Why are some parliamentarians’ bills more likely to progress? Sponsorship as a signal
| Published date | 01 February 2021 |
| Date | 01 February 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1369148120949978 |
| Author | Andrés Dockendorff |
| Subject Matter | Original Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1369148120949978
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
2021, Vol. 23(1) 139 –157
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1369148120949978
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Why are some
parliamentarians’ bills
more likely to progress?
Sponsorship as a signal
Andrés Dockendorff
Abstract
This article offers an empirical test of why some legislators’ bills are more likely to move
forward in the legislative process. We argue that who signs the bill matters when it comes to
the level of support that the proposal receives. Successful bills will be sponsored by a greater
number of members (bandwagon factor) and political adversaries (support across the aisle factor).
On the contrary, failed initiatives will be those sponsored by inexperienced parliamentarians
(newcomers factor). We examine the case of Chile and test the expectations with legislative data
on parliamentarians’ bills.
Keywords
bill sponsorship, information aggregation, intra-legislative signalling, legislative success,
parliamentarians’ bills, reactive legislatures
Introduction
Why are some parliamentarians’ bills more likely to progress? Even in those democratic
assemblies usually viewed as having weak agenda powers, a reasonably large percentage
of bills introduced by legislators in parallel to the cabinet or the president’s agenda trans-
late into law or, at least, receive some consideration at the committee level. In Westminster,
for example, around 10% of the Private Members’ Bills introduced by British Members
of Parliament over the life of a parliament pass and become law (Bowler, 2010). In sepa-
rate power regimes, members’ bills attrition rates are similar. Indeed, in the Chilean
National Congress, around 10% of parliamentary bills became law between 1990 and
2010 (El Mercurio, 2017). In the Colombian legislature, 17% of the legislators’ bills
between 1998 and 2014 translated into statutory law (Carroll and Pachón, 2016). However,
in spite of those numbers, we do not have a good understanding of when and why parlia-
mentarians’ own policy proposals move forward in the legislative process and eventually
become law. While there is an abundance of comparative research on how chief
executives secure the passage of their policies (e.g. Alemán and Navia, 2009; Cheibub
Instituto de Estudios Internacionales, Universidad de Chile, Santiago de Chile, Chile
Corresponding author:
Andrés Dockendorff, Universidad de Chile, Santiago de Chile 1025000, Chile.
Email: adocken@uchile.cl
949978BPI0010.1177/1369148120949978The British Journal of Politics and International RelationsDockendor
research-article2020
Original Article
140 The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 23(1)
et al., 2004; Diermeier and Vlaicu, 2011; Saiegh, 2009), legislative scholars have paid
less attention to the conditions that may foster the passing of parliamentarians’ own bills
in parallel to the government legislative agenda.
One influential set of research, the distributive frame, has sought to understand bill’s
success by focusing on the formation of particularistic coalitions around bills including
spending allowing legislators to build up constituency support. However, in the setting
examined here, Chile, legislators are not authorised to initiate spending bills targeting
districts (i.e. legislative particularism) by constitutional mandate. As it stands, the dis-
tributive link seems incomplete. This feature only makes the original question of why
some legislators’ bills move forward and eventually become law more puzzling.
Informed by the literature on sponsorship and intra-legislative signalling, this article
provides an empirical test of how legislatures act in parallel to the government and aggre-
gate information in parliamentary debates. The model we put forward unifies different
literatures linking (co)sponsorship with outcomes of the legislative process (e.g. Adler
and Wilkerson, 2005; Borghetto and Pellegata, 2013; Box-Steffensmeier et al., 2019;
Browne, 1985; Krutz, 2005; Wilson and Young, 1997). By conceiving sponsorship as an
intra-legislative signal (Kessler and Krehbiel, 1996), we argue that risk-averse legislators
retrieve information about the potential consequences of the bills by looking at the names
of the authors. Therefore, who signs the bill matters when it comes to the level of support
that the proposal receives. We amend and draw upon Wilson and Young’s (1997) study of
the effect of co-sponsorship on the passing of bills in US Congress. Three observable
implications are proposed and tested. First, successful bills will be authored by a greater
number of members (bandwagon factor). Second, bills’ success in moving forward will
be positively correlated with inter-coalition support (support across the aisle factor).
Third, failed bills will signal authors’ lack of experience within the organisation (new-
comers factor). To test those hypotheses, we have collected new observations from the
Chilean National Congress (data available at https://www.researchgate.net/profile/
AndresDockendorff2). The results confirm the hypotheses. The set of signalling factors
influence bills’ success both at the committee level and when passing on the Chamber of
Deputies floor. These findings contrast sharply with Wilson and Young’s (1997) conclu-
sion that co-sponsorship is an overrated signal which, at best, offers an indication pertain-
ing to expertise only at the very beginning of the legislative process.
These observations have significant implications for our understanding of why some
parliamentarians’ bills are more likely to move forward in the legislative process in set-
tings where the executive controls the agenda and distributive incentives are notably
absent. Previous research leaves it unclear why the informational approach provides a
better explanation than the conventional theories on redistributive and partisan incen-
tives. This article addresses that gap. The informational argument examined here in a
presidential case like Chile can be extrapolated to parliamentary settings. This is the
case of the UK Parliament, characterised by cabinet’s exclusive control of the agenda
and Members’ of Parliament limited chances to engage in legislative particularism
(Martin, 2011).
From a more substantive perspective, by examining how parliamentarians advance
their own agendas in parallel to the government, this article furthers our knowledge on
how assemblies represent citizens’ preferences and demands by performing their law-
making functions. This is not trivial. In Latin America, the growing academic attention
given to legislatures coincides with a prevalent view of them not being especially effi-
cient in the law-making process (Simison, 2019).
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