El papel y la función de los parlamentos centroamericanos: cuatro casos comparados

This article explores the patterns of institutional performance of the Legislative and Executive branches in four Central American countries searching for explanatory sources in the constitutional and procedural design. The article explores in a comparative fashion which are the varying scenarios explaining the Executive dominance of the legislative agenda, and puts it in relation to the degree of interests’ aggregation in the legislative decisional process. Finally, the article proposes a combined analysis of both formal and informal rules, or which are the incentives of actors to use discrecional spaces, endogenous to the decisional structure and to the historical patterns of behaviour of the political actors.