An analysis of the rapport between the Executive and the Legislative must take into consideration the constitutional

provisions that regulate the roles and constraints of each branch, The balance of power between the Legislative and the Executive is extremely important in liberal democracies, because government accountability is paramount to a real democracy, and there can be no legitimate form of democracy- absent some form of effective parliamentary check. (Helms, 2008:6) The constitutional provisions regarding executive-legislative relations are extremely important as they condition the ability of the Legislature to perform its traditional functions: deliberation, scrutiny and checks and balances. In France, the Constitution itself empowers the Executive to bypass normal legislative procedures as it has several methods at its disposal to push legislation through. The main point of the Fifth Republic Constitution was to create a strong Executive that cannot be hampered by the Legislative. Article 38 allows the Executive to legislate through ordinances, if given the assent of a majority of the National Assembly; it can make a bill a question of confidence and in this case, the Legislature has to pass a motion of censure approved by an absolute majority within 48 hours in order for the bill to be defeated-the guillotine provision that will also result in government failure and parliamentary election (Article 49.3); Article 45 enables the Government to declare legislative proposals urgent, which limits the time that the Legislative can spend debating the bill; Article 44 introduces the notion of package voting, in which case the Parliament cannot propose amendments. (Hewlett,2005:103) The Rules Committee in the US can also restrict the number of amendments that can be added to a piece of legislation, or forbid amendments altogether, in its assignment of rules for debate. (http://www.rules.house.gov/singlepages.aspx?NewsID=1&RSBD=4)In Spain, the constitutional architects had the same idea of designing a powerful executive, or better said a powerful President whilst the Parliament was supposed to encourage negotiation and consensus driven policy decision-making. Furthermore, there is no clear separation of powers set in the Constitution but the government is meant to integrate both the Executive and the Legislative. (Heywood, 1991:99,110) As opposed to the two countries discussed above, the architects of the US`s constitution always had in mind a system that would ensure that no single branch can dominate the government; hence only Congress can enact law, but the president can veto them, a veto that can be overturned by a two-thirds majority in each chamber. (Janda et all,1999:73) Because their legislative and expenditure functions have been declining, Legislatures have been trying to compensate with performing efficient monitoring functions. (Hague and Harrop, 2007:317) The Spanish Cortes has appropriate mechanism of scrutinising the Government at its disposal but they have been largely ineffective so far because of the dominance of the executive in the political system in general, and its party or coalition within Parliament in particular. Parliamentary groups and members of the House can ask written and oral questions but the time allocated to these is limited, the questions have to be previously delivered to the ministers, and

he can choose whether to answer or not. The small parliamentary victories, such as the 1993 Congress vote that compelled the vice-president-Narcis Serra to stand before Parliament and explain how the government was addressing the economic crisis. (Gibbons,1999:71) In France, there are oral and written questions, ministers can only know the person who is asking the question, and equal time is granted to the majority and the minority. Since broadcasted on national television, they have served as a tool in mobilising public opinion against the government. (Lazardeux, 2009:301) In the US, Congressional investigations are powerful tools in the hand of the Legislative especially because of the high publicity that they generate, and they can compel the Executive to sway its policies. In 1987, President Reagan had to abandon the Administrations efforts to negotiate with Iran when Congress exposed his arms-for-hostages deals; (Zeigler and Dye,2000:365) The Spanish Cortes can also set up investigative commissions but they need a majority vote, which means that the government body enjoys a veto over such designs. (Gibbons,1999:71) In France, the commissions of inquiry have slow, but steadily gained efficiency: their period of work was enlarged in 1997, they were made public in 1991, and because most propositions of setting up commissions come from the opposition, some of them are ran in a bi-partisan manner. The National Assemble also provides for evaluation missions and delegations, which are meant to assess policies in their respective domains- they are ran in a bi-partisan manner but they are still quite weak. (Lazardeux, 2009:296) The main instrument against Governments in Parliamentary democracies is the vote of no-confidence (Spain) or the vote of censure (France). In Spain a vote of no confidence presupposes the support of an absolute majority and it must provide the name of an alternative candidate.(Keating, 1996:376) Following basically the same principle, the vote of censure in France is immediately followed governmental resignation and general elections.(Lazardeux, 2009:295) Despite the fact that they have hardly been successful in overthrowing the government they do generate public debates and bring the Opposition into the media spotlight which enables it to denounce governmental failures so it still functions as an oversight tool for the Legislature. (Hayward, 2004:86) The institutional dynamics set by the Constitutions underline the need for intra-party and interparty bargaining; the leaders of the executive have to be capable of either maintaining loose alliances, on the right or on the left- France (Marian,2006:259), reconciling differences amongst factions-France and US (Janda,1999:383) or compromising and negotiating deals with regional parties-Spain (Keating, 1999:379). According to Philip Norton this amounts to inter-party and intra-party modes of parliamentary opposition and serve as a check on the executive. (Norton, 2008:239) Parliaments, especially in Western Europe, have been downgraded in their functions. In France, the removing of ministers from Parliament shifted the focus of political life, and the direct election of the President also served to enhance its prestige in relation to Parliament.(Keating,1999:168) In Spain the investiture procedure did the same thing for the Prime Minister, plus, the lack of any effective or strong opposition party from 1982 onwards,

further aided the decline of Parliament. (Heywood, 1991:99,110) Congress has not escaped criticism either; its fragmented manner of policy-making and the power that this concentrates in the hands of the committees and subcommittees allegedly made Congress pandering to special interests. (Zeigler and Dye,2000:347) Political dynamics are extremely important. For example in Spain the fear of being seen as betraying the unity of Spain skews parties willingness to ally themselves with other parties to form majority administrations. After the general elections of 2004, PSOE formed a minority government regardless of norms and conventions. (Tim Bale,2008:107) The power of the Prime Minister depends more on the discipline of the party that it heads than on the Constitution itself. (Keating,1999:377) In France the powerful personality of President Charles de Gaulle and his dominance of the Executive, led to a presidential interpretation of the Constitutional provisions and the subordination of the Prime Minister- when they belong to the same party. (Elgie, 2003:99) Congress on the other hand has been reasserting its authority. With more than 3000 employees within the committees, Congress manages an impressive level of involvement with the Government. (Hague and Harrop, 2007:317) The type of the electoral system determines the party-system structure, which in turn conditions the structural features of parliamentary opposition as it is almost always based on party politics (Helms,2008:11); the resultant political realities-the successful use of party unity to downgrade the deliberative function of Parliaments and push legislation through- provide incentives for political parties to stress party coherence and condition politicians` access to offices on the basis of loyalty. Even in the United States where primary elections have removed some of the party leadership control over office nominations (McKay,2009:97), lately, there has been an increase in party voting and ideological polarisation: the legislative process has become more arbitrary with lesser opportunities for the opposition party to contribute with amendments. (McKAy,2009:196) Parties have increasingly started to turn to brinkmanship to ensure the passing of their legislation, hindering the deliberative function of Legislatures. McKay attributes the dominance of the executive regarding policy initiatives and policy formulation firstly to the increasing demands put on the state and secondly to the large and effective executive bureaucracies able to channel large amounts of resources that are often not available to Legislatures. Moreover, because of this limited access to information and sometimes executive and bureaucracy reluctance in handing over information, Legislatures struggle to perform their oversight function as they have no access to what is actually going on within the Executive branch. (McKay, 2009:184,199, Heywood, 1991:111) Whereas the policy process is driven in a top-down manner within the Spanish and French political system, in the US there is a constant need for lobbying and persuading to build support for a policy, mainly because of the individualistic nature of the Congress. In theory, all three countries have some form of a private members bill equivalent; in Spain individual members are not allowed to introduce legislation and neither are parliamentary groups with less than 15 members, but regional governments, autonomous communities and even groups of private citizens if they can gather 500000

signatures are allowed. (Keating, 1999:378) As they need the approval of both of the government and the Chamber, unless the bill is favoured by the government it does not really have a chance of success. (Gibbons, 1999:107) One of the main arguments used to justify executive domination in political systems is the need for efficiency and ability to govern. Nevertheless, coalition governments and even divided governments in presidential systems have demonstrated in several occasions that they are perfectly capable of sustained democratic performance. Concerning the United States, Peterson and Greone studied the amount of congressional activity in relation with the increase of periods of time characterised by divided government and they found no negative effects on their performance. (Peterson and Greone,1998:38) Mayhew also finds that congressional investigations, which are qualified as high-publicity inquiries are quite close in numbers: 15 under strong government and 14 under divided government (Mayhew,1993:32) Marian demonstrates the same thing for the case of France: the Jospin government was perfectly capable of ruling France- running a loose coalition and having to publicly fight the criticism of president Jacques Chirac. (Marian, 2006) In Spain the Government controls the legislative agenda through the urgency procedures which ensure that governmental initiatives are given priority and it also follows the policy process in detail, which means that there is hardly any opportunity for individual members to intervene or to rebel against the party direction. (Gibbons, 1993:104) In France, only a day a month can the Legislative decide the agenda (Stevens,2003) In the US however, the dominant party is the one that dominates the legislative agenda. (McKay, 2009: 178) Strong committee systems ought to enable members from the opposition to affect policy; hence it adds inputs into the debate and incorporates different views in the decision-making process, which is good for democracy. In the US Legislature, committees enjoy a great deal of power, especially because of their prerogatives to: either dismiss a bill by majority voting or just ignoring it, and to amend it to an extent that it becomes a new policy proposal; also, it is the Committees that decide which bills are to be considered by the whole House. (Zeigler and Dye,2000:347) Nevertheless, occasionally, Chairmen have succeeded in containing the committees within the party policy-agendas, speeding through the legislation without allowing for opposition inputs. Hence the importance of this depends on the dynamics of each committee (English,2006:98). In France, on the other hand, committees are large and difficult to manage, but most importantly, the government is not obliged to accept their amendments; furthermore their composition reflects the composition of the House so they have no incentive to create difficulties for the executive (Bell, 2004:539). The same situation occurs in Spain but in addition, Ministers are allowed to attend and speak at the Committee meetings. (Gibbons, 1999:103) With its legislative, expenditure and deliberative functions being undermined by a dominant executive, Parliaments are struggling to maintain their prerogatives of criticising and scrutinising governmental policies. With little access to resources, a media bias in favour of the executive, party dominated politics, the prospects for Parliamentary resurgence are slim.