Introduction

Despite the existence of formal working majorities in the legislature, Colombian presidents have struggled to fulfill their promises, as Congress waters down reforms, making it the job of the executive to constantly negotiate and find a middle ground between national and local constituency representation. This has been a constant during most of our republican history, characterized by a non-stop electoral cycle (Posada-Carbó, 2000), a highly fragmented and regionalized party system (González, 2014), and a highly centralized executive holding the agenda power.

This chapter summarizes some of the previous findings of the research conducted on the role of Congress in the contemporary policy-making process. With data for more than five presidential periods, we show that Congress has played an important part in reacting to executive bills, protecting constituency interests, leading public debates, and occasionally affecting the agenda impeding governmental action. The main insights of the chapter will cover the period after the 1991 Constitution, analyzing mostly the legislative output of Congress.

Following the basic framework of Haggard and McCubbins (2001), the chapter is divided into five sections. First, we describe the rules establishing the “separation of powers”. This is followed by a discussion of the nature of the party system determining the “separation of purpose” among the branches and the legislative output. Thus, the first section describes the most significant institutions constraining the formal agenda-setting powers in the legislature. We put particular emphasis on the committee system for its veto power. The second section reviews the recent changes of the electoral reforms on the party system, which leads us into the third section analyzing the patterns of legislative activity (coalition parties’ ability to control the legislative agenda) and the scope of the bills based on the incentives of legislators and the executive. Because we know that not all bills are equal, the fourth section discusses what happens when any of the actors tries to avoid the legislature. First, we discuss the role the legislature played in the bills introduced by the government after the failure to pass via plebiscite the historic peace agreement with the FARC-EP, after 50 years of intense civil conflict. Then, we discuss the fate of the anti-corruption agreement (a group of bills) after the “consulta anticorrupción” failed to be approved by 1% of the vote. The last section presents some closing remarks.