Executive-Legislative Relations in Parliamentary Systems

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.

A prominent question in the study of policymaking in modern democracies – a question that has clearly warranted increased attention following the various crises of the past decade – concerns how governments make key public policy decisions. In most cases, they can make those decisions either by shepherding bills through the legislative process or by effectively bypassing the legislature and ruling by executive decree. The latter route might improve the speed and efficiency of lawmaking, but it may also have negative implications for transparency, accountability, and the general quality of representation. Which route do governments prefer to take, and why? In this book, Patrícia Calca tackles this important question by focusing on the strategic incentives of government actors given the institutional environment facing them. Using unique and comprehensive legislative data from Portugal, Calca provides convincing evidence that governments decide how to legislate with a clear strategy in mind. Keen to hang onto power, and thus to avoid possible legislative defeats, governments tend to subject their initiatives to the full legislative process only when they are virtually certain that their proposals will survive parliamentary, and later presidential, scrutiny. That is, consistent with her formal model of decision-making, governments behave as quintessential strategic actors. Calca’s analysis is careful and thorough, and her findings are important not only for understanding governmental legislative behavior in Portugal, but for understanding government policy choices in parliamentary and semi-presidential democracies more generally. 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. 


I strongly endorse the monograph of Dr. Calca. It addresses the understudied and immensely consequential for policies process of executive policy-making in parliamentary governments. It also 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. 


Dr. Calca is a highly regarded scholar of European and Portuguese politics and of formal political theory and strategic analysis. Her model captures the complexities and intricacies of the governments’ roles in law making which are often decisive for the policies but are almost invisible to the public eye. She also brilliantly balances communicating the complex logic of her model in a way that makes it both accessible and intuitive to her multiple audiences, including the policy stakeholders such as citizens, activists, and civil society organizations. The “hidden” elite-level steps are exposed and strategies behind decisions are explained. Calca brings to the fore the observation that actual decision-making is more complex than what is outlined in the constitutions and promised by parliamentarians. She also revisits and partially refutes the thesis of congressional dominance (really American-centered and not true even there).


The case of Portugal serves two roles in this book. It illustrates the logic that is general regarding the hidden powers (in addition to the more obvious ones) that the executive possesses in the legislative process in parliamentary democracies. It also delights the institutional scholars with the richness of the details, each with the capacity to pivot specific legislation. The book is a distinct contribution to the literatures on institutional analysis, democratic theory, European politics, and Portuguese politics. 


—Olga Shvetsova, Professor of Political Science and Economics, Binghamton University, Binghamton, New York. 

Patrícia Calca is a Researcher at ISCTE - Instituto Universitário de Lisboa, Centro de Investigação e Estudos de Sociologia, Lisbon, Portugal. She is also a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Data and Methods, University of Konstanz, Germany.