Chapter Eight - The Internal Structure of Parliaments

Summary

The last two chapters have examined the actor composition of legislatures. This and the next chapter will now turn to the way legislatures in the five countries operate. To this end, we first analyse the internal structure of parliaments, their level of institutionalization and their internal procedures, before, in a further step, we try to assess the performance of the legislatures in four key parliamentary functions.

Influential legislatures are usually characterized by “robust” institutionalization (Copeland and Patterson 1994, p. 4; Park 1997, p. 97). Institutionalization refers to a high degree of regularity in collective behaviour through the development of a set of widely acknowledged “norms, rules, and decision-making procedures that shape the expectations, interests and behavior of actors” (Keohane 1989, p. 3). Although these norms, rules, and decision-making procedures need not necessarily be formalized — most democracies have indeed developed unwritten conventions and various forms of informal politics (Lauth and Liebert 1999) — in most cases they are more or less codified. Institutionalization is usually also marked by an elaborated division of labour within legislatures which is indispensable for coping with the proliferation of policy fields and the increasingly technical, complicated, and complex nature of legal matters confronting societies in the era of globalization. In order to counter the executive's superiority in policymaking, a trend visible in Western democracies as well, and in order to exert effective oversight over government affairs, the generalist type of legislator must give way to a type of legislator specialized in a limited number of policy areas. The establishment of committees therefore serves the function of organizing the specific expertise available among legislators. While we accept formality and complexity as indicators for institutionalization, we do not follow Huntington (1968), Copeland and Patterson (1994), and Park (1997, p. 98) in accentuating autonomy as a third major indicator for the institutionalization of parliaments. If legislative “autonomy is gauged by its political independence from other institutional structures, such as the executive” (Park 1997, p. 98), then this indicator may well apply to presidential systems, but certainly not to parliamentary systems. In the latter the legislature is by definition closely intertwined with the executive through the parliamentary majority which forms the government. Moreover, legislatures in both presidential as well as parliamentary systems have lost policy-making autonomy.