To amend or not to amend

Under what circumstances do Spanish legislators propose amendments to executive bills

Bibliographic Data

ID7422255
AuthorsAnna M Palau (0000-0002-3473-1114, Universitat de Barcelona, corresponding author), Andreu Casas (0000-0001-6974-3652, Royal Holloway University of London), Luz Muñoz (0000-0001-6931-548X, Universitat de Barcelona)
Year2023
Volume48
Issue1
Pages189-216
Publication date2023-08-30
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueWest European Politics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0140-2382 • E-ISSN: 1743-9655
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/01402382.2023.2241253
OpenAlexW4386280078
LanguageEN
Citations received5
References cited82

Based on a new comprehensive dataset containing information on 93,722 amendments, this article explores the circumstances under which Spanish legislators propose amendments to executive bills. Our results show that legislators respond to variations in both governmental factors and bargaining dynamics. In single-party minority governments, ad hoc legislature agreements translate into more amendments. However, legislators do not introduce significantly fewer amendments under absolute majority governments, when the chances of their proposals being accepted fall. After controlling for many confounders, the results show that amending activity reacts to attention allocation dynamics – mediatised bills receive more amendments – but not to variations in contextual factors – the number of amendments does not significantly increase when the economic situation deteriorates. Finally, bills associated with a greater number of committee appearances from interest groups, experts and public officials are more often the target of amendments, signalling that an informational logic is also at play.Keywords: Legislative amendmentsgovernmental factorsattention dynamicsmediaeconomic crisisparliamentary appearances AcknowledgmentsThe authors would like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for many helpful comments on preliminary versions of the paper. We also thank Andreu Rodilla for his invaluable work as research assistant.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Comprehensive databases covering at least a 10-year period exist, to our knowledge, for Germany and the Netherlands (Martin and Vanberg Citation2005; König et al. Citation2023); Denmark (Damgaard and Jensen Citation2006; König et al. Citation2023), France (Kerrouche Citation2006) and Italy (Capano and Vignati Citation2008; Pedrazzani and Zucchini Citation2013). Data based on a sample of bills exist also for the UK and Scotland (Griffith Citation1974; Shephard and Cairney Citation2005; Russell and Cowley Citation2016; Russell et al. Citation2016; Russell and Gover Citation2017). Based on recent methodological advances, such as text-reuse methods (e.g. Wilkerson et al. Citation2015; Casas et al. Citation2020), new metrics have been developed to quantify amendments made during the legislative process in Hungary, the UK, Switzerland and Germany (see Sebok et al. Citation2018; Dixon and Jones Citation2019; Gava et al. Citation2021; Behrens et al. Citation2023, respectively).2 Strong institutional environments are associated with a high number of legislative committees, close correspondence between committees and cabinet ministries, small legislative committee size, non-binding plenary debates before the committee stage, committees with rights to compel testimony and documents, few possibilities of using urgency procedures to pass legislation, committees with capacity to set the floor agenda and ministers with no rights to reject amendments or force an up-or-down vote on a bill (Martin and Vanberg Citation2020, pp. 4-5).3 Amendments to the whole text can be of two types: return amendments, calling for the return of the bill to the executive; or amendments proposing a completely alternative text.4 Indeed, parliamentary records regarding amendments signal the group and not the individual MPs that introduce them.5 In total, we excluded 70 executive bills including those that had either expired, were withdrawn or passed on to the next legislature (to which groups had no possibility of introducing amendments) and the annual budget bills.6 The search was conducted using the La Vanguardia search tool (https://stories.lavanguardia.com/search)7 They cannot affect the regulation of basic state institutions, rights, duties, and liberties of citizens, the regional statues, or the general electoral system.8 In the 2016–2019 legislature, IU formed part of a coalition named Unidos Podemos-En Comú Podem-En Marea.9 Even though we have a significant number of zeros in our dataset (36%), we did not calculate a zero-inflated model. Having many zeros in itself is no justification for using such a model (Tlhaloganyang and Thaga Citation2020). All the zeros in our data are real zeros, that is, in all cases, where the amendment count is zero, it is because parties decided not to introduce amendments. Differences in fit between a zero-inflated negative binomial and a negative binomial model are usually trivial so in the absence of any sound reasons for using it we preferred to avoid the conceptual complexities of the zero-inflated model (see Allison Citation2012).Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación under grant num. PID2021-127542NB-I00Notes on contributorsAnna M. PalauAnna M. Palau is Serra Hunter Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Barcelona and member of the research group Q-Dem (www.q-dem.com). Her research focuses on parliamentary behaviour, legislative politics and agenda setting. [[email protected]]Andreu CasasAndreu Casas is a Lecturer in Political Communication at Royal Holloway University of London, and a research affiliate in the Department of Communication Science at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the Centre for Social Media and Politics at New York University. His research focuses on political communication, public policy, legislative politics, and computational methods. [[email protected]]Luz MuñozLuz Muñoz Márquez is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Barcelona and member of the research group Q-Dem (www.q-dem.com). Her research focuses on interest groups politics, legislative studies and Spanish politics. [[email protected]

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