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Legislating or rubber‐stamping? Assessing parliament's influence on law‐making with text reuse

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2026

Roy Gava Open the ORCID record for Roy Gava [Opens in a new window] ,
Julien M. Jaquet Open the ORCID record for Julien M. Jaquet [Opens in a new window]  and
Pascal Sciarini Open the ORCID record for Pascal Sciarini [Opens in a new window]
Roy Gava*
Affiliation:
School of Economics and Political Science, University of St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland
Julien M. Jaquet
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science and International Relations, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland
Pascal Sciarini
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science and International Relations, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland
*
Address for correspondence: Roy Gava, School of Economics and Political Science, University of St. Gallen, Müller‐Friedberg‐Strasse 8, CH‐9000 St. Gallen, Switzerland. Email: roy.gava@unisg.ch
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Abstract

Law‐making is a core function of parliaments in democratic systems. Yet, we still know little about the extent to which parliaments influence legislation and the reasons why MPs modify some bills more than others. We analyse the degree of bill amendments operated by parliament, by comparing bills before and after parliamentary deliberations with a text reuse approach. We postulate that MPs attempt to overcome the problem of limited processing capacity by prioritising certain bills over others. To this end, they use considerations related to institutional rules, attention dynamics and partisan politics. Empirically, we apply zero‐inflated beta regressions on a dataset covering about 1,700 bills adopted from 1995 to 2015 in the Swiss Parliament. Moreover, we address the problem of observational equivalence affecting analyses of parliament's impact on law‐making, by taking into account the government's anticipation strategy. Results highlight a reasonably high amendment activity, but with strong variations across bills. MPs change bills more if they are subject to direct democracy, rank high on the parliamentary agenda or if they attract media attention. The influence of the electoral cycle and coalition politics is not confirmed.

Keywords

law‐makingparliamentamendmentstext reuseSwitzerland

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Type
Original Articles
Information
European Journal of Political Research , Volume 60 , Issue 1 , February 2021 , pp. 175 - 198
Copyright
Copyright © 2020 European Consortium for Political Research

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