Measuring Legislative Power: An Expert Reweighting of the Fish‐Kroenig Parliamentary Powers Index

Abstract

The Parliamentary Powers Index (PPI) developed by Fish and Kroenig (2009) is the most important effort to date to measure legislative power in cross‐national perspective, but it has been criticized on both theoretical and methodological grounds. We build on the 32‐item PPI to develop an alternative indicator of legislative strength that is based on an expert survey of 296 political scientists in 2014. We reweight each of the powers by expert opinion, creating a new Weighted Legislative Powers Score (WLPS) for the 158 national legislatures in the Fish and Kroenig data set. In addition, the article reports the expert‐assigned weight factors for the entire set of 32 powers contained in the original PPI, thus allowing researchers to innovate alternative, disaggregated indicators of legislative power.

Strengthening the Rubber Stamp: Comparing Legislative Powers across Regimes

“…Building on the foundational data collection efforts of Fish and Kroenig (2009) and IAEP-in combination with insightful critiques offered by scholars such as Desposato (2012) and Chernykh et al (2017) and the extensions provided by the V-Dem Project-, we utilized information on de facto and de jure powers attributed to the legislature to gauge its strength relative to the executive.…”

“…This includes three variables relating to influence over the executive, four features of institutional autonomy, and five specified powers. Nine of these are in the top half of variables that were considered more important features by experts surveyed by Chernykh et al (2017). Of the 32 variables that composed the Parliamentary Powers Index, 12 were either not explicitly coded by V-Dem or were not easily identifiable.…”

“…Our use of specific indicators to denote legislative strength across regimes takes heed of criticisms that scholars have raised regarding the PPI (Chernykh et al 2017, Desposato 2012). 3 We tried to be judicious in the attributes that we selected to examine, thereby avoiding an overly inclusive approach that mixes information that may only be marginally relevant (Desposato 2012).…”

MP Firefighting and the Partisan Logic

“…Previous studies have in particular focused on different institutional opportunities for MPs to engage in control of government actions. Institutional set‐up in terms of different modes in parliament (King ; Andeweg & Nijzink ), the construction of legislative power indexes (Fish & Kroenig ; Chernykh et al ), specific parliamentary institutional strength measures (Sieberer ; Winzen ), and institutional opportunities for opposition activity (Garritzmann ). The behavioural dimension has received less attention, like when and for what purpose MPs use control institutions.…”

“… Although it is more transparent not to apply weights, weights might be appropriate (Sieberer ). Fish and Kroenig's classical Parliamentary Powers Index (PPI) for instance is criticised for not applying weights, and Chernykh et al argue that legislative powers should clearly be weighted in their construct of a Weighted Legislative Powers Score (, 9). …”