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Committee Chairs and Legislative Review in Parliamentary Democracies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2017

David Fortunato ,
Lanny W. Martin  and
Georg Vanberg
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Abstract

Recent research on parliamentary institutions has demonstrated that legislatures featuring strong committees play an important role in shaping government policy. However, the impact of the legislators who lead these committees – committee chairs – is poorly understood. This study provides the first examination of whether the partisan control of committee chairs in parliamentary systems has a systematic impact on legislative scrutiny. The article argues that committee chairs can, in principle, use their significant agenda powers to serve two purposes: providing opposition parties with a greater ability to scrutinize government policy proposals, and enabling government parties to better police one another. Analyzing the legislative histories of 1,100 government bills in three parliamentary democracies, the study finds that control of committee chairs significantly strengthens the ability of opposition parties to engage in legislative review. The analysis also suggests that government parties’ ability to monitor their coalition allies does not depend on control of committee chairs.

Keywords

coalition politicscommitteeslegislative organizationpolitical institutions
Type
Notes and Comments
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 49 , Issue 2 , April 2019 , pp. 785 - 797
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

*

Department of Political Science, Texas A&M University (email: fortunato@tamu.edu); Department of Policy Analysis and Public Management, Bocconi University (email: lanm12000@gmail.com); Department of Political Science, Duke University (email: georg.vanberg@duke.edu). We are grateful to Chris Kam and Indridi Indridason for helpful comments. Any remaining errors are our own. Fortunato is grateful to the Hellman Foundation and SFB 884: The Political Economy of Reforms for generous research support. Data replication sets are available at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/BJPolS and online appendices are at http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1017/S0007123416000673

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