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Parliamentary Agenda-Setting in a New Democracy: The Case of Croatia

In most parliamentary systems, the government, not the legislature, has control of the assembly agenda. Governments introduce more than 90 percent of the bills and the relationship between the parties in government and those in opposition is often regarded as an unequal one. Researchers traditionally describe legislatives as “rather docile”, as governments possess all the instruments to enforce their will on the parliament (Blondel, 1990, p. 241). Scholars often take these observations as evidence of the decline of legislatures in parliamentary democracies. Thomas (2006) argues that there are four general tendencies in this decline: firstly, the emergence of disciplined political parties ; secondly, the growth of ‘big government’ in fields of social welfare and economic affairs ; thirdly, the lack of legislatures’ capacity to provide leadership and expertise ; and fourthly, the emergence of new political actors like organized interests and especially media to which legislatures have lost power. However, an important strand of empirical research on legislative- agenda setting convincingly shows that this is not necessarily the case. The main motivation behind this article is to see whether the policy agenda perspective can be extended for the study of opposition-government interactions in a post-communist setting. We use a data set from the Croatian Policy Agendas Project on oral parliamentary questions from 1992 to 2015, complemented with a data set of government weekly meetings in the same period, to test whether the supposedly weak parliamentary opposition in Croatia, has used non-legislative activities for agenda-setting and whether it was successful in doing so. This enables us not only to provide an empirical assessment of the impact of the opposition agenda on government agenda, but also to assess whether gradual changes in the institutionalization of the party system have a contingent effect on the abilities of parliamentary opposition to influence the government agenda.

parliament ; agenda-setting ; democracy ; parliamentary question ; government ; opposition ; Croatia

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