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Determinants of Bicameral Conflict: The Formation of Conference Committees in Chile, 1990-2018

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2021

Patricio Navia Open the ORCID record for Patricio Navia [Opens in a new window]  and
Nicolás Mimica Open the ORCID record for Nicolás Mimica [Opens in a new window]
Patricio Navia
Affiliation:
Patricio Navia is a professor of liberal studies at New York University, New York, New York, USA, and a professor of political science at the Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago, Chile. patricio.navia@nyu.edu.
Nicolás Mimica
Affiliation:
Nicolás Mimica is an associate researcher at the Political Electoral Observatory (OBPE) of the Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago, Chile. nmimica92@gmail.com.
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Abstract

In some countries, bicameral discrepancies are solved by the formation of a conference committee. In Chile, conference committees are exclusively and automatically formed when the second chamber rejects a bill passed in the first chamber or when the first chamber rejects the modifications to its original bill made by the second chamber. This article postulates 4 hypotheses for the determinants of conference committee formation. It tests them for the case of Chile’s sequential legislative process (1990–2018) using 2,183 bills that reached the stage where a conference committee could be formed. The 482 conference committees that resulted were more likely to be formed when chambers were controlled by different majorities, when passage required special voting thresholds, when bills were more important for the president, and when the bills had more approved amendments, but they were not more likely if the bill was introduced by legislators rather than the executive.

Keywords

Legislative workenactment of lawsbicameral conflictconference committeevoting thresholdsbill amendmentspresidential urgencies
Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Politics and Society , Volume 63 , Issue 4 , November 2021 , pp. 74 - 95
Copyright
© The Authors 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the University of Miami

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Footnotes

We report no conflict of interest.

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