Legislative Amendments, Agency Loss, and Shadow Chairs

Parliaments are often depicted as being under the thumb of the executive and having limited ability to affect policy. More recently, scholars have argued that rather than parliaments having independence influence on policy, parliaments, and parliamentary committees in particular, have a role in managing conflict within executive coalitions. In a comparative context parliamentary committees in Iceland are very active in amending legislation, making it an interesting case for considering both what factors affect how extensively legislation is amended as well considering which political and institutional factors contribute to committees exercising their ability to amend legislation. We hypothesize that legislation is amended more extensively when the executive ideologically divided, when a cabinet minister’s preferences differ from those of her party, and when committee chairs ‘shadow’ cabinet ministers. We use an expert survey to estimate the positions of parties and ministers on the policy dimensions corresponding to individual portfolios. We consider all government bills introduced in Alþingi between 2003 and 2014, examining whether the bills are passed into legislation and how extensively they are amended.