L’Effet des Amendements du Budget sur les Comportements au Parlement et la Dimension Temporelle: Vieilles Thèses, Nouveaux Tests

Abstract

In this article the authors examine whether, between 1996 and 2010, the Executive’s execution of individual amendments proposed by federal deputies to the budget was responsible for increasing the proximity between parliamentary votes and government preferences in roll-calls. The possible influence of such amendments iswhere scholars still search for a non-partisan, personal and parochial component of the Legislative support of the Executive. However, both the usual defense of this idea as well as its refutation have considerable gaps to be filled, leaving the question unresolved as time as a factor was not considered in tests or because their methodological approaches require adjustments. This investigation addresses these problems by verifying whether the distance between the ideal points of congressmen and of the appointments by the government chief whip in a given year are influenced by the execution of the budget amendmentsmade by deputies – on the same year as well as on previous ones. We propose to model the temporal between amendments and legislative support, correcting serial auto-correlation, controlling for the coalition membership and dealing with the inherent problems of instrumentalization that come with these types of models.