Why Bills (Don't) Become Law: The Success and Failure of Government Legislation in Parliamentary Democracies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Scholarship on executives’ successes in enacting bills that they propose to their legislatures has emphasized the direct effects of institutional arrangements and the political effects of electoral and coalition-formation results. It has also largely focused on presidential democracies (to the exclusion of their parliamentary counterparts) and on aggregate-level rates of success (to the exclusion of individual bills). In addressing these shortcomings, I focus on executives as strategic actors who must and, even when faced with adverse conditions, are able to 1) ensure that their bills receive sufficient support, 2) receive formal expression of that support, and 3) desire enactment as an important goal. The latter two points have been largely ignored by work on legislative success, and I advance the theoretical understanding of the first by applying insights from Tsebelis’ (2002) veto players theory. In a sample of 14 parliamentary democracies, I find that executives’ rates of success are in fact not adversely affected by a number of factors that might seem to pose obstacles. In addition, I examine over 500 individual government bills introduced in the Canadian parliament, finding that, while initial lack of support reduces the likelihood of a bill’s passage, it also makes the government more willing to accept amendments on bills. The acceptance of amendments, in turn, as well as efforts to expedite bills, increases the likelihood of enactment. I also find that the impact of government amendments is greater for bills that initially lack sufficient support than for bills that never lack sufficient support.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.036 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".