As Arthur Bentley (1908) recalled more than a century ago: “Most bills that become laws do so after a fight with other bills for space in the calendar, rather than after a fight with an opposition of a more direct kind”. Then as now, the matter of competition is time, one of the scarcest resources in parliamentary settings. So far existing research has mainly focused on the factors facilitating the adoption/rejection of bills, thus giving central place to political factors such as the preferences of veto actors. On the other hand, a relatively neglected issue is the variation in the temporal patterns of adoption. Indeed, legislative processes can be understood as sequences of stages a bill has to go through before its final adoption. Remarkably, the time spent in each of these stages varies considerably according to procedural, bill-specific and political factors. This work aims at exploring the impact of these factors on the time trajectories of legislative processes by using the tools of sequence analysis, a method commonly employed for the study of occupational histories or life courses. The analysis will be conducted on the population of legislative acts adopted in Italy from 1987 to 2008.
