Cheibub, José Antonio; Limongi, Fernando --- "Legislative-Executive Relations" [2011] ELECD 372; in Ginsburg, Tom; Dixon, Rosalind (eds), "Comparative Constitutional Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2011)

Book Title: Comparative Constitutional Law

Editor(s): Ginsburg, Tom; Dixon, Rosalind

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781848445390

Section: Chapter 12

Section Title: Legislative-Executive Relations

Author(s): Cheibub, José Antonio; Limongi, Fernando

Number of pages: 23

Extract:

12. Legislative-executive relations
José Antonio Cheibub and Fernando Limongi



1 INTRODUCTION
Legislative-executive relations refers to the institutions that govern and the processes that
characterize the interactions between two of the three conventional branches of a democratic
political system (the third being, of course, the judiciary). This entails a consideration of the
legal (constitutional and statutory) provisions that regulate the formation of the government,
the rules for electing the legislative assembly, the way the formation of each of these branches
affects the performance of the others, the rules for producing legislation, and the behavior
(strategic or otherwise) of the actors that make up the `executive' (the head of government
and the ministers) and the `legislative' (individual legislators and political parties). This is a
large area of research, which could reasonably encompass everything that would traditionally
go under the heading of `comparative government'. A thorough treatment of all these topics
here is impossible for reasons of space, and so we offer a selective treatment of the issues
based on our particular perspective of how studies of legislative-executive relations have
evolved.
In order to simplify the analysis we divide the vast and heterogeneous literature that
concerns us here into two, which we call the `earlier' and the `later' generations of studies of
legislative-executive relations. The distinctive feature of the earlier studies is that they
analyze inter-branch relations as being essentially shaped by the way the chief executive and
the legislators obtain their mandates. The independence or the dependence ...