Cross-Temporal Plenary Advantageous Rules for Majority Parties in Spain (1982-2012)

My paper analyzes the set of procedural rules mostly used by the majority parties in Spain during the period 1982-2012 in the actual legislative decision-making that settle the agenda and directly serve as agenda control in the Plenary as defined by Döring and Hallerberg (eds) (2004) and Rasch and Tsebelis (eds) (2011). My research finds the typical strength of majority parties to exert agenda control as for these have a large array of procedural rules on their advantage at hand. In this paper, I try to dig further on their evolutionary emergence (origin), ask what equilibrium these imply for the large parties – so they would not oppose to their emergence - and what space is left, then, to the opposition parties to exert some type of accountability. Although this is a case study, the research is cross-temporal, covering the recent terms of democratic restoration in Spain (1982-2012, as indicated), and theoretically-grounded in two of the themes of interest of this Panel, namely: origins and ways of (exerting) agenda control in the Plenary (i.e. in the actual legislative decision-making process – legislative output), and accountability – in this case left to opposition, so it aims at raising up theoretical questions that are very much oriented to a comparative design planned for future research.