Presidential legislative initiatives: what accounts for success and failure?

Few presidents in Europe have a power to directly propose new legislation directly to the parliament. As such, the presidential legal initiatives in Europe are not very well researched and understood, since most existing studies simply provide counts of how many times this power was used in different countries. This paper seeks to address this research gap by providing the first exploratory analysis of presidential legal initiatives in Lithuania. We have assembled a new dataset of all presidential legal initiatives proposed in Lithuania since 1990. Using this dataset we demonstrate that the presidential legal initiatives are mostly used in tandem with the presidential veto power (i.e. president vetoes one version of a bill and immediately proposes a new more acceptable version to the parliament) and can be seen as a way for the president to insert herself into the legislative process. We also show that the presidential legal initiatives that are small in scope and technical in nature are usually more successful than more substantive legislative proposals.