Crossing the Finishing Line: Legislative Success in European Parliaments

Although the behavior in roll call votes in the parliament is increasingly well studied, other legislative activities are hardly analyzed. Specifically, there is a lack of analyses of national parliaments in Europe and, even more problematic, of comparative studies covering multiple national parliaments. We have compiled a novel dataset that captures multiple types of legislative activities (a.o. legislative proposals, speeches, and roll call votes) for four European countries: Germany, France, Italy, and the United Kingdom beginning in 2001. Using this data, we present the different levels of success for legislative proposals across and within the different parliaments. In a second step we test several hypotheses for the explanation of legislative success. These hypotheses include individual characteristics, party attributes, and the party system.