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The Legislative Effects of Presidential Partisan Powers in Post-Communist Russia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Paul Chaisty
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CURRENT SCHOLARSHIP ON PRESIDENTIAL POLITICAL SYSTEMS FINDS that the distribution of power between presidents and assemblies can vary significantly from one presidential polity to the next, and can even change within the same presidential regime over a relatively short period of time. Presidents are shown to exercise different levels of control over the law-making process according to the de jure legislative powers at their disposal – initiation, veto, veto override, budgetary and decree powers– and their de facto partisan power – the level of disciplined party support that they command within assemblies. Different combinations of these powers can have strikingly different institutional, behavioural and policy effects. Indeed, such variation has led some analysts to question the usefulness of models of executive–legislative relations that are based solely on the traditional distinction between presidential and parliamentary political systems.

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Articles
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Government and Opposition , Volume 43 , Issue 3 , 2008 , pp. 424 - 453
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Copyright © The Author(s) 2008.

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References

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47 These data covered votes on ‘important’ bills: legislation deemed to be particularly consequential at each Duma by commentators at the time and retrospectively. For more detail on the method used, as well as a list of the laws deemed to be important for the years 1994 to July 2001, see Chaisty, Paul and Schleiter, Petra, ‘Productive but Not Valued: The Russian State Duma, 1994–2001’, Europe-Asia Studies, 54: 5 (2002), pp. 701–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar. These data also included votes that were contentious: roll calls were excluded from the data-set when less than 10 per cent of legislators voted against. Finally, the data-set only included the votes of deputies who were parliamentary party members for the entire period under analysis.

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