Executive Leadership and the Legislative Process

Executive Leadership and the Legislative Process

  • Comparison of U.S. and Canadian Political Systems:
    • U.S.: Separation-of-powers system
      • Power shared by independently elected president and Congress.
    • Canada: Parliamentary system
      • Constitutional fusion of powers.
  • Common Assumption:
    • Parliamentary systems are more capable of dramatic policy change than separation-of-powers systems.
    • This assumption largely fails when comparing the U.S. and Canada.
  • Constitutional Differences:
    • Have important consequences for policymaking and government performance.
  • Focus of chapter:
    • Institutions that make laws (central policymaking institutions) in the U.S. and Canada.
    • U.S.: President and bicameral Congress.
    • Canada: Parliament; Prime Minister and cabinet lead the House of Commons.
  • Chief Executives:
    • U.S. President and Canadian Prime Minister both have central roles in the legislative process.
  • Two aspects of policymaking performance:
    • Ideological direction and change:
      • Extremity (left or right) versus moderation.
      • Dramatic versus incremental change.
      • Shapes the ability to create or eliminate major programs and affects the growth or shrinkage of the welfare state.
    • Policy competence:
      • Ability to avoid distortion by narrow or ill-informed constituency pressure.
      • Adopt policies that respond intelligently to broad interests of society.
      • Shapes the ability to avoid wasteful subsidies, impose needed regulations, design effective programs, and keep revenues in line with expenditures.
  • Two aspects of performance may vary independently.
  • Central policymaking institutions depend heavily on:
    • Electoral and political party systems.
    • Number of parties, ideological positions, internal organization, degree of discipline, and magnitude of changes in party control from one election to another.
  • Chapter structure:
    • Description of the two sets of institutions, including the party systems.
    • Development of expectations for the two aspects of performance in each country.
    • Brief conclusion summarizing major findings.

Executive and Legislative Structures

  • U.S. and Canadian central policymaking institutions differ in a variety of respects.

Canadian Structures

  • Central constitutional feature:
    • Adoption of legislation by simple majority vote in the House of Commons.
    • Requires endorsement by the Senate, but the Senate rarely holds up bills significantly.
    • No requirement for the consent of an independent chief executive.
    • The prime minister and most cabinet members are members of the House of Commons and vote on bills.
  • Prime ministers are dominant in the Canadian system, though not omnipotent.
    • The leader of the party with the most seats becomes prime minister and draws the cabinet from his or her party’s MPs.
    • The governor-general ratifies the selection.
    • Prime ministers must retain the confidence of the House of Commons.
    • Minority situations require additional votes from other parties.
    • Canadian parties in minority situations have not formed coalition governments, though there is no constitutional barrier to doing so.
  • “The government” introduces important legislation.
    • Ordinary MPs are restricted to private members’ bills and motions, which are rarely passed.
    • Government bills emerge after elaborate development processes within the bureaucracy.
    • Career public servants play key advisory and policy-development roles within the political parameters set by ministers.
    • Deliberation and policy formation is centered more in the executive than the legislature.
  • Constitutional expectation:
    • “The government” will govern without major obstacles to enacting its policies.
    • Defeating a government proposal on a major issue is normally considered a vote of no confidence, resulting in an election.
    • The Commons will not defeat an important government bill unless a majority is willing to force an election.
    • A minority government may intentionally force a no-confidence vote if it expects to gain seats in the resulting election.
  • Party Discipline:
    • Each of the Canadian parties exercises very strong party discipline over its own MPs.
    • Party leaders decide their parties’ positions and instruct their caucuses how to vote.
    • MPs almost always comply, especially when defections could change the outcome.
    • Standing committees rarely make consequential recommendations, and members are subject to the same party discipline in committee as in the full chambers.
    • Parties can expel recalcitrant members or deny them the party’s nomination in the next election.
  • Canadian parties, especially the Liberals and Conservatives, are brokerage parties.
    • Brokering and compromise take place mainly outside the legislature, especially in party leadership elections.
    • The parties generally lack readily useable mechanisms for challenging leadership between those elections.
  • Leaders face political constraints in defining party positions.
    • Leaders typically consult with backbenchers before making potentially controversial decisions and may defer to strong opposition within their caucus.
    • Leaders’ ability to make their own calculations about the political consequences of party positions and to override opposition within their caucuses gives them considerable leeway in shaping parliamentary strategy.
  • Concentration of decision-making power over public policy:
    • In a majority situation, the prime minister has nearly complete control over legislative outcomes.
    • In minority situations, prime ministers are more constrained as they bargain with opposition party leaders.
    • A party that would expect to improve its position in an election will be more willing to see the government fall and thus will make stronger demands in negotiations over policy.
    • A party that would like to put off new elections until a later date will make more concessions.
  • Canadian MPs are elected from single-member districts, with plurality elections.
  • Canada in recent decades has had three historical national parties along with a major regional party.
    • The three historical parties compete across the country in all districts: the Liberals, the Conservatives, and the New Democrats.
    • A fourth party emerged in Quebec in the mid-1990s: the Bloc Québécois (BQ), which has devoted most of its energy to advocating the province’s secession from Canada.
    • Although Canada has more parties than does the U.S., the single-member plurality system largely prevents small, ideologically extreme parties from winning parliamentary seats.
  • Canada since 1957 has had four kinds of governments:
    • Liberal majority.
    • Conservative majority.
    • Liberal minority with support from the New Democrats.
    • Conservative minority with support from various parties.

United States Structures

  • Lawmaking process in the U.S. is complex and potentially difficult.
  • Enacting a law requires passage of a bill by majority votes in both houses of Congress (House of Representatives and Senate) and signature by the president.
  • The process of getting to that point is complicated and not under centralized control.
  • Important legislation is usually introduced by party leaders or senior members, often on behalf of the president.
  • In the so-called regular order for developing legislation, the standing committee with jurisdiction in each house must consider a bill and approve it.
    • Each committee will shape the bill to reflect the preferences of its own members, who are not necessarily highly representative of the full chamber.
  • In recent years, the majority party leadership has often bypassed committee deliberations and developed bills in party task forces, or other ad hoc party venues.
  • After a bill is approved in committee or developed by the majority leadership, each house has formal processes for bringing it to the floor and determining which amendments, if any, the whole chamber will consider.
  • In the House, the Rules Committee, controlled by the majority party leadership, proposes floor procedures for each bill in a special rule that must be approved by the whole House.
    • When the House majority party is unified, it can effectively dictate floor procedures.
  • In the Senate, a mere majority cannot control such procedures.
    • The majority leader, minority leader, and interested members may negotiate a unanimous consent agreement to determine the floor procedure on a bill.
    • In the absence of such an agreement, any senator can debate or offer amendments without limit.
    • Senators can use the filibuster (prolonged debate) or the threat of a filibuster to delay action.
    • The support of 60 senators is required to end a filibuster.
    • The Senate majority leadership can sometimes get around the filibuster through expansive use of budget measures.
    • The majority party is far more constrained by the minority party in the Senate than in the House.
  • If the bills passed by the House and Senate are not identical, the two chambers must resolve the differences.
    • Traditionally through negotiation in a House–Senate conference committee, often nowadays by other means.
    • The two chambers will then vote again, as needed, to pass identical bills.
    • Finally, the resulting bill goes to the president for his signature or possible veto.
  • None of the steps are automatic, strictly predictable from the others.
  • Commentators sometimes point to the multitude of opportunities to block action—or, closely related, the large number of veto players—as a direct measure of the difficulty of policy change in the U.S. system.
  • The performance of these institutions depends critically on the ideological orientation and internal functioning of the political parties.
  • With the president, senators, and House members all elected, separately, in single-member-district, plurality elections, the U.S. has had two major political parties—the Democrats and Republicans—for more than 150 years.
    • Third-party or independent candidates have rarely won seats in Congress, and never the presidency.
    • Thus the president is at all times either a Democrat or Republican, and the House and Senate each have either a Democratic or a Republican majority.
  • Since the early 20th century:
    • The Democratic Party has been a generally liberal or leftwing party.
    • The Republican Party has been a generally conservative or rightwing party.
  • In sharp contrast with Canadian parties, U.S. parties are loosely organized.
    • Individual senators and representatives (as well as presidents) define and campaign on their own policy positions.
    • Members of Congress who represent more ideologically extreme states or districts are generally more extreme in their campaign postures and voting on legislation; those who represent more moderate or competitive areas are generally more moderate.
  • The president can influence legislation mainly, “at the margins.”
    • The president’s main formal power over legislation is the veto.
    • The president can also initiate proposals and advocate for his policies and routinely puts forward a legislative program.
    • If Congress does not share the president’s priorities, it can ignore them.
    • To deal with congressional resistance, the president will sometimes “go public.”
  • President’s support in Congress comes from members that want to move policy in the same direction as the president does.
  • Two kinds of variation in party politics have had dramatic effects on policymaking:
    • The congressional parties in recent decades have become increasingly polarized ideologically, more disciplined and organized, and less prone to cooperate with each other.
      • In the 1970s, despite a major difference in their respective centers of gravity, both parties were ideologically diverse.
      • With the resulting internal diversity, neither party could impose much discipline.
      • In any case, both houses had strong centrist factions, and policymaking often reflected varying degrees of bipartisan cooperation.
      • Over the last 25 years, the congressional parties gradually have become sharply polarized.
      • Ideological gaps between the most moderate 10% of Republicans and the most moderate 10% of Democrats in each house have increased sharply since the mid-1970s.
      • Party leaders have had much more authority to define party strategy, to impose a degree of discipline on the few remaining centrists, and even to take over a good deal of legislative decision making from the committees and rank-and-file members.
    • Frequent alternation between unified and divided party control of the presidency and Congress.
      • Divided government has existed about three-quarters of the time from 1969 to the present.
      • When divided government exists, policy change depends on bipartisan cooperation, which takes several forms.

Implications for Performance

  • Structures of Canadian and U.S. central institutions have consequences for:
    • Ideological direction: Policy leaning left or right, and change on that dimension.
    • Policy competence: Ability to resist demands and act intelligently.

Ideological Direction

  • Legislative institutions may affect the direction of policy on the left–right ideological dimension.
  • Institutional effects are contingent on political circumstances.

Structures and Direction

  • Effects of institutions on the direction of policy depend on:
    1. How they shape profiles of policymaking majorities
    2. Changes that occur in those profiles with elections
    * Interaction of three features:
    * Requirements for an effective majority
    * Breadth of electoral support needed
    * Ability to impose policy decisions
  • A policymaking majority is the set of elected officials who provide the votes or other approvals needed to enact legislation.
  • Ideological profile of a policymaking majority:
    * Central tendency of the individual preferences (position of the median member)
    * Degree of coherence or diversity
    * More extreme and coherent = greater tendency to impose extreme policies
    * More centrist and internally diverse = greater tendency toward moderate policies
  • Conditions that determine the ideological makeup of the policymaking majority:
    1. Size and complexity of the institutional effective majority.
    2. Electoral and party systems—breadth of voter support required.
    3. Internal coordination and discipline within the policymaking majority (How much do party leaders impose control over other office holders?)

Canada

  • General institutional and political conditions allow for:
    * High level of policy extremity
    * Major change
  • Effective institutional majority is essentially the minimum size for a democratic institution.
    * Majority in the House of Commons can enact a law.
  • Electoral base required is notably narrow.
    * The Canadian government can respond primarily to a right-leaning, left-leaning, or centrist 38% and it can switch from one to the other in a single election.
  • Canadian parties are highly disciplined.
    * The preferences may lean heavily in one direction, or can be strictly moderate.
  • Minority government: the policymaking majority includes an entire additional major party, or at least the leaders of that party.
  • Historically, the ability of governments to act decisively has generally favored interventionist policies.
  • Party competition has in fact promoted moderation and ensured that policy change has generally been incremental and rarely polarizing.
  • Federalism and regional conflict also promote incremental rather than bold policies.
  • Minority government complicates the picture because of the asymmetrical party system.
  • Since the early 2000s, it appeared electoral majorities would require very broad electoral majorities, implying severe constraints on policy change.
  • The 2011 and 2015 elections broke this trend
  • Both the 2011 and 2015 majority governments also follow the long-term patterns of fundamentally incremental governance.

United States

  • The long-term, general institutional and political conditions promoted moderation and incremental policy change.
  • Recent conditions of party politics have exaggerated the constraints, making significant policy change in many circumstances nearly impossible.
  • What makes the requirements for an effective majority demanding in the U.S. is largely the differences in the members’ constituencies and terms of office.
  • The electoral base for an effective majority is correspondingly broader than in the Canadian case.
  • The U.S. legislative parties are far less disciplined than the Canadian.
  • The combination of routine filibustering or divided government with increasingly polarized political parties in recent years has produced a requirement for extremely broad effective majorities.
  • Over the long run, the demanding requirements for an effective majority have had several effects on policymaking in the U.S.
  • Since the mid-1990s, polarized parties and a filibuster-prone Senate have sharply reduced bipartisan cooperation.
  • During the first two years of the Trump presidency (2017–2018), a new and even more dysfunctional condition became apparent.

Summary

  • Through most of the last century, Canadian and U.S. executive and legislative institutions performed, broadly speaking, similarly with respect to the ideological direction of policy.
  • The institutional sources of moderation and incrementalism were different, however.
  • The development of polarization and extreme partisan conflict in the U.S. points toward a period of marked immobility on the left–right dimension.

Policy Competence

  • In addition to favoring some outcomes over others, executive and legislative institutions affect a separate dimension of performance, policy competence.
  • To achieve competence, government must limit certain political biases that distort policymaking in a democratic political system.
Institutions
  • Shape the ability to avoid distortions.
    • Structures that focus control of major decisions in the leadership of a single party provide strong incentives to serve broadly based, long-term interests.
    • Structures that divide power have a major advantage: providing protection against certain kinds of defective or inadequate deliberation.
  • Institutions that produce a working majority that remains stable for several years at a time will enhance the competence of policymaking.
  • Certain institutional resources are important for providing policymakers with reliable information and advice and inducing them to pay attention to it.

Canada

  • Canadian executive and legislative institutions have major advantages from the standpoint of policy competence, along with certain vulnerabilities.
  • In a majority government, the prime minister and the governing party face few legislative constraints on their policies.
  • The rules for scheduling Canadian elections further strengthen the government’s ability to resist short-term pressures and focus on long-term results.
  • The cabinet receives advice from a highly professionalized career public service and a mesh of central agencies, which carefully refine and evaluate legislative proposals before the cabinet approves them and introduces them in Parliament.
  • Lacking effective checks and balances, a majority government can act on the basis of biased or truncated deliberation without encountering serious challenge.
  • Policies often reflect regional bargains that sacrifice coherence and efficiency.

United States

  • U.S. institutions produce greater challenges for policy competence than do Canada’s, especially under recent political conditions.
  • The results are typically the product of both political parties, in varying degrees, and of individual members of Congress, who may act independently of party leaders and the president.
  • The election schedule of U.S. government discourages a focus on long-term results.
  • The same bicameralism and separation of powers that undermine accountability also provide institutional support for deliberation.
  • Polarized partisan politics of recent years, inter-branch deliberations under divided government have descended into partisan warfare with scant ability to cooperate on behalf of common interests.
  • The U.S. lacks a corps of officials who have experience with existing programs, independence from the political parties, and proximity to decision makers.
  • With respect to policy competence, extreme partisan conflict has made responsible policymaking in many circumstances nearly impossible.

Summary

  • The Canadian and U.S. systems have different features that are likely to promote policy competence, protecting against different forms of bias or distortion in policymaking.
  • In general, policymaking institutions in Canada should perform well with respect to competence.
  • By comparison, the U.S. system has strong checks and balances, which can block reckless action, inspired by an overly ambitious or impatient president, for example.
  • The U.S. has probably paid a price in competence over the long run for having a political system that was designed in large part to obstruct policymaking.

Conclusions and Expectations

*The structures of central policymaking institutions in Canada and the U.S. have important impacts on policy outcomes and the performance of government.

  • Over the long run, both Canadian and U.S. institutions have generally favored incremental change and thus moderate growth of government, but for different reasons.
  • The checks and balances of the U.S. system have sometimes prevented mistakes, Canada has had an apparent advantage with respect to policy competence because its centralized control of decisions provides more effective accountability for results.
  • The most dramatic differences in institutional effects and performance have emerged in recent years.
  • In the U.S., the polarization of party conflict has apparently brought an end to an even longer history of moderation and incrementalism, but with an entirely different result.
  • U.S. policymaking institutions are not only paralyzed on the ideological dimension but largely incapable of reaching cooperative solutions needed to implement competent policies.