Parliamentary Initiatives: Players, Strategies and Patterns of Political Conduct in Times of Uncertainty

Abstract

How do parliamentary actors use rights of initiative when uncertainty reshapes political competition? This panel examines parliamentary initiatives - bills and amendments - as instruments in crisis-driven and multilevel politics. Two papers focus on France’s Fifth Republic: one compares opposition-sponsored initiatives following the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks, the 2020 COVID-19 outbreak, and the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, and considers how the post-2017 reconfiguration of opposition forces conditions such responses; the other addresses the reversal in legislative initiation, where parliamentary-initiated laws have outnumbered government bills, and links this puzzle to constitutional reforms and partisan dynamics. Extending beyond France, a third paper maps how legislative initiative was used in response to COVID-19 across the UK Parliament and devolved legislatures, including the scope for crisis framing to advance otherwise difficult legislative goals and the distribution of initiative between governments and other actors. The final paper conceptualizes amendments as a key vehicle for balancing differentiation and compromise, and evaluates how parties’ relationships to executives - coalition partners, support parties, opposition, and prime ministerial parties - shape amendment strategies in Spain and across regional parliaments. Together, the panel links initiative to agenda control, party competition, and executive-legislative relations under uncertainty, offering comparative leverage on who initiates and when, and to what ends.

Title	Details
Differentiation and Compromise: Parliamentary Strategies in Multilevel Settings	View Paper Details
Legislative Activity in Response to Crises: The Case of Opposition Parties in the French Fifth Republic’s National Assembly	View Paper Details
Reversing the Tide: Explaining the Rise of Parliamentary Initiative in France	View Paper Details
Legislative Initiatives in Response to Covid-19 Across the United Kingdom	View Paper Details