Do parties make a difference? Explaining changes in the legislative status quo

Laws are "a unique resource of the government" (Rose, 1984), and not just any one: they are the typical regulatory instrument that constitutions reserve for the legislator, the representative institution par excellence, to regulate the guidelines of a wide range of policy areas. . For this reason, practically all political actors seek to influence its realization and approval. Thus, it is important to evaluate legislative performance in light of the actions and interactions of political actors in the competitive contexts characteristic of democracies. The paper starts from the concept (and the literature) of party governments to study legislative production from a comparative perspective. It aims to explain how parties, their characteristics and their interactions affect the government in its role as a promoter of laws. We will do so at the macro (governments) level, leaving the meso (coalition partners) and micro (ministers) levels for future research. So, we study whether party changes in cabinet composition favor greater law production, assuming that a new law is the result of the willingness of a party or parties to adjust the legislative status quo to their preferences. We also study the correlate of this hypothesis: legislative fatigue. To do so, we have data from more than 20 parliamentary democracies, totaling more than 300,000 initiatives classified by legislative periods and other institutional and contextual variables. With this, we make an statistical analysis in order to test the hypotheses derived from the framework described above.