ABSTRACT
Time is one of the scarcest resources in modem parliaments (Doring 1995c; Riescher 1994; 1997). Western European constitutions typically limit the lives of parliaments - and the governments they select - to a maximal 'constitutional interelection period' (CIEP) of three to five years (Laver and Schofield 1990: p.64). The time available for the introduction and passage of new policies is limited, even where pending bills can be carried over at the end of a legislative term. Majorities are interested in getting their manifesto pledges on the statute book in time to claim credit for them at the next election. In parliamentary systems the control of time in the chamber is therefore a significant power resource enjoyed - to varying degrees - by parliamentary majorities and the governments they support. Minorities may not be able to muster enough votes to stop bills, but they may have varying degrees of delaying powers enabling them to extract concessions from majorities attempting to get on with their overall legislative program
A parliament's 'procedural efficiency' in legislation - the speed of the legislative process - is a matter of considerable practical importance, especially 'where quick interventions of the state are required' (von Beyme 1998: p.l43). Issues such as agenda control (for example, Doring 1995c), discount rates, intertemporal collective action problems (Elster 1989: pp.18-23), the importance of time for coalition bargaining (Lupia and Str0m 1995) or, more generally, the tactical use of time in bargaining processes (Doron and Sened 2001: pp.lO-ll) have been increasingly recognized in formal theories of political processes. Yet, despite its importance and obvious implications for legislative and regime performance on the one hand and the theory of parliamentary institutions on the other, the lack of suitable data has been an obstacle to systematic comparative studies of the dynamics of the legislative process for a larger number of parliaments in the past. The few existing investigations are usually based on highly aggregated measures of central tendency (for example, the average duration of the legislative process in days) for a single parliament, often over time (see, for example, Griffith and Ryle 1989: p.290, p.473; Schindler 1994: pp.862-863; Van Schagen 1997: p.1l6). Although such studies provide very useful insights, they
have little to say about the process of legislation, let alone the institutional sources of cross-national and diachronic variations in the speed oflegislation.
