Restrictive Legislative Procedures in France and the United States

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Abstract
I develop a framework for applying existing formal models of restrictive amendment procedures in Congress to the study of the French government's use of two restrictive legislative procedures, the package vote and the “guillotine”. I test six hypotheses derived from existing formal models and from existing research on the French National Assembly. The analysis shows that the French government invokes the two procedures on the same types of distributive and jurisdictionally complex bills that frequently receive closed rules in Congress. The analysis also shows that the decision to use the restrictive procedures is strongly linked to the majority status of the government, suggesting they are used to preserve agreements between parties in the same way that restrictive amendment procedures are used to preserve agreements between individual members of Congress. Thus, existing formal models of legislative institutions can help us study how procedural structures shape strategic bargaining between political parties in parliamentary systems, especially during coalition and minority government.

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