The success of legislators’ bills in strong presidential systems: Chile, 1990–2018

ABSTRACT

In democracies where the executive has bill initiation powers and controls the legislative agenda, most laws enacted should come from executive-initiated bills. In Chile’s strong presidential system where the executive has broad legislative powers, one in three laws enacted are legislator-initiated. We postulate 5 hypotheses on the effect of the attributes of the authors of a bill on its success. We test them using sequential logit models, to distinguish between partial and overall success (passing the original chamber and getting enacted, respectively). We utilise the 6005 legislator-initiated bills introduced in the Chamber of Deputies of Chile (1990–2018) – 15.2% of those bills passed the chamber and 8.1% were enacted. Bills concurrently authored by government and opposition legislators are more likely to pass. Having more authors increases a bill’ chances of passing in the first chamber but not the changes of overall passage. A higher presence of first-term legislators reduces the chances of passage.

KEYWORDS:

• Legislative success
• presidential systems
• bill initiation
• legislative institutional design
• Chile

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank Gonzalo Espinoza Bianchini, Javier Vázquez Cubillos, and 3 anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Fondo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología [grant number 1200317] and ANID-Millenium Science Initiative Program [grant number NCS2021_063].

Notes on contributors

Vicente Faúndez Caicedo

Vicente Faúndez Caicedo is a political scientist from Universidad Diego Portales (UDP) in Chile. He is an associate researcher at the Political Electoral Observatory (OBPE) at UDP. He has previously published in Política y Gobierno.

Verónica Figueroa Gutiérrez

Verónica Figueroa Gutiérrez is a public affairs consultant and associated researcher at OBPEUDP and has been a teaching assistant at UDP and Universidad de Chile. She has previously published on the voting cohesion in the Chilean legislature in Revista Española de Ciencia Política.

Patricio Navia

Patricio Navia is a professor of political science at UDP and a professor of Liberal Studies at New York University.

Carolina Pérez Aburto

Carolina Pérez Aburto is a political scientist and an associate researcher at OBPE-UDP.