ABSTRACT
The very notion of voting a bill under a 'restrictive rule' is well known for the US Congress. What may be less well known is the observation that it is also a fact of parliamentary life in Western Europe. While there is a wealth of in-depth studies of agenda control in the US Congress (Gilligan and Krehbiel 1989, Bach 1990, Binder 1997, Binder and Smith 1997, Dion 1998, Marshall 2002) to date there is only one comparative work (Huber 1992), which compares restrictive legislative procedures in the United States and France. The multinational team 'Parliaments and Majority Rule in Western Europe' attempted to redress this balance by focusing, among quite a few other aspects, on restrictive rules. From the SPPL data set it turned out that no less than 80 of 512 bills across 17 parliamentary democracies witnessed some kind of restrictive rule (amendment control or timetable control or vote of confidence procedure). 1 It goes without saying that there is one huge difference, all similarities notwithstanding, between restrictive rules in the US and Western Europe. In the presidential system of the US, it is some authority within the House that grants a restrictive rule on a bill. But in the parliamentary systems of Western Europe it is rather the executive itself, i.e., that part of parliament that happens to form the government of the day, that invokes restrictive rules. In some cases government imposition of restrictions occurs, as we shall see, without active consent of parliament.
