Never Say Never Again: Legislative Failure in German Bicameralism

Abstract

Bills adopted by the Bundestag hardly ever fail. Even under divided majorities in the two chambers legislative failure is a rare phenomenon. This fact has long been accepted as evidence against the popular complaint about legislative stalemate in the German bicameral system. However, it is not at all clear why we should expect to see bills fail in the first place: Rational political actors should anticipate a veto and refrain from initiating bills which are doomed to failure. The question then is why some bills do fail. Building on recent advances in Congressional research, we address this question both theoretically and empirically. We discuss two possible explanations for bill failure both rooted in the rational choice approach: incomplete information and mixed motivations. From each we deduce hypotheses about the conditions under which bills are likely to fail. We test these hypotheses using multilevel logistic regression and a novel dataset which covers legislative decision-making over almost 30 years.