Legislatures and Executive Unilateral Action in Parliamentary Democracies

Scholars who study, and citizens who live in, presidential democracies are familiar with executive unilateral actions. Whether through executive orders, delegated authority, or constitutional decree powers, presidents act in significant ways to unilaterally ‘legislate,’ that is, to change the policy status quo in a direction that is not the one preferred by a legislative majority. Opinions about the consequence of executive legislative actions are divided. While for some they are indicative of a degenerated liberal order and diminished separation and balance of government powers, for others they reflect the reality of democratic governance, one that neither diminishes democracy or enfeebles legislatures. Much less is known about the executive’s legislative actions in parliamentary democracies. Part of the reason is that parliamentarims is conceived as a system in which the executive is a perfect agent of the legislative majority, whose behavior is kept in check by the possibility of removal from office by a vote of no-confidence. This is partially true. While executives in parliamentary systems have to deal with a parliamentary leash that does not exist in presidential democracies, the length of this leash varies in significant ways in parliamentary constitutions. Just like in presidential democracies, governments in parliamentary regimes are also able to unilaterally change the policy status quo. Our goal in this paper is to document the distribution (and, when possible, the use) of constitutional instruments that allow executives in parliamentary democracies to take unilateral action or set the legislative agenda. They include the confidence procedure (which varies, like the no-confidence procedures, in terms of the decision rules adopted and the constraints on calling it); ‘contemporary’ decree powers, some aspects of emergency provisions, legislative initiative, instruments, such as the “guillotine,” the block vote, and urgency requests, which place limits on the parliament’s ability to discuss and amend bills and, ultimately, to influence legislation.