Executive Urgency Authority and Restrictive Rules in the Chilean Congress

• In Event: Executives in the Legislative Process

Abstract

Unlike presidents with mostly (or only) reactive formal powers in the legislative arena, Chile's enjoys formidable proactive ones. Among them is the urgency authority. A bill declared urgent confronts legislators with a short deadline to discuss and vote it. But closer inspection of institutional detail and urgency incidence reveals a puzzle: there is no penalty for non-compliance, yet urgency correlates with the odds of bill passage and most executive-initiated legislation becomes urgent at some stage. We detect an explanation in Chilean legislative procedure: urgent bills can only be voted up or down in second reading, removing the possibility of introducing amendments. So the urgency has much less to do with the timing than with the form of consideration---it is a restrictive rule. We inspect original data in the 1998--2014 in search for patterns consistent with this explanation.

Authors

• Eric Magar, Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico

• Valeria Palanza, Universidad Catolica de Chile

• Gisela Sin, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign