The success of legislators’ bills in strong presidential systems: Chile, 1990–2018

Abstract

ABSTRACT In democracies where the executive has bill initiation powers and controls the legislative agenda, most laws enacted should come from executive-initiated bills. In Chile’s strong presidential system where the executive has broad legislative powers, one in three laws enacted are legislator-initiated. We postulate 5 hypotheses on the effect of the attributes of the authors of a bill on its success. We test them using sequential logit models, to distinguish between partial and overall success (passing the original chamber and getting enacted, respectively). We utilise the 6005 legislator-initiated bills introduced in the Chamber of Deputies of Chile (1990–2018) – 15.2% of those bills passed the chamber and 8.1% were enacted. Bills concurrently authored by government and opposition legislators are more likely to pass. Having more authors increases a bill’ chances of passing in the first chamber but not the changes of overall passage. A higher presence of first-term legislators reduces the chances of passage.