Why fragmented parliaments stop passing legislation: Opposition discipline and representation across four democratic institutions

Abstract

Parliamentary systems pass more bills than presidential systems at baseline, but collapse to near-zero passage under party-system fragmentation. The literature offers three competing micro-explanations: coalition-formation failure, party discipline, and committee gatekeeping. These operate simultaneously in any real legislature, so observational studies struggle to separate their contributions. We present an agent-based model that compares four democratic institutions: pure parliamentary, pure republican/presidential, premier-presidential (France), and president-parliamentary (Russia). Across four scenarios and N=200 seeds per cell we report bootstrap confidence intervals, Morris screening, Sobol variance decomposition, mechanism ablations, and a hung-parliament variant comparison. Three findings emerge. First, government formation failure alone does not halt legislation: when a fragmented parliament reverts to personal voting, parliamentary passage (46.4%) is statistically indistinguishable from the presidential benchmark (44.8%); collapse requires cohesive opposition obstruction, which drives passage to 0.05%. Second, disabling discipline restores fragmented passage to 46.7%, and the rescue magnitude is monotone across the four institutions in a pattern that survives varying the common discipline level. Third, the passage-representation tradeoff is a single spectrum: parliamentary maximises throughput at the cost of representational fidelity; republican maximises fidelity via the presidential veto; semi-presidential variants split the difference.