Beyond the Party-Lens: MPs’ Strategic Individual Efforts in Legislative Review

A variety of studies has recently highlighted the importance of legislative review for multi-party policy-making. Most notably, scholars show how political actors use legislative amendments to police coalition compromises and to publically differentiate themselves from their governing partner. While they provide valuable insights into bargaining interactions within multi-party governments, these contributions are characterized by two shortcomings. First, they exclusively look at legislative review through the lens of party behavior, thus disregarding individual legislators’ dynamics. Second, they rely on indiscriminate measures of legislative change that merely count the number of amended articles rather than paying tribute to the substance of legislative reform. In a quantitative case study of a German state-level assembly, we go beyond these shortcomings. Substantively, we argue that parties’ amendatory action in committees and the plenary is underpinned by strategic actions of individual legislators. Methodologically, designing a rule-based text analysis system that understands legislative text, we implement the exact content of each proposed amendment and contrast initially introduced legislation with all counterfactual bills that would have resulted under each legislator’s preference. This allows us to study several open questions regarding legislative review. One, we investigate how MPs engage with introduced bills. Do they constructively rewrite, alter, and add to proposed legislation or merely destructively discard parts in a ‘quick-and-dirty’ manner? Two, we evaluate the strategic use of amendments in the law-making process. To this end, we investigate whether MPs engage with legislation to pursue a coherent office-seeking portfolio regarding their party-base or whether legislative amendments manifest as individual vote-seeking behavior towards the electorate.