Parties, rules and government legislative control in Central Europe: The case of Poland

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Communist and Post-Communist Studies 41 (2008) 147e161 www.elsevier.com/locate/postcomstud

Parties, rules and government legislative control in Central Europe: The case of Poland Radoslaw Zubek European Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK Available online 22 April 2008

Abstract A distinguishing feature of Central European polities is a strong policy-shaping role of parliaments. This article demonstrates how party political and procedural factors set the scene for the executive’s loss of legislative control in Poland. Parties undermine the governmental grip because of their limited internal cohesion and competitive coalitional strategies. Parliamentary rules reinforce such party effects. The executive can shield its bills from amendments by relying mainly on partisan controls, not formal privileges. But, as an analysis of over 300 bills shows, when party discipline and coalition cooperation are in short supply, partisan controls are ineffective as instruments of legislative control. Ó 2008 Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of The Regents of the University of California. Keywords: Poland; Central Europe; Executiveelegislative relations; Government legislative control; Political parties; Legislative rules

Introduction Executives in Central Europe have long played second fiddle to parliaments. In the early phase of democratic transition, it was the new legislatures who emerged as central sites of policy formulation and played a key role in shaping the post-communist  order (Agh, 1994, 1995; Olson and Norton, 1996). Such initial ‘overparliamentarisation’ of Central European polities was fuelled, in part, by a relative incompetence of executives. Having been accustomed chiefly to implementing decisions of the 0967-067X/$ - see front matter Ó 2008 Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of The Regents of the University of California. doi:10.1016/j.postcomstud.2008.03.004

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communist party, executives were ill-equipped to take a lead in developing policies in  the new democratic context (Agh, 1997; Goetz and Wollmann, 2001). The preparation of bills thus often shifted from ministries to parliament. The strong position of the Central European legislatures had further originated from low party loyalty of MPs and high political polarization, both of which enhanced parliamentary autonomy (Olson et al., 1998; Kitschelt et al., 1999). The many formal prerogatives that the new democratic parliaments had inherited from communist past were also not without significance (Carey et al., 2002). The last decade has witnessed a gradual reinforcement of Central European executives (Kopecky, 2004; Pettai and Madise, 2006). The progressive consolidation of political parties, the emergence of core executives and the adaptation to EU membership have provided opportunities for governments to tighten the control over lawmaking in parliament. In most states in Central Europe, executives now dominate the legislative agenda by introducing the bulk of legislation. Government bills also enjoy high chances of making it to the statute book. In Poland, the share of bills introduced by the executive rose from around one in three in the 1991e1993 parliament to two in three in the 2001e2005 term. Government bills have increasingly achieved a success rate of 80e90%. The executive is now the main source of adopted legislation, being responsible for three in four laws passed by the legislature (Zubek, 2006; Goetz and Zubek, 2007). Yet, despite such developments, many Central European parliaments continue to exert a significant imprint on law-making. A recent survey has shown that the legislatures in Central Europe are still in essence ‘legislating’ rather than ‘legitimising’ parliaments (Olson and Norton, 2007). The executives may have come to dominate the legislative agenda, but parliaments commonly reshape government bills and committees provide the key site for finalization of drafting and coalition bargaining. In Poland, more than eight in ten bills introduced by two majority governments in 1997e2000 and 2001e2003 were subject to substantive, non-technical amendment in parliament (Table 1). The depth of change was also substantial. On average, the ratio between articles changed, deleted or added and the total articles in the original draft stood at 0.6 to 1. This article aims to understand the reasons for the extensive amendment of government bills in Poland. To anticipate, it shows that the legislative control of Polish majority governments is undermined by an interaction of party political and procedural factors. Parties reduce the governmental grip over law-making because of their limited internal cohesion and competitive coalitional strategies. Parliamentary rules reinforce such party effects. The executive can shield its bills from amendment by relying mainly on partisan controls, not formal privileges. But, as an analysis of over 300 bills shows, when party discipline and coalition cooperation are in short supply, partisan controls are ineffective as a means of legislative control. The rest of the article proceeds as follows. The theoretical framework for studying government legislative control is presented briefly in Section 2. Section 3 examines how party political and procedural conditions shaped the legislative control of Polish governments in 1997e2005. The final section assesses the importance of the findings for understanding executiveelegislative relations in Central Europe.

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Table 1 Amendment of government bills under the Buzek and Miller majority cabinets Count

Bills

All bills Unchanged bills

342 65

Percentile

Amendment ratioa

0 20 30 Median 70 90 100

0 to1 0.13 to 1 0.33 to 1 0.50 to 1 0.69 to 1 1.12 to 1 2.5 to 1

Mean

0.57 to 1

Source: Own calculations based on all bills submitted and adopted during the tenures of the Buzek (1997e 2000) and Miller (2001e2003) majority coalition governments. a Amendment ratios are calculated as a ratio between the number of articles amended, deleted and added and the total number of articles in the original draft.

Parties and legislative organization Parliamentary executives are, above all, party governments. Beneath the constitutional division of powers the executive and the legislature are linked by a common institution: the governing party or a coalition of governing parties (King, 1976; Blondel and Cotta, 1996; Mu¨ller, 2000). This ‘‘fusion of powers’’ means that the executive legislative control hinges, first and foremost, on party political factors. The decisive issues are whether all party leaders hold senior positions in cabinet and whether they are able to ensure the loyalty of members in parliament (Bowler et al., 1999; Cox and McCubbins, 1993). If party leadership is split between cabinet and parliament or if leaders shun cabinet altogether, senior officials in parliament are likely to perceive the executive stage of bill preparation as an initialdrather than conclusivedround of decision-making. This, in turn, will increase the likelihood that cabinet legislative decisions are reopened in parliament. If party leaders sit in the cabinet, they must still have at their disposal levers with which to mobilize party members and to monitor their behaviour. The capacity to impose voting discipline is thus related to the availability of such instruments as the right to gate-keep placements on party lists in future elections and the power to reward loyalty through appointment decisions. The effectiveness of leaders further depends on whether they head a cohesive party and can rely on pre-agreed programmes to induce MPs to toe the leaders’ line in parliament. In coalition governments, executive legislative control is further shaped by interparty dynamics (Mu¨ller and Strøm, 2000; Thies, 2001; Dimitrov et al., 2006). The key issue is whether governing parties are inclined to bargain in cabinet and uphold such decisions in parliament. The extent to which coalitions exhibit this behaviour depends on what dispositions their members hold to inter-party cooperation. Parties with a collaborative disposition value benefits from coalition survival higher than

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any gains from collusion with the opposition to reshape government bills; parties with a competitive outlook are prepared to risk the life of the coalition by joining forces with the opposition to reopen cabinet-level bargaining. The disposition that a party adopts depends, among others, on how divided the coalition is in programmatic terms. Another factor is the availability of party-based institutional arrangements to support bargaining in cabinet and monitoring in parliament. Executive control is reinforced if coalitions can rely on the shadowing role of junior ministers and coalition summits or conferences (Mu¨ller and Strøm, 2000). Besides party political factors executive legislative control is shaped by legislative rules (Cox, 2000; Do¨ring, 1995). The latter influence the position of the executive through two principal channels. First, legislative rules may empower those parliamentary actors who are typically selected and controlled by the governing parties. The speaker, committee chairs or majority caucuses may be thus granted extensive powers to set the agenda and timetable for the processing of legislation. The empowerment of these actors may play into the hands of the executives. The leaders in cabinet will rely on party lines to give directions to the speaker or committee chairs who in turn will use their prerogatives to make MPs behave according to the leaders’ line (Mu¨ller, 2000, p. 319). The parliamentary actors will, in effect, become the executive’s agents. But, as with most forms of agency, there is a risk of shirking. If party discipline and coalition cooperation are in short supply, members in parliament may use their formal rights to challenge the cabinet and reshape government bills in accordance with their own preferences. The effectiveness of such partisan executive control thus critically hinges on the loyalty of governing party members and the underlying coalition dynamics. Legislative rules may also empower the executive itself. The government may be given special procedural privileges to constrain parliamentary opportunities for amendment of bills (Do¨ring, 2003; Huber, 1996a). Governments normally benefit from a confidence vote procedure under which a vote on a bill can be linked to a motion of censure (Huber, 1996b; Diermeier and Feddersen, 1998). Executives may also have the right to set aside amendments or propose amendments when other actors cannot (Huber, 1996a; Heller, 2001). These executive privileges reinforce the legislative position of governments by restricting the menu from which party members choose in parliament or by making government bills an up-or-down proposal. Furthermore, they increase the incentives for bargaining in cabinet and lower the motivation for reopening negotiations in parliament (Heller, 2001). Unlike partisan controls, formal executive privileges make it possible for governments to shield bills from amendment even if party or coalition unity is limited. As the executive can control the law-making in parliament directly, coalition discipline is imposed by default (Do¨ring, 2003). Party political factors interact with legislative rules to determine the degree of executive legislative control. The latter can be high or low depending on how these two variables combine (Fig. 1). The probability of the parliamentary amendment of government bills is likely to be highest if internal party discipline is weak, coalitions are internally divided, and the legislative rules provide for partisan controls as the main instrument of executive influence over parliament. Under such

R. Zubek / Communist and Post-Communist Studies 41 (2008) 147e161 Weak party and coalition discipline

151

Strong party and coalition discipline

Parliamentary procedures provide for partisan executive controls only

Low executive legislative control

Moderate executive legislative control

Parliamentary procedures provide for formal executive controls

Moderate executive legislative control

High executive legislative control

Fig. 1. Impact of party political and procedural factors on executive legislative control.

a configuration, the adverse impact of party political factors on executive control will not be mitigated by legislative rules. The outlook for executive control should improve as party and coalition discipline increases. In such circumstances, governments will be more successful in using partisan controls as the means to shield government bills from amendment. A similar effect will be produced ifdkeeping the party political factors constantdthe executive is granted special formal privileges in parliament. Finally, a combination of strong party and coalition discipline on the one hand, and high availability of formal executive controls on the other hand is likely to result in the lowest chance of parliamentary amendment of government legislation. Executive legislative control in Poland The preceding discussion has generated some theoretical expectations as to factors that may explain extensive amendment of government bills in Central Europe. This section tests such predictions through an empirical analysis of the party political factors and legislative rules in Poland between 1997 and 2005 (see Table 2). To anticipate, the key finding is that Polish majority governments suffered from problematic party or coalition discipline and had to rely mainly on partisan controls as the key instrument of executive control. Parties and coalitions The party organizations that dominated the Polish political arena in 1998e2005 provided their leaders with some control over members. Party leaders dominated the process of candidate selection and had a decisive voice in the formulation of party policies. They controlled intermediate executive bodies inside party organizations which reinforced their grip on the selection of candidates to parliament and

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Table 2 Polish prime ministers and party composition of cabinets (1997e2005) Terms of parliament

Prime ministers

Dates in office

Party composition

Cabinet status

1997e2001

Jerzy Buzek Jerzy Buzek Leszek Miller Leszek Miller Marek Belka

1997e2000 2000e2001 2001e2003 2003e2004 2004e2005

AWS, UW AWS SLD, UP, PSL SLD, UP SLD, UP

Majority Minority Majority Minority Minority

2001e2005

Source: own compilation.

executive posts (Szczerbiak, 2001). The existence of nation-wide parliamentary party lists provided yet another useful instrument with which to discipline party members. In parliament, party leaders hired whips and checked voting behaviour to ensure discipline and cohesion (Grzymala-Busse, 2002, 2003). The progressive development of intra-party controls occurred both in successor parties such as the Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) and the Polish Peasants Party (PSL) as well as in parties with a post-dissident lineage such as the Freedom Union (UW). The party where centralization of leader controls was perhaps most problematic was the Solidarity Electoral Action (AWS), whose federal structure inhibited the reinforcement of its leadership. Although Polish leaders had some institutional controls within party organizations, two general factors simultaneously limited the positive impact of intra-party mobilization on executive legislative control. The first problem was that many senior party leaders often remained in parliament. This was most apparent in the case of the AWS, whose leader, Marian Krzaklewski, did not sit in the cabinet, but headed the AWS parliamentary club. Many faction leaders also stayed in parliament, and premiership was offered to Jerzy Buzek, a relatively unknown party member. The presence of the majority of the AWS leadership in the legislature meant thatdin the words of prime minister Buzekdgovernment bills were ‘preliminary points for discussion’ (Zubek, 2001, p. 927). The situation looked rather different in the SLDe UPePSL cabinet, as all party leaders became members of the cabinet. But even under the Miller cabinet some high-level members of the SLD stayed outside the cabinet, which prompted intra-party conflicts and played a part in the SLD’s eventual split in 2004. The second problem was that the political parties had been organized less around socio-economic policy platforms and more around attitudes to the communist past (Szczerbiak, 1999; Markowski and Czesnik, 2002). In effect, party leaders found it difficult to use party program or political ideology as a coordination mechanism. The internal heterogeneity of Polish political parties was most evident in the case of the two parties that won the largest share of seats in the two parliaments between 1997 and 2005. The Solidarity Electoral Action (AWS) was formed in 1996 as a coalition of many post-dissident parties clustered around the Solidarity Trade Union. The key integrating principle was the ambition of the post-Solidarity forces to remove the post-communist SLD from power. In programmatic terms, however, the AWS remained a diverse amalgamate of left-wing populists, Christian democrats

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and liberals. A similar predicament befell the Democratic Left Alliance (SLD), a descendant of the Polish communist party. The SLD attracted mainly former communist apparatchiki for whom shared biographies and political survival provided the principal integrating element, while lefteright identification had only secondary importance (Paszkiewicz, 2000). Thus, the SLD emerged as a programmatically heterogeneous organization, marrying socialists with technocrats and market liberals. The shaping power of the historical cleavage extended well beyond SLD and AWS and affected the evolution of the entire Polish party system (Raciborski, 2007). The internal life of coalitions had an adverse impact on the executive legislative control. On the one hand, parties concluded written agreements to spell out common objectives and held meetings of party leaders and, at times, set up joint working groups (Jednaka, 2004). It was also common practice to appoint deputy ministers from a party other than that of the minister. But, on the other hand, coalitions tended to be fractious, increasing the likelihood that policy negotiations are reopened in parliament (Markowski, 1999). The centrifugal forces originated, first and foremost, from programmatic incohesiveness. Governing coalitions formed according to historical rather than ideological criteria since the communist past precluded parties that had their roots in the anti-communist opposition from forming coalitions with the descendants of the former communist party or its two satellite organizations (Rydlewski, 2000; Jednaka, 2004). The programmatic differences within coalitions were stark. The coalition led by Buzek married the economically liberal Freedom Union and the social policy-inclined AWS. Similarly, the Miller cabinet was a coalition of catch-all social democrats in the SLD, socialist leftists of the Labour Union and moderately nationalist Polish Peasants’ Party (Jednaka, 2004, p. 281). Another important factor that pulled the coalitions apart was the dominant logic of party building in the coalitional strategies of their members. The dominance of competitive dispositions was evident in both the AWSeUW and SLDeUPePSL cabinets. The parties vied to establish their identities in the electoral market and, in doing so, desired to differentiate themselves from others. The leaders thus had a penchant for stressing the ideal points of their policies, seeking to form ties with their natural voter constituencies. The parties were keen to reopen cabinet bargains in the parliament and often joined forces with the opposition to reshape government bills. Under such conditions, the formed alliances were not stable and coalitions often broke down to allow parties to re-emphasize their identities (Zubek, 2001). The AWSeUW coalition ended in mid-2000, after the UW had withdrawn its ministers in protest at its coalition partner’s lack of collaboration on a number of policy issues; the SLDeUPePSL coalition split in 2003, when the PSL had declined to support government legislation in the parliament. Legislative rules Between 1997 and 2005, the parliamentary process provided for few formal executive controls (Van der Meer Krok-Paszkowska, 2000; Goetz and Zubek, 2007). The government did not have recourse to confidence votes on policy issues.

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Although the prime minister could request a vote of confidence, the procedure could not be linked directly to a vote on a bill. This arrangement severely limited the usefulness of confidence votes in shielding government bills from internal dissent. Neither could the executive rely on special privileges of when and how its amendments were voted. It could propose amendments until the end of the second reading, but its proposals had no priority over amendments proposed by other actors. The sequence in which proposed amendments were voted was determined by the speaker and depended on their substance and not on the type of proposal (Kudej, 2002). Like all actors entitled to initiate bills, the government had the option to withdraw its bills but it could exercise this right only until the end of the second reading. The executive enjoyed strongest formal privileges when it came to adopting emergency and EU legislation. The government had the exclusive right to designate its bills as ‘emergency’ legislation and thus benefited from an accelerated procedure in parliament. The emergency procedure provided for much shortened legislative deadlines and special amendment restrictions. As regards the latter, members of parliament were barred from adding ‘new discretionary provisions’ to bills (Kudej, 2002, p. 68; Trybuna1 Konstytucyjny, 2004, p. 41). Moreover, the Speaker had to set aside amendments proposed in the second reading if they had not been deliberated in the committee. This last control had a particular relevance to situations when the Sejm proceeded to hold a final vote on a bill immediately after the second reading without an intervening committee stage (Kudej, 2002, p. 67). The main limitation of the emergency procedure, however, was that it could not be applied to codes and bills dealing with tax, budgetary, electoral and constitutional matters or to any legislation regulating the competencies of public authorities. In effect, only marginal bills could in practice be covered by this procedure. The procedure for passing legislation transposing EU lawsdintroduced in 2000 and retained after accessiondalso provided for special executive timetabling and amending rights. It was the government which decided which of its bills fell under the ‘EU procedure’, though it is interesting to note that the parliament could also initiate such bills. In practice, most transposing measures originated with the government. Before accession the EU procedure applied only to bills processed by a special European Union committee; since May 2004, it applied to all EU bills, irrespective of the committee to which they were referred. Similarly to the emergency procedure, the Speaker determined a timetable for committee deliberations, taking into account EU-imposed transposition deadlines. The EU procedure provided for amendment restrictions. In contrast to ordinary and emergence procedures, a committee could vote an amendment only if the latter was supported by at least three deputies. The same rule applied to minority proposals that were tabled together with the committee report. A motion for rejecting a bill had to be supported by a minimum of three members of parliament and required an absolute majority to be approved by the committee (Kudej, 2002, pp. 91e92). While formal executive privileges were few and far between, governments had ample opportunities to resort to partisan controls. First and foremost, the Speaker, who was a senior leader of the largest governing party, enjoyed extensive powers with

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regard to managing the legislative timetable and could use such powers to expedite or delay bills (Koksanowicz, 2002; Kudej, 2002; Kubuj, 2004). In particular, the Speaker decided on the plenary agenda after non-binding consultations with deputy speakers and party caucuses and could unilaterally delay the introduction of an item for a vote for up to six months. The Speaker could further put pressure on committee chairmen to conduct their business more swiftly or take recourse to informational requirements if he intended to slow down legislative business. In the third reading, the Speaker could also refuse to put to a vote any amendment which had not previously been submitted to a committee or could delay a vote on a bill for such time as was necessary to check if there were any inconsistencies between particular provisions resulting from adopted amendments. Perhaps the most opportunities were provided by the committee system. In particular, the governing parties could set up special committees to handle government bills. Such committees as well as their chairmanship and composition were established by a majority vote at a plenary. Committee referrals were made by a majority vote, if the first reading was held in the plenary, or by the speaker, if the first reading was held in a committee. The majority could constrain both the plenary and the speaker in the referral decision. When defining a special committee jurisdiction, the governing parties could give the committee the exclusive power to process bills related to a specific section of the government agenda and then the prime minister would indicate the relevance of a given bill in the submission to parliament. Other benefits that followed from concentrating government business in special committees included the ability to separate executive bills from non-executive initiatives; to prevent referrals to multiple committees; and to ensure that bills were reviewed by deputies who shared the preferences of party leaders in government. Special committees had been a particularly popular setting for processing large-scale reform packages but had been also used to handle looser collections of salient legislation or even single government bills. The government could also increase its control by routing bills through committees chaired by members of the governing party. Committee chairmen and deputy chairman were appointed and removed by a majority vote but by convention opposition parties were permitted to hold the chairmanship of some selected committees. The committee chairman convened and presided over meetings, invited experts and circulated documents to members. It was widely recognized that such powers could be used to manipulate the timing of and participation in meetings. The chair’s powers were not absolute. The time-tabling and agenda-setting rights could also be exercised by the committee presidium which consisted of the chairman and all deputy chairmen. The governing majority could route bills towards committees chaired by its deputies in two ways. First, it could do so through a vote on committee referrals, if the first reading was held at a plenary session. Second, it could depend on the speaker for arranging the first reading of government bills in such committees. Rules in action The preceding discussion has demonstrated that between 1997 and 2005 a combination of party political and procedural conditions set the scene for weak government

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control over legislation in parliament. The governing party leaders were reluctant to sit in the cabinet which downgraded the importance of executive decision-making. Even if the leaders were members of cabinet, they found it hard to discipline their programmatically heterogeneous party organizations. The predominance of competitive strategies among coalition parties provided further incentives for reopening discussions on government bills. Such adverse party political conditions were hardly mitigated by parliamentary procedures. The legislative rules provided for very few formal executive privileges. In shielding its bills from amendment, the government had to rely mainly on partisan controls whose effectiveness was likely to be limited, if party discipline and coalition cooperation were in short supply. This section checks whetherdas can be expecteddpartisan controls were ineffective as tools of government legislative control. The analysis relies on an original dataset of over 300 bills proposed and adopted during the tenure of the Buzek and Miller majority cabinets (1997e2000; 2001e2003). Detailed data on each bill was collected from online databases available on the official website of the Polish parliament. In measuring the extent of parliamentary amendment the analysis followed the approach of Martin and Vanberg (2005). To calculate amendment scores, draft and final versions of each government bill were compared using file comparison software. Amendments that consisted of correcting spelling and grammatical mistakes were ignored. The score is calculated as a sum of three values: the number of amended articles, the number of deleted articles and the number of added articles. The variable is thus bounded from below by 0 and has no upper limit. 0 means that no article was amended, deleted or added to a bill during its passage through parliament. There are four independent variables. The first variable is whether a bill was referred to a special committee. It takes the value of 1 if such a referral occurred and the value of 0 if it did not. The second variable is whether a bill has been processed by a committee chaired by a member of a governing party. The variable is an ordinal variable taking the value of 0 if the committee or all committees to which a bill was referred was/were chaired by a member of a governing party; the value of 1 if a bill was referred to multiple committees some of which were chaired by the opposition; and the value of 2 if the bill was referred to the committee or committees which were chaired by the opposition. The other two variables capture the use of emergency and EU procedures and are binary variables which take the value of 1 if a bill was processed under emergency or EU procedure and the value of 0 if it was not. A bill is classified as processed under the EU procedure if it was referred to a special EU committee. It is sensible to expect that besides procedural controls there are other factors that affect the probability of parliamentary amendment. The analysis introduces three such control variables. The first control variable is the natural log of the number of articles in a government bill. The expectation is that the more articles a bill contains, the more articles can be amended, added or deleted. The second variable is the degree of conflict inside the coalition. The higher such conflict, the more likely it is that bills will be subject to amendment. To measure it, data on the intra-executive stage of the legislative process was obtained from the Polish Prime Minister’s Office.

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Bills that were discussed in cabinet more than once or were amended after scrutiny in cabinet committees were categorized as conflictual and coded as 1; all other bills were coded as 0. The final control variable is the number of committees a bill is referred to. This variable captures the expectation that bills referred to more committees may have longer adoption times and higher probability of amendment than bills referred to fewer committees. Its minimum value is 0 when a bill has not been referred to any committee. The impact on the extent of amendment is measured using zero-inflated negative binomial regression (Cameron and Trivedi, 1998; Hilbe, 2007). The dependent variable is defined in terms of the total number of articles amended, deleted, or added to a bill during its passage through parliament. A large number of bills (Table 1) had no amendments. The high number of zero counts in the dependent variable precludes it from being modelled as a standard negative binomial and, hence, a zero-inflated negative binomial regression is preferable. The zero-inflated model divides the analysis into two separate processes, one generating coefficients for positive counts, the other generating results for the zero counts. The analysis was performed on 314 bills submitted and adopted by the Buzek (1997e2000) and Miller (2001e2003) majority cabinets, of which the parliament amended 258 bills and adopted unchanged 56 bills. Table 3 shows how the extent of amendment is affected by control and independent variables. The top table shows negative binomial parameter estimates together with associated standard errors and P-value statistics. The coefficients have been parameterized as incidence rate ratios. The larger the value of the coefficient, the greater is the risk of having larger numbers of amendments. Two out of three control Table 3 Zero-inflated negative binomial regression on extent of amendment IRR

SE

P > jzj

z

Count table Log no articles Conflict Committee no Emergency EU Special committee Friendly chair

2.462214 1.247342 1.036538 0.7303056 0.7753744 1.02058 1.016919

0.0813527 0.1075062 0.0767334 0.1006248 0.0956947 0.1185452 0.0733188

27.27 2.56 0.48 2.28 2.06 0.18 0.23

0.000 0.010 0.628 0.023 0.039 0.861 0.816

Binary table Log no articles Conflict Committee no Emergency EU Special committee Friendly chair Constant lna

1.029039 0.9195937 0.0244574 13.24586 27.18419 17.02517 1.128361 0.094021 1.686444

0.4469649 0.8805399 0.6748074 445.1331 424102.1 2993.318 1.562023 1.034182 0.1626555

2.30 1.04 0.04 0.03 0.00 0.01 0.72 0.09 10.37

0.021 0.296 0.971 0.976 1.000 0.995 0.470 0.928 0.000

a

0.1851768

0.03012

Inflation model ¼ logit, log likelihood ¼ 729.0644, LRc2(7) ¼ 498.28, Prob > c2 ¼ 0.0000, N ¼ 314.

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variables have a significant impact. The extent of amendment is positively related to the natural log of the number of articles in a bill. For the natural log of every additional article in a draft bill introduced to parliament, there is an approximate two and a half times increase in the number of changes made to the bill. The existence of coalition conflict increases the number of changes made to a bill. The presence of conflict increases the expected number of article changes to a bill by about 20% holding the other predictors constant. The effect of the number of committees to which a government bill has been referred is not statistically significant. Two of the four independent variables have a significant impact. The formal executive controls allow governments to reduce the extent of amendments introduced to bills. Being introduced under emergency and EU procedures decreases the expected number of changes to a bill by some 27% and 23% respectively. In contrast, partisan executive controls are not effective in shielding government bills from parliamentary amendment. As expected, neither the referral to a special committee nor a committee with a friendly chairman has a statistically significant impact. The bottom table shows the parameter estimates for zero counts and helps to clarify the impact of control and independent variables on the probability of bills not being changed. The logistic regression estimates are not parameterized in terms of odds ratios. Although these results are additional to the key consideration in the present analysis, it is interesting to note that neither formal nor partisan controls affect the probability of no change. It is only the natural log of the number of articles that has a statistically significant impact. For the natural log of each article in a bill, there is a 64% decrease in the odds of having no changes to a bill, holding the other predictors constant (exp(1.029039) ¼ 0.36). This finding is not surprising. None of the four controls makes it possible for the Polish executive to make its bill a take-itor-leave-it proposal to governing parties in parliament as would be the case under a confidence vote or last-offer procedure.

Conclusion This article has investigated the reasons for an extensive parliamentary amendment of the government bills passed to parliament by Polish majority cabinets. The key finding is that it is a constellation of party political and procedural factors that sets the scene for the executive’s loss of legislative control. Parties undermined the governmental grip on bills because of programmatic incohesiveness and competitive coalitional strategies. Not without significance was the reluctance of some party leaders to enter the cabinet. The legislative rules did little to mitigate such adverse party effects. The parliamentary procedures provided for partisan executive controlserather than formal privilegeseas the dominant means of government control over law-making. But, as the analysis of over 300 bills has shown, when party discipline and coalition cooperation are in short supply, partisan controls have limited usefulness. The combination of weak party cohesion, divided coalitions, and few formal executive privileges shifted the site of conclusive decision-making from cabinet to parliament, and thus undermined the legislative control of Polish majority cabinets.

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But is this finding relevant across Central Europe? A detailed comparative analysis is beyond the scope of this article but there is reason to believe that conditions similar to those of Poland obtain in many Central European states. As a recent survey makes clear, despite progressive professionalization of political parties, relatively low party system consolidation is still characteristic for many states in the region (Jungerstam-Mulders, 2006). Linek and Rakusanova (2005) show, for example, that party cohesion in parliamentary voting in the Czech Republic is significantly lower than in Western Europe. Kitschelt et al. (1999) point out the problems that regime divides and party polarization hold for coalition governance. Most Central European states have also opted for the form of legislative organization which forces executives to rely on their partisan agents in parliament to shield bills from amendment. Few, if any, cabinets enjoy a special right to set aside amendments or propose amendments when other actors cannot do it. Like Poland, some states do not allow confidence votes to be linked to votes on bills. It is thus likely that the combination of a growingebut still problematiceparty system consolidation and the choice of legislative organization based on partisan controls provides the foundations for a strong policy-shaping role of the legislatures across the region. Under such conditions, the prospect of Central European executives reinforcing the legislative control depends on two principal factors. First, the ascendancy of executives is contingent on the gradual process of consolidation and professionalization of political parties in Central Europe. Executives in countries with more stable party systems will be quicker to tighten their grip on parliamentary lawmaking than those in more volatile systems. Second, executives will be strengthened vis-a`-vis parliaments if constitutional reforms offer them more formal privileges. Some developments along these lines were triggered by EU accession, buteas shown in the above discussionethe breadth of their impact has been limited. The probability of increased executive control will be the highest, if change occurs along both these dimensions. Hungary provides a good illustration in this regard. It has one of the most stable party systems in Central Europe and, at the same time, Hungarian cabinets enjoy a relatively strong formal position in parliament. Unsurprisingly, the Hungarian executive has been found to exercise the most control over its bills in Central Europe (Olson and Norton, 2007). An interesting point for further research is whether the two avenues of changee party consolidation and introduction of executive privilegesecan be mutually reinforcing. The invoking of formal controls can be expected not only to help executives to impose party or coalition discipline on a given vote, but also to have some medium or long term effect. This is because a repeated use of such procedural instruments may contribute to the emergence of norms mandating party discipline and coalition cooperation. In many mature parliaments, confidence votes and last-offer amendments are rarely used as party members adjust their actions in anticipation of the imposition of such rules. If formal executive controls can engender a culture of discipline and cooperation, they may also contribute indirectly to the effectiveness of partisan controls. The cumulative effect will be a high capacity of the executive to shield its bills from parliamentary amendment.

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