The Absorption of Legislative Standing Committees: The Case of the Hungarian Parliament

Legislative scholarship on parliamentary committees has argued that strong legislative committees can provide greater opposition influence over the legislative process (Strom 1990) and the opportunity for coalition partners to shadow (Carroll and Cox 2012) and “keep a tab on each other” (Thies 2001) in order to implement their joint program (Martin and Vanberg 20111). The case of Hungary, however, suggests otherwise: whereas legislative committees are formally strong (Martin 2011; Ylaoutien and Hallerberg 2009), in practice they act as agents of the incumbent coalition. Moreover, there is weak evidence suggesting that coalition partners use committee assignments for the purposes of shadowing. Although shadowing did exist in the first two post-communist coalitions, it took place within the executive as opposed to the legislature, i.e. by way of appointing political state secretaries represent a coalition partner other than the one who controlled the portfolio. In this paper I explore the mechanisms by which Hungarian governing coalitions absorb parliamentary committees. I start by comparing the coalition agreements of recent Hungarian governments with specific regard to their provisions about the implementation of the coalition program in the legislative committees. I show that coalition partners have consistently regarded standing committees as an integral part of the implementation of the government program. Furthermore, coalition partners have used committee assignments in the allocation of payoffs among coalition partners rather than as means of keeping a check on another; as a result we find fare more instances of political parties overseeing than shadowing a ministries (Carrol and Cox 2012). Next, I examine the legislative fate of 9971 bills that have been considered by standing committees during the 1998-2014 period.