Committees and Agents of Negative Agenda Control: The Hungarian Experience

It is well-known from the literature on comparative legislative studies that governments in post-communist democracies control the legislative process no less effectively than their counterparts do in the established democracies of Western Europe. What is much less known and documented is the prevalence of the use of negative agenda control, i.e. by limiting opposition access to the floor of the plenary. Although much has been written about the causes and consequences of different types of agenda control in West European democracies, legislative studies of the younger parliamentary democracies of East-Central Europe have largely ignored the issue of negative agenda control (Zubek 2011). An important exception to this is Zubek’s (2011) comprehensive overview of the emergence of different rules and procedures that govern opposition access to the floor in six post-communist democracies. However, as he admits, “procedures are the script, not the play” (2011: 189); a purely institutional account of how and why such procedures emerge and vary across states cannot reveal how the majority and the opposition actually use the powers, no matter how limited, available to them. The present study seeks to contribute to filling this lacuna with a case study of the use of negative agenda control in the post-communist Hungarian legislature, the Országgyűlés, during the 1998-2014 period. Focussing on the Hungarian case is particularly important because the literature gives rise to conflicting expectations about whether we should expect the opposition to have greater or smaller opportunities to access and influence the legislative process. On the one hand, Hungary has been repeatedly noted in the literature to have a very strong and institutionalized system of legislative committees (Ilonszki 2011; Khmelko 2011; Martin 2011, Yloutien), which one would expect to translate into greater opposition access to legislation (Ilonszki Strom 1990, Matin and Vanberg). On the other hand, Zubek’s (2011) work leads to the expectation that the same conditions that led to the emergence of strong rules of negative agenda control in Hungary, i.e. high party concentration and low institutional dispersion of power, should also allow the parliamentary majority to use these rules to its advantage.