Decision Making Potential and ‘Detailed’ Legislation of Western European Parliamentary Governments

This paper aims to address two very interesting topics in political science: firstly, the possibility of measuring governments’ decision-making potential; and secondly, the actual legislative productivity of such governments. As regards the first of these aims, I have created a multidimensional index combining what I assume to be the most important sources of governmental decision-making potential, namely: the political complexion of the governing party or coalition, compared to that of the previous government (alternation in office); the government’s agenda-setting power; the internal cohesion of government (the spatial arrangement of the major party – or parties – in office). Each of these dimensions bears differently upon the formulation of my index. As for the second of my aims, I have tested the relationship between such an index and the (detailed) legislative production of eight Western European parliamentary democracies during the period 1987-2012, under the assumption that the higher a government scores on my index, the greater its capacity to produce (detailed) laws. Empirical findings seem to confirm the availability of the index: firstly, GDPI (Government Decision-Making Potential Index) correctly distinguishes between different political (and governmental) systems (the higher the average GDPI of a country, the higher the mean standardized page length of its bills, and as a consequence, the more that country is capable of passing detailed legislation). Secondly, GDPI also seems to be an accurate tool with which to account for the variation in governments’ legislative productivity: the coefficient follows the predicted direction, is significantly correlated to the dependent variable and accounts for a fairly substantial amount of the variance in the dependent variable.