Explaining Legislative Success in Parliamentary Democracies

One of the major challenges for governments in parliamentary democracies is how to get their proposals enacted by parliament.

If governments cannot get their bills accepted, which increasingly seems to be the case, countries in the end cannot be governed.

Despite this, surprisingly little is known about what explains variation in the tendency of governments to get their proposals accepted by parliament, or what in the literature is called: legislative success.

Moreover, previous studies of legislative success have simply conceived it in binary terms, not taking into account that some government bills are substantively amended before being passed into legislation.

The aim of this project is to overcome this gap in the literature by asking what explains variation in degrees of legislative success among parliamentary democracies.

Theoretically, the project will break new ground by developing a novel conceptualization of legislative success as well as a unified theoretical framework of the process of legislation that can be applied generally to a wide variety of parliamentary systems.

Empirically, the project will combine case studies of specific reform proposals with large-n analysis of the four Nordic countries of Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland together with the UK, France and Germany over the last decades.

Methodologically, the project will innovate by drawing on recent developments in automated computer-assisted text analysis for analyzing large bodies of text.