Executive-legislative Relations Research Articles

The Tug-of-War over Drone Strike Oversight: Congress and the Politics of Drone Warfare during the Obama Presidency

Despite the increasing use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in counter-terror operations, executive-legislative relations, intelligence oversight, and war powers regarding drone strikes have received scarce scholarly interest. Our article contributes to filling this gap and focuses on the politics of congressional oversight of drone warfare—in particular those operations conducted by the CIA (Title 50 operations) during the Obama administration. We apply the Multiple Streams Framework (MSF) to conduct an interpretive case study and shed light on our central research question: How can we explain the timing and limited extent of changes with regard to congressional oversight of drone strikes during the Obama presidency? While this policy area is traditionally depicted as one of executive dominance and legislative acquiescence, we analyze how congressional entrepreneurs used a policy window in the wake of John Brennan’s confirmation hearings for CIA Director in 2013 to set the agenda on congressional oversight of drone strikes, and thereby contest executive policy-making. Congress enacted limited changes to drone strike oversight and pressured President Obama to increase transparency. At the same time, further limitations, most notably to consolidate drone strike oversight by ending the CIA drone program, were defeated by senior leaders in Congress. Our study thus contends that congressional entrepreneurs played a key role for both change and continuity regarding drone warfare oversight.

Parliaments and government termination: understanding the confidence relationship

The core feature of a parliamentary system is not that governments tend to emerge from the legislatures in some way or another, but their political responsibility to this body. While in only some parliamentary systems the government needs formal support of parliament in order to take office, in all parliamentary systems no government can survive against the will of parliament. The academic literature related to the rules for how governments form is vast. Strikingly, scholars have paid far less attention to unpacking the core institution of parliamentary systems of government – the confidence relationship and the various no confidence procedures. Placing the focus on how the parliament can hold the government accountable, this special issue assesses the larger influences legislative confidence has on executive–legislative relations, and improves our understanding of the ways in which the executive may be challenged or dismissed.

Personal data protection and access to information: interfaces of Civil Society role in Brazilian legislative process

The relationship between access to information and personal data protection leads to the relativization of transparency under the argument of a false tradeoff between these two concepts. Based on that, this study’s objective is to understand the role of civil society movements in maintaining the rights of access to information and personal data protection. This research made a qualitative analysis, with a documentary survey and bibliographic review of the main categories presented in the Executive-Legislative relationship and in the theme of advocacy. We observe the role of civil society lobby groups in the Brazilian Access to Information Law legislative process, between 2003 and 2011, and the Brazilian Data Protection Act, between 2012 and 2018, perceive the change of these groups with the foundation of Rights in Network Coalition, in 2016. As a result, the active participation of Civil Society in public hearings has intensified increasingly in public hearings since 2018, specifically on the LGPD, while LAI had participation of civil society in the body’s scope institutionalized.

Does Power Always Flow to the Executive? Interbranch Oscillations in Legislative Authority, 1976–2014

AbstractIs legislative power flowing to the executive branch over time? Beginning in the 1990s, comparativists began to investigate delegation to the executive under different executive formats. Hypothesized causes include collective action problems due to legislative fractionalization, the presence of a dominant pro-executive faction, preference congruence vis-à-vis the head of government, and challenges posed by economic crises. We test these four hypotheses on a data set containing 2,020 country-year observations of democracies and semi-democracies between 1976 and 2014. Using V-Dem data, we derive annualized measures of shifts in executive–legislative relationships. Contrary to stereotypes of executive dominance, relative gains by legislatures are no less frequent than gains by executives, and economic crises do not advantage political executives in consistent ways. Surprisingly, some of the factors expected to benefit executives seem to enhance assembly authority as well. Robust democracy maintains interbranch power relations in equilibrium, while lower levels of polyarchy are associated with greater ‘noise’ in the relationship.

How Far Can Populist Governments Go? The Impact of the Populist Government on the Hungarian Parliament

Abstract The article poses the following research questions: to what extent has the populist executive in Hungary affected formal and informal parliamentary powers? To what extent has the relation between the executive and the legislative changed over the three legislative periods of populist government? This article examines change in formal powers but also in the informal practices concerning parliament’s legislative and scrutiny functions. Regarding the time frame, the empirical analysis compares the period when Fidesz was in opposition (2006–2010), with the period when Fidesz has been in government (2010–2020). The article establishes that during 2010–2020, the legislative suffered profound disempowerment that has been attributed to three factors: systemic collapse of democracy in Hungary, weakening formal powers of the legislature and the autocratic features of the Fidesz party. Moreover, the article demonstrates that executive–legislative relations have been dynamic between 2010 and 2020 and concern different formal and informal practices.

Do governments delay the implementation of parliamentary requests? Examining time variation in implementing legislative requests in Switzerland

This paper investigates time variations in the implementation of legislative requests by the Swiss government. Combining the literature on executive–legislative relations with findings from implementation research, we focus on the procedural level and argue that implementation delays can occur because the government does not want to, cannot or should not implement faster. We test these mechanisms using a unique database, which enables us to analyse a systematic collection of all legislative requests that have been approved between the parliament’s 2003 winter session and its 2018 spring session. Our results show that the considerable variation in the time needed for the legislative mandates’ implementation is mostly related to the Swiss government’s inability to transpose faster, i.e. to factors like highly busy administrative offices or complex and controversial issues. In contrast, there is no support for the ideas that the government “shall not” or “does not want to” transpose faster.

Parliaments in the MENA Region: Between Timid Reform and Regression. A Comparative Survey

Abstract Part of a special issue devoted to the role of parliaments in contemporary Arab politics, this article gives an oversight of the evolution of the constitutional rules governing the status and powers of Arab parliamentary assemblies following the “Arab spring” and during the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic. Parliaments have traditionally played a marginal role in Arab constitutional theory and practice. Although the strengthening of the role and powers of parliaments and a rebalancing of the executive-legislative relations in favour of the latter featured prominently in the reform agendas emerging from the protest movements of the “Arab spring,” these movements proved unable to produce lasting change. The reforms have either been rolled back by oppressive governments or given way to a political pactice of renewed presidential dominance which diverges considerably from the initial aspirations of the reformers. The highly unfavourable conditions existing in most Arab countries – with internally divided democratic reform movements, entrenched military, and political elites determined to resist genuine democratic change with all means available and powerful external actors supporting the domestic status quo – are likely to ensure that parliaments will remain confined to a largely ornamental role in Arab politics in the foreseeable future.

The Impacts of Executive Responses on Democracy During the Coronavirus Crisis in Croatia, Slovenia and Austria

In Croatia, Slovenia and Austria, the coronavirus crisis raised pre-existing deficiencies in the democratic orders to the surface, i.e., issues in functioning according to democratic principles in the circumstances of a public health crisis. In Austria, the strained executive-legislative relations were already visible in April 2020, when the opposition parties refused to support the second wave of crisis legislation without the appraisal process that would justify its urgency. In Croatia and Slovenia, the governments decided not to declare a state of emergency, arguably in order to avoid cooperation with the opposition and other state institutions in drafting and passing crisis legislation. Finally, in Slovenia, the government used the crisis as a pretext to install its people into leading positions in several key state and public institutions.

Confrontational but Respecting the Rules: The Minor Impact of the Finns Party on Legislative–Executive Relations

Abstract Having achieved a major breakthrough in the 2011 elections, the Finns Party remained in opposition but joined the governing coalition from 2015 until 2017 when the party suffered a serious internal split. This article shows that the overall impact of the populists on parliamentary procedures and culture has been modest. The Finns Party has adjusted to the strongly institutionalised parliamentary norms and it has not contested the existing patterns of legislative–executive relations. The populists have brought more confrontational elements to the debates but seem content operating within the established institutional constraints. Content analysis of oral and written questions shows the internal diversity of the party.

Government termination and anti-defection laws in parliamentary democracies

A growing number of parliaments around the world have adopted anti-defection laws that protect the unity of legislative party groups. Although they remain rare among established democracies, India, Israel, and New Zealand have enacted such legislation with important consequences for the politics of executive–legislative relations. The paper argues that the introduction of anti-defection laws in the three democratic legislatures can be understood as an attempt to keep governments safe from defections rather than reduce the overall frequency of party switching. As such, anti-defection laws constitute an important albeit often overlooked institutional source of government stability.

Relações Executivo-Legislativo na Perspectiva da Medida Provisória no Brasil e do Decreto-Lei em Portugal | Executive-Legislative Relations from the Perspective of the Provisional Measure in Brazil and the Decree-Law in Portugal

The purpose of the paper is to analyze the relationship between the executive and legislative branches from the comparison between the presidential system adopted in Brazil and the semi-presidential system in force in Portugal. The research seeks to identify whether different systems of government produce different results in the capacity of the executive branch to intervene and direct legislative production. To produce a comparison between the two countries, the prerogative of the Brazilian president to produce Provisional Measures was used as an analysis variable and in the Portuguese case the production of Decree-Laws initiated by the Prime Minister. The research comprised the post-democratic period in the two countries, covering 26 years in Brazil and 37 years in Portugal. The results found demonstrate the high capacity that the Portuguese Prime Minister finds to direct legislative production, but this has not remained stable over time. In Brazil, the President’s ability to obtain legislative support for his initiative projects is quite precarious, but this resource has remained stable throughout the analyzed period.

執政制度の多様性の再検討 ―憲法の明示的規定に基づくデータセットの構築、1946～2020年

執政制度の多様性の再検討 ―憲法の明示的規定に基づくデータセットの構築、1946～2020年

한국의 행정부-입법부 관계 및 입법생산에 있어서 행정부 지배 : 거부권행사자 이론과 경험분석

한국의 행정부-입법부 관계 및 입법생산에 있어서 행정부 지배 : 거부권행사자 이론과 경험분석

Prorogation: Comparative Context and Scope for Reform

Abstract In August 2019, the UK government’s attempt to prorogue parliament for five weeks raised the question whether the UK’s prorogation rules ought to be reformed. We place this discussion in comparative perspective by contrasting the UK’s prorogation rules with (i) equivalent procedures in 26 European democracies and (ii) recent changes in other areas of UK executive–legislative relations. These comparisons suggest that the UK’s current prorogation rules are increasingly anomalous. They give governments significantly more power to suspend parliament than comparable European democracies, and are at variance with recent efforts to counterbalance the executive’s wide ranging discretion in the UK.

FENOMENA PENGAWASAN PEMILIHAN KEPALA DAERAH DI KALIMANTAN TENGAH MASA PANDEMI COVID-19


 
 
 This study is to provide an overview related to the supervision of local elections in Central Kalimantan during the co-19 pandemic. The method used is the study of literature studies. The author examines the phenomena related to election supervision in Central Kalimantan based on existing phenomena and from various literary sources to support the author in presenting the results of the study in question. One indicator of the implementation of post-conflict local elections that is transparent, professional and responsible is related to the extent to which supervision is carried out properly despite the current non-natural disaster covid-19. Related to this, several things were delivered, namely: 1.) The Need for Regional Executive-Legislative Relations in Good COVID-19 Budget Policy, 2). Bawaslu As a supervisor must exist and continue to innovate in supervision during the pandemic, 3). The Covid-19 disaster should not be used as a campaign event.
 
 

Executives, Legislatures, and the Semantics of EU Public Law: A Pandemic-Inflected Perspective

This contribution will serve as the epilogue to a forthcoming volume on executive-legislative relations in the European Union (EU). It begins by noting that the EU’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, encouraging though it may be in some respects, has nonetheless reminded us of the constraints placed on a system of supranational governance that lacks a legislative fiscal capacity of its own. Although there is much excitement about the pandemic ‘recovery fund’ built on borrowing against the EU budget (and distributed, at least in part, through grants), the fund will still be ultimately backed by the fiscal capacities of the member states severally rather than by the EU’s own. Autonomous fiscal capacity, however, is arguably the core attribute of a genuinely ‘constitutional’ form of governance, and more specifically of a genuinely constitutional ‘legislature’. The EU’s persistent lack of a fiscal capacity of its own leads this epilogue to pose an admittedly radical question: Semantically speaking, is it right even to speak of the EU possessing ‘legislative’ power at all, at least in the most robust sense of the term, when it otherwise lacks autonomous fiscal capacity? This question might seem bizarre given key features of the EU’s institutional system, notably the existence of an elected assembly—the European Parliament (EP)—as well as that body’s participation in something called the ‘ordinary legislative procedure’ (OLP) in order to make rules of general and prospective application to govern European integration. According to the ‘as if’-constitutional framing that dominates most legal analysis of the EU today, the EP and OLP are so-labelled for a simple reason: they are the focal points of ‘legislative’ power in the European system. And yet, might this labelling be misleading? Might both the EP and OLP merely serve to inject an electoral component into a regulatory system that is fundamentally executive-technocratic (ie administrative) in character? Might specifically ‘legislative’ power in the EU—in the sense of the legitimate-compulsory mobilization of fiscal and human resources—still be concentrated entirely at the national level? With these questions in mind, this epilogue examines the many stimulating topics covered by the chapters in this volume: the application of Rodrik’s famous ‘political trilemma of the world economy’ to the EU context; the role of the EP in counter-balancing the powers of the Commission, Council, and European Council; the expansion of national executive power as a consequence of integration—the so-called ‘deparliamentarisation’ phenomenon—which operates to the obvious detriment of national parliaments (NPs); and finally the respective roles of the EP and NPs, as the case may be, in such areas as trade policy, the supranational regulation of national budgets, as well as several former 'second’ and ‘third pillar’ domains (security, defense, foreign policy, justice and home affairs). Based on this discussion, this epilogue concludes by reflecting on whether the last decade of upheaval in the EU—from the Eurozone crisis to the current pandemic emergency—has brought the EU to a ‘critical juncture’, in which some form of supranationalised fiscal capacity is now in the offing and which, if realised, might then allow the EU to transcend the current but misleading ‘as if’ constitutionalism that continues to characterise discussions of EU public law.

Discretionary Military Action in Political Time

This study investigates whether a president’s place in Stephen Skowronek’s theory of political time affects the likelihood that the president will use his power as commander-in-chief to take discretionary military actions abroad. The study presents a new approach to an age-old question: what makes the president more or less likely to decide to use military force abroad? The study’s theory section combines Skowronek’s framework and the larger political time the literature with insights from literature on diversionary theory, foreign policy decision-making, and executive-legislative relations. The political time literature argues that the president’s relationship with the dominant party regime of their day, and the strength of that regime, creates systematic incentives for presidents who serve during similar places in political time. The theoretical framework presented in this study argues that presidents who are unaffiliated with the dominant party regime of their day will be more likely than others to engage American armed forces in minor military conflicts. The study uses two datasets to test this argument and finds evidence that presidents who serve during the politics of preemption and the politics of reconstruction are more likely than other presidents to order the military into relatively small-scale, minor international conflicts. This finding builds on Skowronek’s argument that presidents who serve during the politics of articulation are the most likely to engage in major wars.

President and Assemblies—25 Years After Shugart and Carey’s Book: Introduction to Special Issue

Why are some institutions capable of enhancing democracy, while others struggle under pressure? Shugart and Carey wrote their seminal book Presidents and Assemblies at a crucial time in modern history in an effort to answer these fundamental questions. Because of bold claims and huge theoretical and conceptual contributions, their timely publication became the starting point for a new way to think about institutional specifications and types of political systems. And although their examples are by now dated, the idea of “trade-off” or “balancing efficiency and representativeness” still speaks to the fundamental questions of regime change and democratic sustainability. While their study made clear that there are distinctions between system types, they also argued that not a specific type is more conducive or damaging to democracy; rather specific institutional configurations lead to a vulnerability of a political regime. Twenty-five years after the first publication of Presidents and Assemblies, this special issue uses this argument and reconnects Shugart and Carey’s book with the recent debate on individual attributes of legislative–executive relations and their effect on democracy. This article serves as an introduction and highlights the rationale and the major themes that run through the contributions to the special issue.

Ambitious Reform Via Constituent Assemblies: Determinants of Success in Contemporary Latin America

Since 1998, several Latin American presidents have attempted to create constituent assemblies, rewrite constitutions, and fundamentally shift power relations with varying levels of success. I argue that two variables have determined executive success. These are mobilizational leverage, or the ability to rally popular support behind the reform agenda, and institutional leverage, or the ability to convince the Judiciary or Electoral Council to allow a referendum to form a Constituent Assembly and sanction its supreme power. I examine this argument through process tracing cases of success (Chavez in Venezuela, Morales in Bolivia, and Correa in Ecuador) and a case of failure (Zelaya in Honduras), drawing on data from 118 elite interviews in Bolivia and Ecuador. This article contributes to the literature on executive-legislative relations and presidential power, explaining a process that allows presidents to navigate the institutions of democracy and enact ambitious reform.

Legislative-Executive Relations in Nigeria's Fourth Republic

Legislative-Executive Relations in Nigeria's Fourth Republic