Navigating Crowded Agendas: Presidential Urgencies as Agenda Control in Chile

• In Event: Comparative Studies on Executive-Legislative Interactions

Abstract

The Chilean president's urgency powers over bills effectively grant the executive a unilateral capacity to discharge bills from committees. We argue that this prerogative undermines the role of committee gatekeepers in Congress and bolsters the executive's agenda control. We develop a formal model to illustrate the workings of this power and to show how it counteracts committee gatekeeping authority. The model predicts that this presidential power is most consequential when the legislative agenda is crowded. We go on to assemble data on executive urgency motions and show that committee jurisdiction and coalition control of committees influence the use of urgency powers, sometimes in counterintuitive ways.

Author

• John Benedict Londregan, Princeton University