Ferdinand Teuber - Why do legislators submit bills that are doomed to fail? Unraveling the paradoxes of non-government bill submission in Belgium from 1995 to 2010

Le Recteur de l'Université catholique de Louvain fait savoir que

M. Ferdinand Teuber

soutiendra publiquement sa dissertation pour l'obtention du titre de Docteur en Sciences Politiques et Sociales

« Why do legislators submit bills that are doomed to fail? Unraveling the paradoxes of non-government bill submission in Belgium from 1995 to 2010 »

Résumé

In contemporary representative democracies, non-government legislators, i.e. legislators who are themselves not member of the executive, submit considerable numbers of bills during each legislative period. Most of these bills fail to ever become law. As legislators must invest time, staff, and other scarce resources when they draft a bill, it seems to be odd to do so if the effort results most probably in legislative failure. This dissertation seeks to get to the bottom of this somewhat paradoxical behavior by answering the following question: Why do non-government legislators submit bills in the face of probable failure? To answer this question, we have collected a new dataset with information on more than 10.000 bills submitted in the two chambers of the Belgian parliament over four legislative periods (1995 to 2010). In line with one important strand of the literature, this study argues that non-government legislators introduce bills to improve their re(s)election chances. Bills are supposed to serve as signaling devices in order to send messages to legislators’ (s)electorates. The dissertation develops and tests a number of hypotheses on how such a signaling motive should influence legislators’ choice of content, framing, and timing of their bill submission.

Membres du jury 

Prof. Virginie Van Ingelgom (Université catholique de Louvain, Fonds de la recherche scientifique–FNRS), Présidente
Prof. Benoît Rihoux (Université catholique de Louvain), Promoteur
Prof. François Maniquet (Université catholique de Louvain)
Prof. Stefaan Walgrave (Universiteit Antwerpen)
Prof. Lieven De Winter (Université catholique de Louvain)
M. conf. Julien Navarro (Université Catholique de Lille)