On Legislatures

The Puzzle of Representation

Gerhard Loewenberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781594517518
• eBook ISBN: 9781317255147
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

On Legislatures looks at why people support their individual representatives but continue to criticise the legislative system at every opportunity. Although legislatures exist in every political system and are meant to represent the people, they are generally disparaged because they appear both unrepresentative and indecisive. Gerhard Loewenberg explains this puzzling contradiction by examining what representation means and what it takes for a large number of equally representative members to reach decisions. It also describes the methods for studying legislatures that have been developed in the social sciences in the last half century and shows their importance in democratic societies throughout the world. On Legislatures gets to the heart of the current disconnect between legislatures and the public they are supposed to represent.

CHAPTER ONE

LEGISLATURES AS PUZZLES

Legislatures are puzzling institutions. How is it that a collection of several hundred members who are nominally equal to each other can ever reach a decision? How is it that an institution, which is presumably representative of the people, is usually the most unpopular institution in a system of government? These contradictions arise out of the history of the institution, out of the contrast between the characteristics it had at its origin in medieval Europe—its genetic properties, so to speak—and those the institution developed as it adapted to changing political environments over eight or nine centuries. It would be difficult to imagine any other organization of several hundred members that had no boss, no assignment of duties, no one in charge of hiring or firing, and no “bottom line” to evaluate success or failure. Legislatures attract scholarly attention, in part, because they are puzzling. Interested citizens who look at sessions of a legislature on public television usually see numbingly boring scenes of members speaking to an empty chamber, or standing around waiting for the results of a roll call, or interrupting each other with points of order. It is hard to make any sense of what is going on.

Legislatures are unlike other political institutions, most of which can be pictured on an organizational chart with defined lines of authority and responsibility. By contrast, each member of a legislature is formally equal to every other member; no member can legally order another member around, let alone hire or fire him or her. No constituency can accept control of its representative by a representative of another constituency. So legislatures are large collections of individuals who do not formally owe each other obedience and do not necessarily accept any division of labor among themselves. No wonder legislatures are difficult to understand. And no wonder they so often frustrate the public by their apparent indecisiveness. How they manage to act at all is one of the central puzzles that scholars have tried to understand.

Legislatures as Objects of Research

Legislatures multiplied in the second half of the twentieth century with the multiplication of independent countries. By the first decade of the twenty-first century, there were 191 national legislatures, as well as a very large number of legislatures at sub- and supranational levels of government.¹ Their role in their political systems varies enormously. A bold recent effort to assess the influence of 158 of these legislatures in their respective countries measures thirty-two aspects of their constitutional powers derived from expert opinions and legal texts and compares the power of the legislature with that of the executive. By that measure the U.S. Congress, generally regarded by legislative specialists as the most powerful legislature in the world, comes out in forty-ninth place.² The survey is obviously a rough effort, its results providing evidence of the difficulty of assessing the role that legislatures play in governance by relying merely on expert opinions of legal texts.

A few legislatures can trace their origins back over a thousand years, among them the Althing of Iceland, which first convened in AD 930, marking the beginning of the Icelandic Commonwealth. It was originally an outdoor gathering, open to all free men, in which the country’s most powerful leaders declared law and settled disputes. An example at the other end of the long history of parliaments is the National Council of Slovakia, established in 1993 when Slovakia became an independent state after the peaceful dissolution of the Czechoslovakian federation. Its 150 members exercise veto-proof legislative powers, have considerable oversight capacity, and can dismiss the government by a vote of no confidence. Although a relatively new parliament, the council has assumed an assertive political role similar to that of the older, but recently democratized, legislatures of Central and Eastern Europe. The Kenyan National Assembly, established in 1963 upon the independence of that country from the United Kingdom, is typical of the new parliaments in sub-Saharan Africa, which have only very slowly been able to assert some independence from powerful executive rulers. Among the weakest parliaments are such appointed bodies as the Consultative Council of Saudi Arabia. One of the strongest legislatures in the twenty-first century is the German Bundestag, heir to a checkered history growing out of its beginnings in an authoritarian, newly united state in the nineteenth century, an unsuccessful democratic interval after World War I, and a remarkably successful new beginning after the end of the Allied occupation of the country.

These examples illustrate the puzzling variety that exists among legislatures. Some of them, including the more powerful ones, have existed in one form or another since medieval times, when monarchs first summoned representatives of medieval communities to confer with them on matters of war and peace and raising governmental revenue. Some of the more powerful ones are of more recent origin, notably in Europe and in the states formerly belonging to the British Empire. Many of the newest legislatures—those in the Middle East, North Africa, the post-Soviet states, and Southeast Asia—are among the weakest. But their age does not seem to relate to their role in the political system; nor does their size, their location, or their organization. As puzzling as their variety is their near universality. Despite widespread public despair over them, legislatures exist in nearly every political system in the world. They all have in common their structure—they are assemblies of nominal equals—and their reason for being—they are at minimum consultative bodies for rulers. Governments of all kinds seem to require their existence. Publics of all kinds seem to regard them as objects of despair.

Legislatures are very feasible subjects of study. Typically they are accessible, they are relatively open to researchers, they document their actions, and their members are willing—often eager—to talk about what they do. Early legislatures have often left extensive records of their work. Thus, many examples can be studied. Legislatures attract country and area specialists. As legislative institutions have achieved prominence in international organizations, they have also attracted a significant body of scholarship, for example, in studies of the European Parliament. Legislatures attract scholars who are interested not in the institution as such but in political developments with which legislatures are connected, notably the modernization of traditional societies in what Samuel Huntington called the third wave of democratization.³

The overwhelming amount of research on the U.S. Congress is the product of the very large group of American government specialists in political science, for whom Congress has been a central object of research from the earliest days of the organized profession, beginning with Woodrow Wilson’s Congressional Government published in 1885.⁴

Research began to proliferate after 1945. Congressional studies became a subspecialty in American political science, formatively shaped by a few influential scholars, including Ralph Huitt at the University of Wisconsin; David Truman at Columbia University; Donald R. Matthews at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Nelson Polsby at the University of California, Berkeley; Richard F. Fenno Jr. at the University of Rochester; and David Mayhew at Yale University.⁵ They and their students, encouraged and aided by the Congressional Fellowship Program established by the American Political Science Association in 1953 and by the organization of accessible data on Congress, created a community of students of Congress that has no counterpart in legislative studies in any other country. The strength of this group of scholars is that it has produced an array of research methods and research agendas that have been gradually applied to the study of other legislatures. But for nearly half a century, the study of Congress completely outdistanced the study of legislatures outside the United States, both by American and by non-American political scientists. Legislative research was therefore predominantly research on the institution in its American historical and cultural context, which shaped both the research methods that developed in this field and the conceptualization of the subject.

Studies of legislatures in other countries were, like congressional research, country specific. In the last twenty years, however, there are increasing examples of cross-national legislative research in explicitly comparative frameworks. This has made it possible to get a better general understanding of the legislature apart from its specific manifestation in a particular country or at a particular time. Rational-choice theory has proven to be especially suitable for this purpose because it focuses on institutional structure independent of cultural-historical contexts. International contacts among scholars have facilitated this development. For example, the consolidation of democracy in Latin America has led specialists in Latin American politics to undertake extensive research both on individual legislatures and on sets of legislatures in a comparative framework.⁶ I will discuss many other recent examples of comparative research on aspects of legislatures in subsequent chapters.

Because many legislatures are of long standing, they have attracted historians, particularly in Great Britain and on the European continent. Under the aegis of the History of Parliament Trust, set up in 1940, British historians have published twenty-eight volumes covering 281 years of parliamentary history, including 17,000 biographies of members.⁷ In 1936 a group of European scholars organized the International Commission for the History of Representative and Parliamentary Institutions, which has published a broad range of historical studies of parliamentary institutions for over seventy years. It is an active scholarly organization with two hundred members in thirty countries, meets annually, and since 1981 has published the journal Parliaments, Estates & Representation.⁸ Originally an organization of medieval historians focused on the history of parliamentary institutions in Western Europe in the Middle Ages, it has in the last two decades broadened its purview to include articles and monographs on parliaments up to the present, covering all of Europe and often taking a comparative approach. With the revival of interest in the German parliamentary tradition after World War II, German historians established a commission in 1952 to sponsor research on the development of German parliaments, which has resulted in 250 monographs and volumes of primary documents.⁹

Unfortunately, there is little interdisciplinary work on legislatures. There are exceptions, notably the work of the historian William O. Aydelotte. His analysis of the British House of Commons of 1841 to 1847 reflected his interest in the application of quantitative methods to the history of legislative behavior and led him to organize interdisciplinary conferences bringing together historians and political scientists doing legislative research.¹⁰ But political scientists rarely avail themselves of the research of historians, be they American, British, or continental European. In turn, British and European historians are seldom aware of the research of American political scientists, even research that pertains to the early history of American legislatures. This is only one of several examples of barriers that divide scholars in the field of legislative studies by disciplines and by country.

As research subjects, legislatures have proven suitable to successive methodological fashions in the discipline of political science: legal-constitutional analyses of their rules and powers, sociological analyses of their memberships, attitudinal surveys of their members’ policy preferences and role concepts, participant observation of their members’ activities, and game-theoretical interpretations of how they reach decisions. Legislative research has escaped the methodological controversies that exist in many subfields of political science because over time each of these methods of study has helped to illuminate the characteristics of legislatures.

In its many manifestations, legislative studies constitute a thriving field of research. Venues for publishing legislative research in political science have multiplied in the last half century, beginning with the British journal Parliamentary Affairs in 1947, the German journal Zeitschrift für Parlamentsfragen in 1969, the Legislative Studies Quarterly in 1976, and the Journal of Legislative Studies in 1995. However, neither the general public nor politically attentive publics nor scholars in neighboring fields share the fascination for legislatures that exists among students of legislatures in political science. Public attention to legislatures occurs chiefly when they are involved in scandals or fail to act pr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 Legislatures as Puzzles
• 2 Representation
• 3 Collective Decision Making
• 4 Legislatures as Links Between Government and the Public
• 5 Ways of Studying Legislatures
• 6 Has Scholarship Unraveled the Puzzles of Legislatures?
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author