Executive-Legislative Relations in Parliamentary Systems: Policy-Making and Legislative Processes

"This book is important for any scholar interested in the question of why governments occasionally trade off the checks and balances inherent in legislative review, and the transparency and accountability this engenders, for the more efficient (but generally less popular) mechanisms of executive decrees."
—Lanny W. Martin, Professor of Political Science, Department of Social and Political Sciences, Bocconi University, Italy.
"The book… speaks to multiple audiences, ranging from the scholarly to students and to the multiple stakeholders in the policy process. As a great bonus, the manuscript offers an authoritative strategic analysis of the Portuguese policy process, which would dovetail nicely with similar literatures on the rest of the European governments. The book will be a go-to resource for the years to come."
—Olga Shvetsova, Professor of Political Science and Economics, Binghamton University, USA.

Analysing the conditions under which governments are more likely to present an executive law or a government bill, this book addresses a central aspect of the decision-making process of public policies. Drafting legislation is an important action to achieve specific policy goals, and the path chosen for this process is part of governmental strategy. This book presents a new theoretical explanation of how executives wield legislative power, based in a formal model. The model is tested using new data from Portugal. It shows that in political systems where one of the political actors has veto powers which can easily be overridden, the type of parliamentary majority is the main consideration for the government's choice of legislative instrument. More specifically, when a government does not have the majority in parliament it is more likely to propose an executive law, and contrary, when a government has a majority in parliament, it is more likely to propose a government bill.