Lawmaking: a spurt of acceleration

The emergency procedure, renamed accelerated one since 2008, enables the government to call for a conciliation committee between the Assembly and the Senate after one reading only.
It can be seen as a sign of the government’s willingness to close the bicameral dialogue in order to save time. Two points can be made from our data. First, the frequent use of that procedure is old and does not originate from Sarkozy or Hollande’s presidencies : it appears that under Giscard or Mitterrand, the emergency procedure was already applied to about one third of the texts. Although on another hand, Two, the average mean reveals a constant growth in the use of the procedure since the mid 2000’s and reached a peak in 2017 with 75 % of the passed bills concerned. Further study will say if this trend results from a greater willingness to fasten the procedure or from growing filibustering from parliament…

The Law Factory: generalisation of the accelerated procedure in France since 1977 (international conventions excluded)

These data were gathered and processed as part of a research project on “The use of digital technology to assess the impact of parliament on the lawmaking process” funded by Sciences Po’s Laboratory for the Interdisciplinary Evaluation of Public Policies (LIEPP). Essentially conducted by researchers from Sciences Po’s medialab and Center for European Studies and Comparative Politics, it also includes researchers external to Sciences Po as well as the Regards Citoyen association. It has enabled the launch of a website on “Lawmaking” where – to date – over 800 laws have been scrutinized throughout their development: from their proposal stage through their adoption, including all the speeches, amendments, etc. The website facilitates navigation of all the texts and also makes all of the data available in Open Data.