Government Agenda Power in Parliamentary Democracies

Much research is interested in the role that executives and committees play in setting the legislative agenda in parliamentary democracies, but progress in this area has been limited by a lack of comprehensive time-series data on agenda setting powers in different countries. In this paper, I seek to address the gap in three ways. First, I propose a detailed scheme for classifying rules in six principal dimensions of executive and committee agenda power. Second, I apply this scheme to develop a time series of agenda-setting powers in 18 European democracies for the period 1945-2011. Finally, I demonstrate the utility of the new dataset by examining how partisan and non-partisan factors shape legislative organisation in parliamentary democracies.