The politics of delay: Time as latent variable in legislative dynamicsBy Rogelio Alicor L. Panao

In legislatures where roll call votes do not reflect true policy positions, how does one measure the bargaining that takes place to pass proposals into legislations?

To study legislative dynamics, an approach familiar in literature involves estimating ideal points statistically by plotting and analyzing roll call data. In many advanced democracies roll call data are used extensively not just to map the policy preferences of legislatures but to gauge how congress as an institution interacts with other policy actors. This presupposes, of course, that political institutions work to hold legislators accountable and ensure that legislative voting is not a pro forma process. In the Philippines, however, there is hardly any contest in roll call voting and bills on third reading typically just get approved overwhelmingly. But then again it is well-known that roll calls are unreliable measures of legislator’s true preferences (Clinton, Jackman, and Rivers 2004). It could well be that legislator’s decision on any analyzed vote have been influenced by party pressure, presidential pressure, and/or lobbying by interested groups, and is not a perfect reflection of the legislator’s ideology.

This paper offers the analysis of delay—the time it takes a bill to pass into law—as a methodological alternative in the analysis of legislative dynamics in political systems where rational policy actors resort more to informal rules. The chief executive’s predominance in legislative policymaking, this paper argues, can be established by looking at the duration or the length of time the president’s legislative agenda undergo the legislative process. Legislative success, therefore, is not simply whether the bill was eventually approved or not. Rather, it pertains to the speed in which the passage of a legislative proposal is facilitated over a given time.

The paper proceeds by first explaining the rationale for why event history was adopted as a statistical approach in the analysis. Afterwards, I will describe the variables and how they were defined operationally. This is followed by a discussion of the estimation model developed to test the effects of the variables as covariates.

Why time?To test the effect of executive-Congress relations on lawmaking a common

methodological approach employed in the literature is to statistically estimate ideal points using interest group scores or roll call data. The analysis of roll call has a long history in legislative studies even before Poole and Rosenthal’s groundbreaking work (1997) and the succeeding body of research applying roll call data became the litmus test of later scholarships (Cherryholmes and Shapiro 1969; Clausen 1973; Matthews and Stimson 1975; Weisberg 1978). In the US where roll call data is extensively used, a considerable amount of effort is poured to collect data to estimate the preferences of Congress members in various periods, and to extend its application to other policy actors in other settings (Poole 2005). The press typically report roll call votes of members of the US Congress far more often than they do of other Congressional data. This presupposes however that roll call data are readily available and that there is a formal system of recording and safekeeping this data as part of public information. In many nascent

democracies, however, roll call data are generally meager, if not conspicuously missing in periods of transition, tumultuous regimes or instability.

In the Philippines, for instance, roll call votes tend to be unanimous and legislators appear to vote similarly for or against issues that are subject of legislative deliberations (Kasuya 2008; Shin 2010). Does this mean all members of Congress consistently share the same policy preferences? Can roll call votes in this case be a reliable gauge of preference?

Timing is important because in the Philippine legislative process a bill technically has a life span of only three years and those that fail to become law before congress closes need to repeat the process in the next congress. Moreover, the passage of measures may be impelled or delayed by the happening of events at some point in time (e.g. election, national crisis, public scandal, etc.). Because legislation entails cost (e.g. bargaining cost, dissonance cost) the president has to be mindful about keeping the duration of proposed legislation to a minimum. Not only does delay drive the cost of legislation higher, it also increases the risk that a bill will not pass.

In this context, even though the Philippine presidents are not endowed with strong formal legislative powers the power to certify measures as priority gives them an advantage in the policy process because it signals Congress to divert its focus onto these select measures above others.

How does literature typically treat time?To estimate legislative delays scholars in the social sciences have employed a

wide array of approaches including cross tabulations, linear regressions and logit or probit models. In recent years, however, there has been a growing preference for event history models, such as the Cox model, that flexibly relaxes the assumption of parametric shape and at the same time adjust for the non-proportional properties of covariates of interests. The preference for these types of models is not merely a matter of statistical sophistication but impelled by theoretical issues that are raised in political analysis. Admittedly, many questions in political science involve some kind of risk, that is, the risk of a certain political event happening. In this study, for instance, my main objective is to measure the effect of institutional and author-specific variables on the “risk” of passage of a bill into legislation. Duration models have an advantage of directly incorporating the notion of risk in their estimation parameters. Moreover, unlike, say traditional time series models where an entity is examined over time, event history can accommodate “many information on many observations over time” (Box-Steffensmeier and Jones 2004, 3). This makes inferences derived from duration models quite powerful. Researchers can make claims not only about the factors that impel the risk of a political event but also how differences across systems are related to this risk.

Another advantage of duration models is their ability to take into account “censored” data or when an observation’s full event history is unobserved. In ordinary least square regressions, censored cases are simply ignored, thus, inducing a form of selection bias in the results. In duration analysis, however, it is possible to construct a likelihood function to accommodate censoring if the censoring points are known in the data.

Yet another noteworthy advantage of duration models is their ability to account for covariates that have effects that vary over time. Certainly, the ability to take into

account the effect of time as a determinant is not unique to survival models and is competently handled in time series or cross sectional time series models. But whereas traditional regression models tend to treat the effect of variables as static or “time-invariant” even though accounting for time, in parametric models the analysis of changing effects over time is incorporated in the analysis (Box-Steffensemeier and Jones 2007, 19)

Cox model to test time dependencyThe choice of a specific duration model to test time dependency in event history

data has to satisfy two important considerations. First, the use of certain models, particularly parametric models, must be based on a strong theoretical expectation about the shape of the hazard rate (Box-Steffensmeier and Jones). Because the distribution has to be inevitably interpreted by the researcher, if the parameterization is wrong then the results of the estimation of the covariates can be misleading. Second, there must be strong theoretical reason to prefer one distribution function (among the list of parametric models available) over another. The Cox model offers an attractive alternative given the abovementioned constraints. The Cox model is ideal for this study since in modeling the effects of the variables to time, I am making no assumption as to the specific shape of the duration dependency. Moreover, my interest is more on establishing the theoretical relationship of the covariates on the president and Congress and how these institutions shape lawmaking than with the ancillary parameters that are relevant in other duration models but can make interpretation tenuous.

The concern in duration analysis is the time until the occurrence of an event. In this study, the event of interest is the passage of a bill into legislation. In effect, my interest is on the risk that a bill will incur delay or spell in some period, given that the spell has lasted up to or beyond some length of time. The risk in duration models is often referred to as hazard rate. The hazard rate gives the rate at which units fail or durations end by time t given that the unit had survived until t. This can be expressed as:

h(t) = lim Pr(t < T < t + Δt | T > tΔt→0 Δt

(4.1) Here, T is a positive random variable denoting survival times, since there cannot be a negative time. The lower case t denotes actual survival time or the realization of T. If the hazard rate is treated as having a dependency on time as well as covariates x, then it can be expressed as:

h(t | x) = lim Pr(t < T < t + Δt | T > t, xΔt→0 Δt

(4.2)In the Cox model, the hazard rate is given as:

hi(t) = h0(t)exp(βN x) (4.3)

where: h0(t) is the baseline hazard function and (βN x) are the covariates and regression parameters.

The hazard rate for the Cox model is proportional, that is, the ratio of two hazards hi(t) and h0(t) is a fixed proportion across time. But while the proportionality assumption applies for the Cox model, it must be mentioned that the particular form of the baseline hazard rate h0(t) is assumed to be unknown and is left unparameterized (Box-Steffensmeier and Jones 2004, 49). Because the baseline hazard is unspecified, Cox regressions do not have an intercept term. The intercept is absorbed into the baseline hazard function. For this reason the Cox model is often referred to as a semi-parametric model. The duration times are measured in terms of covariates although the particular distribution function is not parameterized.

Priority measures as determinant of legislative agendaTo establish the chief executive’s dominance over the legislative process, I look at

the duration or the length of time the president’s priority measures hurdle the legislative mill. I take legislative success as not necessarily the approval of a bill in a chamber. Here, it pertains to the speed in which the passage of a legislative proposal is facilitated over a given time. Priority measures are signals to Congress that the bill is part of the executive agenda and deserves immediate action.

It is widely known that congressional agenda setters take the president into account when making proposals on the floor (Fett 1994; Kiewet and McCubbins 1988; Mouw and Mackuen 1992). Bills prioritized by the president via urgency motions and bills falling within presidential policy domains such as appropriation measures are found to enjoy a higher likelihood of passage than other measures (Aleman and Navia 2009).

The president is thought to be able to single handedly set the agenda not only in the executive branch, but also in Congress and beyond. Baumgartner and Jones (1993, 241) broad examination of agenda setting showed that “no other single actor can focus attention as clearly, or change the motivations of such a great number of other actors, as the president.” Even scholars who are cautious of taking a presidency-centered view of governance recognize the agenda setting power of presidents and its use as a strategic advantage (Edwards 1989; Jones 1994; Moe and Teel 1970).

The constitutional prerogative of the Philippine president to signify a bill urgent can be regarded as an institutional advantage. And arguably, the exercise of this prerogative has its costs such as patronage and pork politics. These practices are not uncommon in presidential systems where strongly empowered political actors are known to “systematically employ them as ordinary rule” (Fresno 2006, 1).

Hence, I expect that:H1: Bills included in the president’s agenda have greater propensity to be

approved.

Controlling for Other Determinants of Legislative SuccessThe Philippine president’s agenda setting power, however, is not assumed to be

the single most important predictor of legislative success. There are, of course, other institutional and author-specific factors that determine the propensity of a bill to become law. Hence, I control for the following variables.

President’s Tenure

Tenure or the length of time the president sits in office has important implications not just on the success of government programs but the ability of the chief executive to ensure the cooperation or support of other policy actors. Presidents are known to be conscious of the precarious resources available during their incumbency (Hager and Sullivan 1994; Johnson and Roberts 2004; Ostrom and Job 1986; Ostrom and Simon 1988; Rivers and Rose 1985). Because time is crucial, it is rational for presidents to work towards achieving as much of their programs as possible and leave with a strong sense of legacy. This is particularly the case in the Philippines where the president is only entitled to a single term. In fact, at the end of the president’s term, policies churned during the administration regardless if they had been presidential or Congressional initiatives would be credited largely to the president.

Neustadt (1990) observed how legislatures in a presidential system count on the president to set the agenda in the form of legislative programs to which it can respond to or react against. Legislators—especially those who belong to the president’s coalition or party—are impelled to support the president’s programs all the way to the end of the president’s term because they will out term the president

i and will likely reap the immediate consequences of the latter’s legacy. Studies have shown that assessments of presidential performance figure prominently in citizens' evaluations of Congressional incumbents and that voters with low regard for the incumbent president express their displeasure in Congressional elections (Abramowitz 1985; Cover 1986) which need not even be on a partisan basis (Gronke, Koch, and Wilson 2003). In other words, legislators have all the reason to work harder to accomplish the programs of the government as presidents approach their exit because their electoral fate also depends on the perceive success of the president as main policy driver. Moreover, where presidents are limited to a single term, the laying out of legislative agenda also becomes a matter of strategic timing. Bills that are difficult to pass or apt to elicit opposition are proposed to congressional allies early during the president’s term to allow room for negotiation, while less controversial ones are liberally introduced during the latter part of the president’s term.

Thus, H2: The risk of delay for bills is lesser when presidents approach the end of their

term.

Political KinshipThere is wide consensus among scholars as to what causes politics and the party

system in the Philippines to be dysfunctional and not least among them is the dominance of well-entrenched political families (Gutierrez, Torrente, and Narca 1992; Rivera 2002, 2011). The propensity of elites to persist and reproduce power over time naturally undermines the effectiveness of institutions. The question of who has power in society is fundamental in determining the direction of economic policies and the distribution of economic resources. Political families are also political elites and, thus, have comparative advantage in vesting de jure power given their wealth, weapons, or influence in addressing collective issue problems (Mosca 1939; Olson 1965). Not only can political families exercise power outside formal institutions but, as the persistence of local dynasties in the Philippines illustrate, they can also take over institutions and capture the political system.

If electoral positions are a means to perpetuate a family’s social and political foothold, then it is expected that political kinship increases the propensity of passage of authored measures, particularly by members from well entrenched dynasties whose family members occupy seats in other branches of government. Moreover, in the Philippine House of Representatives where it is not unusual to encounter members who are next of kin, membership in a political family should facilitate the passage of a measure submitted to the floor. Hence:

H3: Bills filed by a legislator from a political family generally enjoy greater propensity for approval.

SenioritySeniority gives an incumbent certain advantages including increased access to

money and media (Mayhew 1974), the use of seniority as a voting cue when the party system has become weak (Ferejohn 1977; Wolfinger and Heifetz 1965), and the ability for more senior legislators to channel programs to their constituencies (Fiorina 1977; Mayhew 1974). At the committee level in the United States (U.S.) Senate, the number of bills introduced is found to increase as members gain more experience, suggesting that legislators become more active as they accrue experience although they confine their activities to their committee issue areas (Schiller 1995).

Seniority in this study pertains to the actual number of years the incumbent has been elected into office (years in office). Seniority, of course, may be construed differently depending on constitutional or institutional design. In the Philippines, the Constitution restricts representatives to no more than three consecutive terms. However, this provision does not bar them from running for the same office after the lapse of the interim.

Studies found that term affects not just the behavior of legislators but the complexity and breadth of laws produced (Kousser 2005, 2006). Term limits can constrain legislative performance because certain policy objectives require political investments relative to the incumbent’s position that may take time to mature (Dal Bo and Rossi 2008). Consequently, legislative productivity tends to be more enhanced the longer a legislator is in office. Hence,

H4: Bills filed by more senior legislators have greater propensity for approval.

National SignificanceStudies have suggested the theoretical importance of categorizing lawmaking by

policy substance (Mouw and Mackuen 1992; Talbert and Potoski 2002; Wood and Peake 1998), some even demonstrating empirically how findings can be skewed when studies on lawmaking simply pool enactments instead of disaggregating laws by policy issues (Lapinski 2008).

The Philippine House of Representatives generally categorizes measures as either of local or national significance. In deciding if a bill deserves greater congressional attention, legislators not only weigh the exigency of policy but also try to vote in a manner that does not perturb their constituencies. Recent studies of Congressional campaigns demonstrate that incumbents who support policies that are more attuned to their constituents' preferences face fewer reelection obstacles (Hogan 2008). But

members eyeing higher national elective positions also take advantage of bills of national significance as a platform for public attention.

Generally, legislation providing state or local remedies are less controversial and, thus, more prone to logrolling than legislation with national implications (Anderson, Box-Steffensmeier, and Sinclair-Chapman 2003). The exchanging of political favors, especially the trading of influence or votes among legislators during logrolls supposedly facilitate the passage of local measures. However, this view is not definite and findings tend to vary depending on the political context of the country. In the Philippines, bills certified as urgent by the president are mostly laws of national significance even though these laws comprise only about one in five measures (21.78%) proposed in Congress. But precisely because laws catering to narrow interests are more numerous, competition for Congressional attention is more rigid. There is a pecking order in which the author’s membership in the president’s coalition, administrative expertise due to seniority, or the president’s certification of urgency can be pivotal in facilitating the legislative process (Falguera 2004).

Hence it is expected that:H5: Bills of national significance have greater propensity to be approved.

Senate OriginAccording to literature, a House that is larger relative to the Senate not only

enjoys a first-mover advantage but also tends to develop informational expertise that facilitates bill passage (Rogers 1998). A study looking into the dynamics of bicameral lawmaking in Brazil, for instance, suggested that bills introduced in the lower house enjoy greater legislative success than their counterparts in the Senate (Hiroi 2008). However, in the Philippine legislative context this does not apply because legislative attention may occur simultaneously and one chamber need not wait for the other, except with respect to certain laws that the Constitution requires to originate at a particular house. The only requirement is that bills, in order to become law, must have the concurrence of both houses of Congress.

However, the Senate has traditionally been equipped with a better informational and expertise base. Most legislations of national significance originate in the Senate. Because senators enjoy six year terms, Philippine senators are able to hone a certain degree of policy expertise compared to their counterparts in the lower house. Moreover, electoral rules do not permit the Senate to be completely dissolved as half of the membership is retained while the other half is replaced or reelected every three years. This is supposedly intended to “encourage the maintenance of Senate policies as well as guarantee that there will be experienced members who can help and train newcomers in the discharge of their duties.”

Hence, it is expected that,H6: Bills originating in the Senate enjoy greater propensity to be approved.

Socioeconomic ConditionFinally, I control for the effect of economic shocks. Unemployment, recession,

and periodic bouts of inflation impact not only the policy direction of governments but the behavior of policy actors. Among politicians, loyalties are tested during periods of

deep economic crunches when legislators have to weigh the demands of their political parties with the interests of their constituencies.

High and volatile inflation is widely regarded by economists as having a range of economic and social costs not just to the economy but to government. At the House of Representatives, as previously mentioned, a great bulk of legislation entails particularistic spending or pork barrel legislation. During periods of steep or continuous upward inflationary movements, however, governments tend to be more discrete in spending as a matter of fiscal policy. This is in keeping with the context of Philippine lawmaking in which most laws churned out involve some form of spending for narrow programmatic policies.

Thus;H7: Bills filed during periods of economic shocks have greater propensity to be

approved.

Data and MethodIn this study, the event of interest is the passage of a bill into legislation—the risk

that a bill will incur delay or spell in some period, given that the spell has lasted up to or beyond some length of time. The risk in duration models is often referred to as hazard rate. The hazard rate gives the rate at which units fail or durations end by time t given that the unit had survived until t. This can be expressed as (Box-Steffensmeier and Jones 2004, 14):

h(t) = lim Pr (t < T < t + Δt | T > t)Δt→0 Δt

Here, T is a positive random variable denoting survival times, since there cannot be a negative time. The lower case t denotes actual survival time or the realization of T. If the hazard rate is treated as having a dependency on time as well as covariates x, then it can be expressed as (Box-Steffensmeier and Jones 2004, 15):

h(t | x) = lim Pr (t < T < t + Δt | T > t, x)Δt→0 Δt

In the Cox model, the hazard rate is given as (Box-Steffesnemeier and Jones 2004, 48):

hi(t) = h0(t)exp(βʹx)

where: h0(t) is the baseline hazard function and (βʹx) are the covariates and regression parameters.

The hazard rate for the Cox model is proportional, that is, the ratio of two hazards hi(t) and h0(t) is a fixed proportion across time. But while the proportionality assumption applies for the Cox model, it must be mentioned that the particular form of the baseline hazard rate h0(t) is assumed to be unknown and is left unparameterized (Box-

Steffensmeier and Jones 2004, 49). Because the baseline hazard is unspecified, a Cox regression does not have an intercept term. The intercept is absorbed into the baseline hazard function.

I model legislative success in legislative agenda setting as delay or the length of time it takes for a measure to hurdle the legislative process from its filing until its enactment into law. This is expressed as a Cox hazard function of the form:

hi(t) = h0(t)exp[β1AGENDA + β2TENURE + β3KINSHIP + β4SENIORITY + β5NATIONAL + β6SENATE + β7CONDITION]

where:

1. t pertains to duration or delay – It is a continuous positive integer corresponding to the number of days it takes until a bill becomes law. Here, passage into law pertains either to the president’s action of signing the bill into law or the event of a bill lapsing into law. By constitutional provision, an enrolled bill or one that is submitted for the president’s signature can only be vetoed, not rejected. If the president does not act on the bill, it becomes a law 30 days from its submission.

2. AGENDA – This refers to presidential legislative agenda, which in this study pertains to bills certified urgent by the president and those that are considered administrative bills. Administrative bills are of two types, those certified as urgent and those that are not. The study makes no distinction and includes both in the definition. Agenda here is a dummy variable coded 1 if the bill was certified urgent or administrative and 0 if otherwise.

3. TENURE –Tenure is a continuous variable corresponding to the number of days from the filing of a bill until the next presidential election. A larger value for tenure implies that the bill was filed at the beginning of the president’s term. Similarly, a smaller value suggests that the bill was filed near the end of term.

4. KINSHIP – Political kinship refers to membership in a political family. Three variables pertaining to political kinship were created. The first considers a bill author as a member of a political family if he or she has a relative or relatives up to the fourth degree of affinity or consanguinityii, elected or had been elected in Congress or the executive branch (president or vice president) in any of the three previous and current Congresses of incumbency. The second operationalization considers an author a member of a political family if he or she has a relative or relatives up to the fourth degree of affinity or consanguinity elected or had been elected as mayor or governor in any of the three previous local elections or during the member’s incumbency. The third variable pertains to a member with ties to both local and national politics as defined. All three are dummy variables coded 1 if the bill author belongs to a political family. Instead of a name-identification approach, the study utilized qualitative evidence to establish kinship. Secondary materials include newspaper reports, personal declarations, and data from the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ).

5. SENIORITY – This refers to actual number of years the legislator has been serving as member of the House of Representatives since 1987, regardless of reelections.

6. NATIONAL – This is a dummy variable indicating that the measure is a bill of national significance. The designation is based on the House of Representatives’ own classification of enacted legislation. Bills of local significance pertain to measures that appropriate or accommodate in favor of a specific individual or community, or provide public convenience for a narrow set of constituency. Bills of national significance, on the other hand, refer to measures that address a broad policy concern affecting the Filipino public in general.

7. SENATE – This is a dummy variable indicating that the bill was first proposed in the Senate.

8. CONDITION pertains to the monthly inflation rate, which in this case is taken as a crude proxy for prevailing socioeconomic condition. The variable on inflation pertains to monthly inflation rate. The values correspond to the moving average of five previous months prior to the month the bill was filed.

ResultsTable 1 gives a descriptive summary of the delay in the legislative process for

various types of bills. The life span of a bill is the time from its introduction or filing, up to its signing or lapse into law. Censored bills, those which failed to pass during the incumbency of the deliberating Congress, exit the dataset on the date Congress comes to a close since technically, the life of a pending bill is coterminous and bills revived in succeeding Congresses have to undergo the process all over.

Generally, a measure filed in Congress takes about 670 days or 1.83 years to pass on average. The shortest time it took a bill to pass was three days. The longest time a bill underwent the legislative mill was 1,815 days or about five years (the 8th Congress served for more than five years or about as long as the late president Corazon Aquino’s tenure). These broad figures suggest that bills certified urgent or priority become law at a faster rate on average. There were only 255 certified priority measures during the span of seven Congresses in the study. This is just roughly 4 percent of the total 6,130 laws analyzed. But the mean for urgent measures of about 338 days, suggests that when the president turns a measure into priority legislation, the average time it spends on bicameral chambers is cut by half the average for all other types of bills.

A considerable number of laws in the sample are local legislation, including measures catering to specific constituencies and private bills. In fact, about eight in ten laws pertain to measures of local significance (78.2%). Yet, on average, bills of national significance appear to be approved more quickly (557 days, in contrast to the average of 702 days that it takes for local laws to pass). It is also interesting to note that bills that originate in the Senate, on average, are seemingly able to hurdle the legislative process twice faster than bills that originate in the House of Representatives (377 days for bills initiated by the Senate and 685 days for bills first introduced in the House).

I now turn to a discussion of the results of the Cox estimation. Table 2 summarizes the result of the regression estimates after correcting for violation of the nonproportionality assumption.

The covariates pertaining to presidential agenda, national bills, and Senate origin exhibit nonproportionality at the 0.05 confidence level. These covariates were interacted with a simple linear function of time.

Consistent with expectation, the result of the Cox regression estimates suggest that the certification of priority by the president increases the propensity of a bill to be approved into legislation. There is strong support for the hypothesis on the hastening effect of presidential agenda setting on legislative action. The coefficient of its interaction with time is negative, suggesting that its effect diminishes over time. The marginal effect of nonproportional hazards at a given case j at time t is given as (Licht 2011, 231):

hi(t)=

(Xi-Xj)(β1 + β2f(t))

hj(t) E

where f(t) is some function of time.iii

Because the variable on presidential agenda is dichotomous, the marginal effect is reduced to exp(β1 + β2f(t)), or in this case, exp(β1 + β2(t)) since the nonproportional covariates are interacted with a linear function of time.

To illustrate, 15 days upon filing, the effect of presidential agenda on legislative delay is to hasten the passage of such measure by about eight times (see Table 3). After two months (a month having 30 days), the effect is still to hasten passage by about seven times. There is a noticeable decrease in the likelihood of passage after six months but bills certified urgent still have a greater propensity to become law by about four times than other bills. A priority bill that fails to obtain approval after a year still has about twice greater propensity to be approved compared to other measures. But if such bill is allowed to remain in the legislative mill for, say two and a half years, it becomes at risk of delay by 64 percent.

When exactly does the pivotal event when the effect of presidential agenda starts to delay instead of hasten bill passage? The point where they cancel each other out is the ratio of the coefficient of the constitutive term and the interactive term (Box-Steffensmeier and Zorn 1998, 17; see also Box-Steffensmeier and Zorn 2001). In this case, it is about 605 days from the introduction of the priority measure. In other words, while executive clout significantly hastens the passage of priority measures, the president and his or her allies must make sure these bills obtain bicameral approval within two years.

How are Philippine presidents able to get Congress’ attention to their priority measures? Philippine presidents exercise wide latitude over the control and release of congressional earmarks (pork barrel) through their budgetary powers. The funds and the manner in which presidents program their disbursement serve as an effective bargaining mechanism not just to ensure support within the president’s coalition but to thwart potential opposition. Philippine presidents are known to literally grease the legislative mill to ensure the smooth and speedy passage of their legislative programs (Araral 2006; Kasuya 2005). Likely opponents are threatened either of a delay in the release of earmarks or difficulty in disbursement—prospects which can hold hostage the projects that legislators promised to constituencies during election campaigns.

How about the influence of other political variables? The president’s tenure is a continuous variable pertaining to the number of days

from when a bill is filed up to the next presidential election. Tenure value becomes smaller as a bill is filed closer to the next presidential election. The negative relationship

between propensity of bill passage and tenure indicates risk of delay. This suggests that bills filed closer to the next presidential elections or when the incumbent president is about to exit (smaller chronological distance in days) has a smaller likelihood of failing than those filed around the beginning of the chief executive’s term (higher chronological distance in days). To illustrate, a bill that was filed during the year when the president had just assumed office is at risk of being shelved by 70 percent. If the same legislator would file the bill immediately upon the opening of the next Congress or at the start of the second half the president’s six-year term, the risk of delay would be reduced by half. There is only around 11.4 percent risk of delay for bills filed six months before the next presidential election.

This may indicate that legislators, particularly allies of the president, are mindful of their own electoral fate and, thus, are impelled to work harder to accomplish the exiting president’s policy programs. The single term limit for presidents is perhaps another institutional basis for this phenomenon. Philippine presidents are aware they cannot run for another term and tend to strategize the timing of legislative programs, submitting the controversial bills that are more difficult to pass at the beginning of their terms to guarantee their passage when their terms expire.

How about author-specific circumstances such as kinship and term in office? Three variables where created to operationalize political kinship but only ties to

local politics appear to be significant in terms of legislative production. Moreover, the relationship is negative, contrary to what was hypothesized.

But why do ties to local politics delay the passage of measures? Two insights are offered. The first relates to the view of Philippine politics as intra elite competition among well entrenched families (Lande 1965; Simbulan 2005). If election in the Philippines is indeed a clash of ruling families, then scions of the political elites in Congress are expected to put up efforts to stifle potential competition. After all, it is typically in local politics where House members on their third term typically spend the lull of the three term restriction. A legislative proposal by a House member whose family is slowly building political presence in another member’s political bailiwick may be met by indifference, filibustering, dilatory tactics, outright opposition or other actions that undermine the legislative performance of the political rival. The presence of relatives in local politics indicates an attempt by a political family to reproduce and expand power in other political arenas. Members from equally entrenched families threatened by such expansion would naturally resort to self-preserving behavior to dissuade competitors. This is consistent with the idea that dynastic perpetuation is less effective in more competitive environments. One study of political dynasty in the U.S. found that under more severe competition, elites cannot afford strategies other than fielding the best candidates, regardless of family connections (Dal Bo, Dal Bo, and Snyder 2009). The persistence of political dynasties has been blamed for democratic arrest as when a single or few families monopolize political power (Querubin 2010). In some countries, the preferences of well-entrenched families as political elites are closely aligned with the national interest. But elsewhere, their predatory behavior is a major source of development failures. It is no coincidence then why political families tend to be more prominent in the poorest and most economically depressed provinces in the Philippines (Mendoza et al. 2012; Rivera 2011, 66-67).

The second view hinges on the idea of legislation as a political investment (Dal Bo and Rossi 2008), and consistent with more recent findings on the role of Philippine political dynasties. It is possible that House members from well entrenched political families are simply less inclined to introduce measures or exert effort to see the passage of their proposed measures. In one study of local health service delivery, economists found that political kinship serves as an alternative to providing insurance coverage for securing votes (Capuno et al. 2012). In other words, there is no incentive for incumbents who belong to political dynasties to invest in vote courting activities and to be constantly on their toes because political kinship alone can assure them of reelection. The findings apply even when the effect of term is taken into account. Consider two local executives on their last term, one with strong political kinship, the other without. One who belongs to a political family is found to discount the future utility of providing local health services because family ties alone can secure votes in the next election. One of common blood, however, does not resort to such discounting. The non-dynastic candidate instead considers term limit as merely a recess and tries to be continuously accountable to win votes.

Seniority in this study is defined as the actual number of years the legislators is serving in office to account for the fact that term per se (e.g., first term, second term) may provide an imprecise indicator of political persistence. Recall that although the Philippine Constitution imposes a three-term limit, there is no restriction to successive reelections after the recess. This is why in the Philippines it is virtually possible for an incumbent to serve perpetually. The findings suggest that the longer authors of measures have served as legislators, the greater will be the likelihood that the bills they filed will be enacted into law. For instance, legislators who are in the middle of their second term enjoy a 13.5 percent likelihood of legislative success. Assuming they continue to enjoy electoral success, at the end of their third term, their bills have a 20.9 propensity for approval. A bill by a House member who has been serving in Congress for 18 years is likely to be approved into law by 46 percent, all other factors constant.

This finding is consistent with the investment logic of term limits (Dal Bo and Rossi 2008; Kousser 2005) which argues that longer serving legislators fare better in terms of performance not only because they are able to invest a stock of expertise but because an expectation of a longer horizon to capture returns induces them to bear the cost of investing in legislative activities.

As for the issue focus of legislative measures, the estimation results show a positive relationship between bills of national significance and duration of passage, lending strong support to the assumption of its hastening effect on lawmaking. In fact, of all the covariates the national significance of legislative proposals appears to be the strongest determinant of approval. However, its effect exhibits nonproportionality, suggesting that the impact tends to vary over time too. Assume that a legislator proposes a bill of national significance. After six months upon its introduction, such bill enjoys a propensity for approval of about nine times than bills of local significance, all other factors constant. About a year and a half of deliberation, it still enjoys a greater propensity for legislative action but this time only by 76 percent. An important implication is that legislators should not allow bills they introduce to linger in the chamber for more than two years. This makes sense when the three year term of office is put into context. Representatives vying for reelection can be expected to prioritize bills

that will bring projects to local constituencies after about a year before their term expires. The result reflects an important facet of legislative behavior and how politicians weigh issues according to their electoral prospects. Bills that cater to broader national concerns, albeit mostly initiated as part of government programs, typically enjoy greater attention (hence, higher propensity for passage) at the initial stage. However, over time as national issues lose their heat and the sense of urgency fades, legislators shift their efforts on measures that appeal more to their narrow constituencies and are likely earn them votes. This may well explain why ultimately, bills of local significance comprise the larger bulk of legislation passed across Congresses.

The results also confirm the hypothesis that measures first proposed in the Senate enjoy a greater likelihood of legislative attention. This could well be because bills originating in the Senate, being typically of national significance, benefit from the confounding effect of issue focus and presidential agenda. At first glance, this finding appears to be in conflict with past studies ascribing a first mover advantage to the House of Representatives (e.g., Hiroi 2008; Rogers 1998). It must be pointed out that in the Philippines, most legislations of national significance originate in the Senate. Because senators serve for two consecutive six year terms (in contrast to the House’s three consecutive three year terms), Philippine senators are able to hone a greater degree of policy expertise compared to their counterparts in the lower house. The House’s exclusive jurisdiction of local laws also inadvertently narrows the focus of the Senate to issues that affect the nation in general. These make senators more specialized in terms of scope and subject of legislation.

Monthly inflation is also shown to be negatively associated with legislative activity, as hypothesized. I offer two possible explanations for this behavior. One relates to fiscal prudence. In the Philippines, the most common areas of legislation are those that involve some form of public spending or appropriation. The results suggest that during times of economic hardships, legislators tend to be more circumspect in the deliberation of bills submitted for approval. Fiscal sobriety, of course, is a behavior not exclusive to Philippine legislators as the findings actually echo those of studies that have linked changing Congressional moods toward government spending as a function of changing economic conditions (for instance, Kramer 1971; Kiewiet and McCubbins 1985). In the U.S., for instance, Congress has consistently responded to high rates of inflation by holding down on appropriations and maintaining current spending levels instead of compensating for inflation (Kiewiet and McCubbins 1985). The other explanation relates to the president’s anticipation of oppositional policy response during periods of exogenous macroeconomic and political shocks (Brule and Hwang 2010; Fenno 1978). Presidents anticipate the likelihood that Congress will take action in response to poor economic conditions and the implications it has for their supporters. Because an economic bill from the opposition can suggest ineptness on the part of chief executives and their allies, presidents divert the legislature and work to derail policies. Brule and Hwang (2010, 361-362) narrates as a case in point how the 98 th U.S. Congress became so preoccupied with the issue of U.S. troops in Lebanon and Grenada and anticommunist campaigns in Central America that it closed its first session without passing any significant economic legislation.

ConclusionSome of the observations made are admittedly neither new nor unique to the

Philippines. The findings support, but at the same give a more nuanced perspective, on a number of established notions about the Philippine chief executive. The president is no doubt a dominant policy actor but obviously holds no monopoly of the policy process. Moreover, the president’s power to influence legislative agenda can be weakened by political realities such as term limits, unpopularity, and local political dynamics.

The role of political and institutional resources other than the Philippine president’s agenda setting power is worth further examination. Aside from the president’s certification of priority, bill type, political persistence, and bicameralism are also shown to be strong significant determinants of bill passage and rightfully deserve a more expansive and introspective theoretical framing.

Admittedly, the study is limited. First, the study’s definition of legislative agenda was limited to administrative bills and those certified urgent by the president even though there are other venues by which Philippine presidents signal their legislative preferences. In the U.S. for instance, where most of Philippine government institutions were patterned, the State of the Union Address which presidents deliver every year during the opening of Congress are widely regarded as signals of the president’s policy targets (Brenner 1999; Cummins 2010). It would certainly be interesting to see how much of the legislative programs outlined in the Philippine president’s State of the Nation address gets concretized into actual legislations. Second, although the study argues that presidents are able to impose their agenda over Congress by using pork as a bargaining leverage, the symbiotic relationship revolving around pork is taken as given. Without doubt, the findings could have been enriched by the inclusion of variables pertaining to pork earmarks and their disbursement. A major informational drawback with respect to pork barrel in the Philippines is not necessarily the determination of the amount of allocation since legislators technically have the same entitlements. Rather, it is how to establish when precisely disbursements are made since the president supposedly utilizes the timing of budget releases strategically to control Congress. Third, focus was restricted to the House of Representatives and merely included bill origin as a crude bicameral control to approximate the effect of the Senate. Undoubtedly, such simplification leaves out a great deal about the importance of interchamber bargaining and gives an uneven picture of executive-legislative dynamics in the Philippines. I intended the study to be an initial foray into Philippine legislative research and hope the dataset can be further expanded in the future.

These aside, the findings highlight several important features of Philippine politics as well as practical implications on legislative work and lobbying. For instance, being aware of the temporality of institutional and political resources on capturing legislators’ attention should impel lobbyists, policy activists, Congressional staffs, and government technical personnel engaged in the drafting and advocacy of legislative proposals to consciously observe timing as a strategy. Policy entrepreneurs in the House i In the Philippines, representatives may serve three consecutive three-year terms.ii The restriction is consistent with laws governing public officials such as Republic Act 7160 (Local Government Code) and Republic Act 3019 (Anti Graft and Corrupt Practices Act).iii Typically, as in Licht’s case, the natural log of time is used. In this study, a linear function of time was used.

who peddle the government’s policy cart, on the other hand, must make sure that priority measures do not stay under deliberation for more than two years. It is also a good idea to choose more experienced and seasoned members of the House to sponsor measures, particularly with respect to proposals that are likely to spark debate or controversy.

On the whole, the findings confirm a widely held notion about the nature and extent of the Philippine president’s power. Eminent Filipino scholar of politics Remigio Agpalo (1999, 46) distinguishes the Philippines’ brand of presidency from Anglo-American types by the premium it places on the “supremacy” of the executive and it is understandable why. The presidency is a reactive job and people size up presidents by how they handle the unexpected crises that come their way. Being apt for such task requires the Philippine president to be both a politician who knows what people want and a pragmatist who can shift smoothly between sensible opportunism and flexible response. After all, people will hardly remember whose arms were twisted or how much were paid to achieve the president’s programs. What they will remember is the pang of hunger, the frustration of unemployment, and the agony of an uncertain future due to the president’s inaction.

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Table 1. Life Span of Bills (in Days)

By Type Number of bills Mean Min. Max.Certified urgent by the president 255 338.32 3 1792Bills of national significance 1335 557.06 3 1797Bills of local significance 4795 701.57 10 1815All types of bills 6130 670.09 3 1815By OutcomeBecame law 3532 626.12 3 1815Failed to obtain bicameral concurrenceiv 2598 729.89 154 1805Vetoed by the president 33 647.69 224 1690Signed by the president into law 2629 627.89 3 1815Lapsed into law upon president's inaction 870 619.94 79 1315By OriginBill originated from the House 5827 685.32 7 1815Bill originated from the Senate 303 377.42 3 1679All Types of Bills 6130 670.09 3 1815

Table 2. Propensity of Approval of Bills, Philippine House of Representatives, 1987 to 2010

Variables Expected sign Coefficient Standard ErrorPresident's agenda + 2.1060*** (0.1833)President's agenda x Time -0.0035*** (0.0005)

Controls President’s tenure - -0.0007*** (0.00003)Political Kinship of House Member With relatives in national politics + -0.0001 (0.0426) With relatives in local politics + -0.3242*** (0.0727) With relatives in both local and national politics + 0.0212 (0.0939)Seniority of House Member + 0.0211*** (0.0050)National significance of bill + 3.0211*** (0.1356)National significance of bill x Time -0.0045*** (0.0002)Senate origin of the bill + 0.6588*** (0.1504)Senate origin x Time 0.0002 (0.0002)Control for socioeconomic conditions (Inflation) - -0.2130*** (0.0187)N = 23737* p<0.05, ** p<0.01, *** p<0.001

Table 3. Diminishing Effect of Presidential Agenda Over Time

No. of days from filing Hazard ratio p value15 days 7.798 (5.514, 11.027) <0.001 60 days 6.668 (4.896, 9.081) <0.001 6 months 4.392 (3.527, 5.469) <0.001 One year (365 days) 2.307 (1.954, 2.724) <0.001 Two years (720 days) 0.671 (0.446, 1.008) 0.055Two and a half years (900 days) 0.359 (0.203, 0.635) <0.001

iv A bill that fails to obtain the concurrence of both houses does not become law. In this study this refers to when either the Senate failed to approve the bill, or when the two chambers cannot agree on a common or consolidated version.

0

2

4

6

8

10

12

0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200

days from fi l ing

haza

rd ra

te

Bill passage as a function of the type of bill proposed