Setting the Parliamentary Agenda: Legislative Activity and New Challenges in the Changing Social and Political Context

Abstract

How do parliaments set agendas when shocks are recurrent and policy time is scarce? This panel addresses legislative initiative and parliamentary agenda-setting in contexts of ‘permanent crisis’ and social change. Across diverse institutional settings - from established and new democracies, and from national to subnational legislatures - the papers examine who initiates legislation, which issues receive attention, and how crisis framing shapes the content and sequencing of proposals. Contributions analyze pandemic-related initiatives and the trade-offs they encode between public health, rights, and economic intervention; the use of crisis-labelled bills to bundle non-crisis issues; patterns of issue attention in a new democracy linked to committee specialization and gender; legislative initiatives concerning human rights and emergency governance as crises emerge; and the political opportunities associated with introducing pro-trans initiatives across subnational units. The panel treats agenda-setting as both a procedural and representational problem: managing executive and non-executive initiative, balancing urgency with scrutiny, and allocating parliamentary attention across established and newly salient policy domains. Methodologically, the panel combines qualitative comparative approaches with original legislative datasets and longitudinal statistical designs, offering leverage on how institutional structures and opportunity conditions shape what parliaments debate, propose, and enact in turbulent times, and with what implications for democratic accountability.

Title	Details
When Do Legislators Become Entrepreneurs? Political Opportunity for Setting Pro-Trans Agenda	View Paper Details
The Politics of Pandemic Lawmaking: The Policy Content of Legislative Initiatives Related to the COVID-19 Pandemic.	View Paper Details
Policy Specialization, Gender and Issue Attention in New Democracies	View Paper Details
Parliamentary Agenda-Setting and Responses to Crisis Emergence in the Context of Legislative Initiatives Concerning Human Rights: a Comparative Perspective	View Paper Details