Do Coalition Governments with Populist Parties Attempt to Rationalise Law-Making in Parliaments? Evidence from the Czech Chamber of Deputies

Populism might be a threat to parliamentary democracy but does not automatically signal its demise. First, not all populist parties seek illiberal goals. Second, in Europe most populist parties entering governments have done so as coalitions with mainstream parties. Yet, almost all populists, including the non-extremist and ‘integrated’ ones, call for more efficient governance. We assume that once in the executive, that objective will also manifest itself in the rationalisation of law-making in legislatures. By applying a more assertive strategy and exploiting existing rules, cabinets will attempt to streamline their legislative agendas. We test this theoretical framework on empirical evidence from the Czech Chamber of Deputies, which can serve as prototypical case. Since 2010, three coalition governments have ruled. In the last two, the influence of populist parties (represented by ANO under the leadership of Andrej Babiš) gradually increased. By tracking the legislative performance of cabinets in the Chamber, we found that executives with a populist presence actually fared worse than their non-populist predecessor (baseline) in almost all proceedings and outcomes of law-making. The bills submitted by the last government, where ANO dominated, even suffered the most. Contrary to our assumption, a strategy of rationalisation has therefore not succeeded. The findings open interesting questions about how effective cabinets with populists are in law-making in parliaments, and about the future of legislatures as resilient safeguards against the populist challenge.

Committees and the legislature

This chapter explores the historical and contemporary role of parliamentary and other political committees in policy analysis, and the institutional supports which enable their function in policy making. While the dearth of assistance and resources available to Teachtaí Dála (TDs) has contributed to underwhelming legislative performance, developments since 2011 provide an important context for amending relative deficiencies in earlier reform initiatives and the systemic policy failures highlighted by the 2008 crisis. The agenda to introduce political-administrative reform post 2011 included building policy analysis capacity within the Oireachtas and addressing the significant imbalances in executive-legislative relations.

When Does Information Influence Voters? The Joint Importance of Salience and Coordination

Scholars argue that access to information about a politician’s programmatic performance helps voters reward good performers and punish poor ones. But in places where resources are made conditional on collective electoral behavior, voters may not want to defect to vote for a strong legislative performer if they do not believe that others will. We argue that two conditions must hold for information about politician performance to affect voter behavior: Voters must care about the information and believe that others in their constituency care as well. In a field experiment around legislative elections in Benin, voters rewarded good programmatic performance only when information was both made relevant to voters and widely disseminated within the electoral district. Otherwise, access to positive legislative performance information actually lowered vote share for the incumbent’s party. These results demonstrate the joint importance of Salience and voter coordination in shaping information’s impact in clientelistic democracies.

Legislative Activity and Private Benefits: A Natural Experiment in New Zealand

We examine the causal effect of legislative activity on private benefits, which have been largely neglected by previous research in legislative studies. By relying on a natural experiment in New Zealand, where randomly selected Members of Parliament (MPs) are given the opportunity to propose legislation, we find evidence for a causal relation between proposing a (successful) bill and the private benefits MPs receive, in terms of gifts and payments for services. We conclude that the allocation of private benefits depends on legislative performance.