From Conflict to Coordination: Perspectives on the Study of Executive-Legislative Relations

Resumo

Until not very long ago, the literature on legislative-executive relations was bifurcated. It had evolved into two separate and independent bodies of work. One branch focused on parliamentary and the other on presidential systems, which were considered to represent two completely independent and alternative forms of government. Today a more integrated view of executive-legislative relations in democratic regimes exists. The emergence of this new perspective owes a great deal to the appearance of two seminal books, which, perhaps in a way unintended by the authors, questioned the premises upon which the bifurcated view of parliamentarism and presidentialism rested. Kaare Strom’s Minority Government and Majority Rule (1990) demolished on empirical and theoretical grounds the basic office-seeking assumption that informed studies of parliamentarism. John Huber’s Rationalizing Parliament (1996), in turn, questioned the appropriateness of the conflict model at the root of most thinking about executive-legislative relations in democracies. The specific contribution of each of these authors may be traced to studies of legislative politics that focused on the US congress. As a consequence of these shifts, legislative organization came to the forefront of analyses of executive-legislative relations. It is the characteristics of the legislative process that matters for understanding how a majority organizes itself across the two branches and becomes effective in the pursuit of its policy objectives. This is so regardless of the way the executive comes to and stays in power.