There are three exhaustive and mutually exclusive models that characterize legislatures: the government (or majority party) dominated, the consensual, and the chaotic model. Each model provides a different answer to the following question: does the government control the policymaking process in national legislatures? These three models are implicit in the political science literature but are rarely made explicit.

In government dominated legislatures the governing party monopolizes lawmaking. In consensual legislatures policy outcomes are the result of bargaining and compromise between the legislative majority (or government) and parties in the opposition. In chaotic legislatures, no party has the ability to bring order to the process.

When the government alone has “blocking power” (typically through control of the plenary agenda), I view the legislature as government or majority party dominated. Government or majority monopolization of the agenda is referred to as the cartel agenda model by Cox and McCubbins (1991, 2005). If, however, blocking power is shared by government and opposition parties, I will show that consensus results. When blocking powers are absent, a disciplined majority party will still be able to dominate law making; thus, I will show that discipline can substitute blocking power (and vice-versa). By contrast, when blocking power and discipline are both absent, chaos reigns.

My goal is to formulate explicit models for each of these three legislative models, derive testable predictions from each, with emphasis on predictions about legislative output that differentiates each model. I will then analyze large data sets on legislative voting for several countries in order to discriminate among those three models in each case. I emphasize three major empirical findings.

First, legislative data from most contemporary democratic legislatures is consistent with the government or majority party dominated model - even data from legislative assemblies that are most often described as consensual, such as the German Bundestag, or universalistic, such as the United States House of Representatives.

Second, despite the commonly held belief that responsible party government cannot exist without disciplined or cohesive parties, legislative data suggests that governments in countries with undisciplined parties (such as Italy or the United States) exercise responsible party government through blocking (agenda) power.

Third, I use the models to analyze how legislatures change and evolve. Divided government provides opposition parties greater access to blocking power and therefore, legislatures that are consistent with the government dominated model during periods of unified party control are consistent with the consensual model during divided government. I will also show that legislative voting data is consistent with the chaos model throughout the early stages of democratic legislatures but, by the time the legislature is institutionalized, the data evidences a government dominated or consensual model. It is at this point that responsible party government emerges.

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