Government autolimitation: Does abstract review work as check and balance for democracy?

This paper analyzes the influence of abstract review mechanism on the legislative process through an empirical analysis of the amendment process. The goal is to study to what extent abstract review contributes to parliament’s consensus building or on the contrary if parties uses it as an electoral weapon. Theoretical models have described a potential “auto-limitation” behavior in parties induced by court aversion attitudes -scholars suppose high costs from vetoing a law- that could favor inter-party agreements. Yet, there are few systematic empirical analyses on this question due to data limitations. Based in web scrapping, text parsing and text-reuse methods we build different datasets, which allow us to monitor every party’s decision regarding each bill along the legislative process -including the potential court revision. In addition to data on the characteristics of individual judges, the court plenary composition and cases of abstract review the paper considers data on the number and type of amendments and whether they are incorporated into final legislation to measure the parties’ movements through its policy positions. This research based on the Spanish case is especially relevant to explore empirically the potential influence of the court in parliamentary systems, public policy and legislative studies and to analyze the compromises that parties strategically make. The preliminary results show that government accept more demands of the opposition when they have got an unfavorable court, even with majority governments.