Executives and Legislatures: Explaining Interbranch Oscillations in Legislative Authority

Beginning in the 1990s, comparativists began to investigate interbranch delegation of authority under different executive formats. Hypothesized reasons for delegation include collective action problems due to legislative fractionalization, the presence of a dominant pro-executive faction, preference congruence vis-à-vis the head of government, and challenges posed by economic crises. We test these four hypotheses on a dataset containing 2020 country-year observations of democracies and semidemocracies between 1976 and 2014. Using V-Dem data, we derive annualized measures of shifts in executive-legislative relationships. Contrary to stereotypes of executive dominance, relative gains by legislatures are more frequent than gains by executives, and economic crises do not appear to advantage political executives in consistent ways. Surprisingly, some of the factors expected to benefit executives also seem to enhance assembly authority as well. Robust democracy seems to maintain interbranch power relations in equilibrium, while lower levels of polyarchy are associated with greater “noise” in the relationship.