Approval of Laws

A very important stage in the life of states is the approval of new laws, The legal term is "Approval" or enactment of a new act. In Italian the term is translated "Approvazione", in French "Adoption", in Spanish "Aprobación".

According to Dr. Curry, James M. (2018: Congressional Processes and Public Approval of New Laws. SAGE Journals), there is evidence that how US Congress makes a law affects public approval of that law.

The topic in this article:


APPROVAL OF LAWS

He wrote: “The rising use of unorthodox processes in Congress raises concerns about the perceived legitimacy of congressional action among the public... This effect is especially pronounced among partisans already inclined to be in opposition to the law, further solidifying their opposition. These findings have important implications for a Congress that in recent years has increasingly turned to unorthodox legislative processes to pass legislation.”

The author expresses the idea that

"public expresses a general preference for civil and bipartisan policy making, and there is ample empirical evidence that legislative and public politicking can damage approval of and faith in Congress as an institution…

Information about the use of unorthodox tactics may reduce approval for new laws in large part because most citizens have “process preferences” that engender skepticism of legislative politicking (Hibbing and Theiss-Morse 2002), and a sense of “procedural justice” which leads them to view some governmental processes as inherently more, or less, fair (Tyler 1994, 2006). Moreover, information about the use of unorthodox processes may exacerbate partisan motivated reasoning (Druckman, Peterson, and Slothuus 2013) among citizens deciding whether to approve or disapprove of a policy. Reading that Congress bypassed traditional steps of the legislative process is likely to further reduce approval for the policy enacted among those already inclined to be opposed based on policy preferences or partisan-leanings.

This article assesses the impact of public awareness of the use of certain unorthodox processes on approval of new laws. Specifically, it analyzes how procedural hardball tactics—tactics with which congressional leaders strain the rules and bypass traditional legislative processes to win legislative battles—affect levels of public support for the policies enacted. To do this, I draw on two survey experiments, the first embedded in a module of the 2014 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), and the second fielded using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) in 2016.

Both experiments asked respondents to read descriptions of hypothetical new policies passed by Congress, modeled on the language used in newspaper accounts of congressional action. Respondents in control groups just read about the law, while those in the experimental groups also read about processes used to enact the law. The results show that reading about the use of hardball processes reduces approval for the laws, with the sharpest effects among partisans who might already disapprove.

In the conclusions, I discuss the implications of these findings for a contemporary era in which Congress is frequently relying on unorthodox tactics to make laws.”

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