Parliamentary Control of Ministerial Policymaking

A key issue in parliamentary democracy centers on parliament's ability to contain ministerial drift. Recent scholarship highlights the importance of strong legislative institutions for enforcing parliament’s wishes, emphasizing that ministers’ policy choices can often be corrected after the fact by the overseeing standing committees. In this article, we argue that parliament’s oversight can also incentivize ministers to adjust their policy positions in advance—and thereby obviate any need for actual parliamentary enforcement. To substantiate our analysis, we field five decades of lawmaking data from the Swedish government and show that the ministers systematically stack their bills in parliament's favor already at the agenda-setting stage. Specifically, by selectively eschewing proposals from individual ministers that lie relatively far from parliament's ideological position, the ministers collectively ensure that most bills will typically support parliament’s interests. Our conclusions suggest that ministers in parliamentary governments may enjoy significantly less policy discretion than is commonly assumed.