The Handbook of National Legislatures

Abstract

Where is the power? Students of politics have pondered this question, and social scientists have scrutinized formal political institutions and the distribution of power among agencies of the government and the state. But we still lack a rich bank of data measuring the power of specific governmental agencies, particularly national legislatures. This book assesses the strength of the national legislature of every country in the world with a population of at least a half-million inhabitants. The Legislative Powers Survey (LPS) is a list of thirty-two items that gauge the legislature's sway over the executive, its institutional autonomy, its authority in specific areas and its institutional capacity. Data were gathered by means of a vast international survey of experts, extensive study of secondary sources and painstaking analysis of constitutions and other relevant documents. Individual country chapters provide answers to each of the thirty-two survey items, supplemented by expert commentary and relevant excerpts from constitutions.

'Break-In Parties' and Changing Patterns of Democracy in Latin America

“…To grasp the relations between executives and legislatures, we relied on the assessment of presidential powers by Shugart and Carey (1992) for the first period, and the assessment of legislatures by Fish and Kroenig (2009) for the second period.…”

The Parliament of Bangladesh: Representation and Accountability

“…According to the Parliamentary Powers Index (PPI), the parliament in Bangladesh is relatively well-powered (Fish and Kroenig 2009). The PPI is constructed through a perception-based survey covering 32 items such as parliament's ability to monitor the executive and the bureaucracy, parliament's freedom from presidential/prime ministerial control, parliament's authority in specific areas, and the resources that it brings to its work.…”

Does the Process of Constitution-Making Matter?

“…We next drew on our own data from the CCP to create an index of legislative power, based on a parallel set of items from Fish & Kroenig's (2009) Parliamentary Powers Index (see also Fish 2006). Fish & Kroenig aggregate 32 dimensions of legislative power, equally weighted, into an index representing the level of legislative power in a constitutional system.…”