Abstract
This chapter addresses the dataset construction. Covering a period of about 27 years (1982-2009), this dataset was coded from the theoretic perspective previously presented. The operationalisation and respective coding of each of the variables also implied several recombinations of initially coded variables to create variables able to mimic the four scenarios used to solve the formal model. This database is a relevant contribution presented in this book.
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Notes
- 1.
Greatly inspired by the Empirical Implications of Theoretical Models (EITM) philosophy. The key objective of the EITM is to provide tools for researchers interested in the predictions of formal models who wish to clarify their mechanisms by integrating empirical data in their analysis by deeply comprehending the data-generation process. For more information about the EITM, see <http://www.eitminstitute.org/>.
- 2.
From my PhD dissertation was published a working paper with more detailed information about the new database that I use in this book. This description of my database is set out in my paper published as Calca [42].
- 3.
About these pieces of literature see the Chap. 4 on the characterization of the Portuguese case. In addition, Claro da Fonseca and Guerra Martins [51] present a database in a book chapter that includes the Portuguese case. However, it has two limitations that keep it from being user-friendly. First, it is not coded in English but rather in German, which is an international drawback since a majority of researchers do not understand the language. Second, this work does not have most of the variables needed to test institutional moves by actors, and, consequently, actors’ interactions. In their analysis, Claro da Fonseca and Guerra Martins [51] only presented totals of legislation, and they did not code until the 10th legislature. Another study that deals with Portuguese parliamentary legislation production is the book by Leston-Bandeira [158]. This work is centred around budget bills from 1985 to 1995. As I have noted previously, there is some research about Portuguese institutions and legislative production, but none in a format as comprehensive and complete as the one I present here. Additionally, the database that I coded encapsulates legislative production from the government and the parliament, which is not so common, and will be available with additional information on the following website: <https://legislativepolitics.eu>. More recently, two studies on Portuguese legislation and the European Union (transposition of European Directives) considered legislative production Calca [43], Calca [40] and Caupers et al. [48]. Both works use data on legislative production but they present limitations, since these data are a small parcel of the country’s major legislative production. They analyse interesting and useful information but as they are not complete, they are insufficient for the testing of my model.
- 4.
This is the Portuguese official gazette. The legislative documents are binding from the moment they are published there. To access these documents see https://dre.pt/ or http://www.parlamento.pt/.
- 5.
Those data that I analyse start on 30 September 1982, when the Conselho de RevoluĂ§Ă£o was officially dismissed. This institution had powers that constrained the other institutional powers, such as the government, the president and parliament, in such a way that to include it as part of my analysis would produce a bias and drive the results towards partial conclusions.
- 6.
More information about these processes is available in Chap. 4 about Portugal.
- 7.
The presidency of the Council of Ministers (PCM) is the cabinet. There, governmental policies are defined, their execution is planned, and other actions associated with the duties and powers of the government are materialised. For more information on the composition of the Council of Ministers see the CPR [62], Article 184 (1) and Calca [38].
- 8.
Despite my main concern lying with the proposals from the government, I had to consider the other actors in order to test the first actor’s strategic moves.
- 9.
For more on each variable, as well as their conceptualisation, operationalisation and measurement, see the next subsection.
- 10.
During the coding of the initial dataset, while navigating the parliamentary website, one could see in the left-hand menu of the homepage that there was a link to the Parliamentary Activity and Legislative Process. If you were to follow this link, you could see further breakdown between Legislative Initiatives and Approved Legislation. By clicking on the options, you could find separate pages, each with relevant aspects that could be selected: type of law, legislature, date and legislative session, among others. Even with relevant information, the two types of action (initiatives and accepted initiatives) were not directly connected. To find a relationship you would have to search through several layers of information and click on several links. It was this structural aspect that made the data matching necessary and much more time-consuming and problem-prone than expected, even in the moments where some automated coding was possible. For this reason, and in order to match both sets of information–the listed and the downloaded data–I had to clean the database of features that were not needed. This cleanup also involved other tasks, such as correcting mistakes in the information from when it was introduced on the website, spelling errors and typos. This data cleaning was done both automatically (any time it was possible) and manually, given the specifics of the mistakes encountered. Dealing with elements such as the titles and the abstracts of the legislation was not simple, typically due to the Portuguese encoding. This was one of the hardest tasks to carry out because of the specific features of the Portuguese language, such as the use of diacritics (ç, ~, ̀‚). This task is not easy to manage, even using such powerful software as R (http://www.R-project.org). Typing mistakes, extra spaces before and after words within the cells, and changes made by the alternate use of Macintosh and Windows computer environments, among others, created extra problems to be solved. Only after this time-consuming process were the data ready to be matched and merged.
- 11.
Concerning the conditions under which governments are more likely to initiate an executive law (legislation that is defined in the presidency of the Council of Ministers by the government) or a government bill (legislation that is presented to the parliament by the government and all the other legislation proposed by opposition parties and approved or not) it was necessary to know which proposals were initiated by the government during the analysed time period. Additionally, other relevant institutional features were incorporated in the database, such as the legislature in which the proposals were initiated or the party(ies) that supported the president’s candidacy.
- 12.
Not all the legislative initiatives are approved and enacted as laws and not all the passed legislation has its origins in parliamentary initiatives, for example international agreements or the transposition of European Union directives.
- 13.
Two of the variables that I coded in this dataset, which comprises a total of 48 variables, are identification variables regarding its coding, so I do not report them here. Also, not all the variables presented in Table 5.1 are relevant in terms of content for eventual analyses, but they were useful in organisational terms and were important to help in the construction of the final database. They are: (1) Orig—origin of the initiative (if it is legislation proposed in the parliament or the Council of Ministers), (2) Filna—the name of the file that was downloaded from the website of the parliament in order to be able to match and merge the entries, (3) Pub—the publication reference, (4) Appr—the information on whether a given initiative was approved or not, (5) Obs—observations, (6) Prop—the type of proposal, (7) Legis—legislature, (8) IniTyp—the initial type of initiative, (9) TypLaw—the type of legislation created after approval, (10) Num—the number of the proposal and (11) Ref—the reference to the proposal.
- 14.
This variable incorporates the executive laws and the government bills plus several other types of legislation. This variable is an aggregation of particular rules proposed in the Council of Ministers which, for the sake of simplicity, I named executive laws, and the other legislation introduced via the government in the parliament, which I named government bills.
- 15.
There are ten possible types of initiatives in parliament: Legislative Parliamentary Consideration (ApreciaĂ§Ă£o Parlamentar), Popular Initiative (Iniciativa Popular), Popular Inquiry (InquĂ©rito Parlamentar), Draft Decision (Projeto de DeliberaĂ§Ă£o), Member’s Bill (Projeto de Lei), Drafted Rules of Procedure (Projeto de Regimento), Draft Resolution (Projeto de ResoluĂ§Ă£o), Draft Amendments to the Constitution (Projeto de RevisĂ£o Constitucional), Government Bill (Proposta de Lei) and Draft Resolution (Proposta de ResoluĂ§Ă£o). There are eleven types of approved initiatives: Constitutional Decree (Decreto Constitucional), Decree of the Republic’s Assembly (Decreto da Assembleia), Decision (DeliberaĂ§Ă£o), Law (Lei), Constitutional Law (Lei Constitucional), Organisational Law (Lei OrgĂ¢nica), Rules of Procedure (Regimento), Rules of Procedure of the Republic’s Assembly (Regimento da Assembleia da RepĂºblica), Resolution (ResoluĂ§Ă£o), Republic’s Assembly Resolution (ResoluĂ§Ă£o da Assembleia da RepĂºblica) and Correction (RetificaĂ§Ă£o). The legislation originating in cabinet can have the following format: Agreement (Acordo), Warning (Aviso), Contract (Contrato), Declaration (DeclaraĂ§Ă£o), Declaration of Correction (DeclaraĂ§Ă£o de RectificaĂ§Ă£o), Extract-Declaration (DeclaraĂ§Ă£o-Extracto), Decree (Decreto), Executive Law (Decreto Lei), Regulatory Decree (Decreto Regulamentar), Decision (DeliberaĂ§Ă£o), Order (Despacho), Joint Order (Despacho Conjunto), Order-Extract (Despacho-Extrato), Normative Order (Despacho Normativo), Extract (Extracto), Instruction (InstruĂ§Ă£o), List (Listagem), Praise (Louvor), Ordinance (Portaria), Protocol (Protocolo), Correction (RectificaĂ§Ă£o) and Resolution (ResoluĂ§Ă£o).
- 16.
There are not too many studies that consider the opposition parties in the analysis of legislative output [34, 10]. In introducing the majority in parliament, I must take into consideration the opposition parties.
- 17.
In Portugal, the citizens directly elect the president. In the database, when I refer to the president’s supporters, I am talking about the parties that publicly declared their support for their candidacy.
- 18.
The three vetoes were made during the second presidency of MĂ¡rio Soares: the first one on 17 December 1993 on the regulation of university fees; and the second on 20 February 1995 regarding loans, with state guarantee, for social associations. The third and last one happened on 13 October 1995 on the status of the Portuguese public notaries. These informations were compiled from the Presidency of the Portuguese Republic Archive.
- 19.
In this book when I refer to issue, I adhere to the agenda-setting notion on the issues (more specific) rather than topics (more general themes) as objects of public attention. This concept goes together with the broader notion of political agenda as a set of issues that are present in enacted policies.
- 20.
For more information about the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) see http://www.comparativeagendas.info. The standard coding procedure of the CAP project is to have more than one coder. However, due to resource constraints, for this database the coding was only carried out once by me, although it was confirmed once.
- 21.
In most parliamentary democracies, because of party discipline, when MPs vote for legislative proposals they usually follow the party line. A broader discussion about this point can be found in [124].
- 22.
For a discussion on how the median legislator is closer to the majority party median and how this may influence the legislative process see [288].
- 23.
About this data see the Manifesto Project dataset available at <https://manifestoproject.wzb.eu/>. For coding procedures, literature-related and developed studies see Volk et al. [278].
- 24.
Although the number of initiatives presented in parliament is, in principle, included in the data from the cabinet it may happen that it is not. According to the services of DIGESTO that are services part of the Portuguese presidency of the Council of Ministers and concern the Integrated System for the Treatment of Juridical Information; more information on them is available at <https://dre.pt/web/guest/acerca-do-digesto>. According to DIGESTO services, this specific database is always being updated, even in terms of past legislation. It is important to underline that the final information that I extracted was retrieved on 28 November 2013 and given their capacities, the updating of legislation can be made, meaning that it may be the case that, currently, more cases are presented there. However, still considering these the most important entries that that are certainly there and only residual data could be missing. Statistically, eventual missing cases would not interfere with the direction of the results.
- 25.
Note that this is from the total number of data entries coded as approved initiatives; some did not go through a first step as initiatives. In these cases, they do not count as initiatives because they have a distinct law-making process from the ones I have mentioned.
- 26.
Darker grey is the legislation with parliamentary origin and lighter grey is the legislation with cabinet origin.
- 27.
Darker grey are the bill initiatives and lighter grey are the approved government bills.
- 28.
When calculating the average of totals per year, there were 845 executive laws and 469 government bill initiatives (266 approved).
- 29.
Other controls were used in the empirical analysis. However, because they do not directly relate to the theory that I present, I do not extend the explanation of their use. More information about these variables is available in the corresponding section of this chapter.
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Calca, P. (2022). The Construction of the Database. In: Executive-Legislative Relations in Parliamentary Systems. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92343-3_5
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