The Handbook of National Legislatures: A Global Survey

Description

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.

M. Steven Fish is Professor of Political Science at the University of California-Berkeley. He is author of Democracy Derailed in Russia: The Failure of Open Politics (2005), which was the recipient of the Best Book Award of 2006, presented by the Comparative Democratization Section of the American Political Science Association. He is also author of Democracy from Scratch: Opposition and Regime in the New Russian Revolution (1995) and a coauthor of Postcommunism and the Theory of Democracy (2001). His articles have appeared in World Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Democracy, Post-Soviet Affairs, and other journals. He served as a Senior Fulbright Fellow and Visiting Professor at the Airlangga University, Surabaya, Indonesia, in 2007 and at the European University at St. Petersburg, St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2000-2001. In 2005, he was the recipient of the Distinguished Social Sciences Teaching Award of the Colleges of Letters and Science, University of California-Berkeley. Matthew Kroenig is Assistant Professor in the Department of Government and the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. His articles have appeared in Security Studies, Foreign Policy, and Democratization. He has held fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University, the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, and the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at the University of California. He has also served as a strategist on the policy planning staff in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, where he was a principal author of key national security strategy and defense review documents and where he led the development of a U.S. government-wide strategy for deterring terrorist networks. For his work, he received the Office of the Secretary of Defense's Award for Outstanding Achievement.

'This is an impressive undertaking, genuinely novel in its conception, and remarkably broad in scope. The strength of legislatures is a critical marker of the performance of representative institutions and of democracy more generally. Until Fish and Kroenig, there was no metric of legislative strength so comprehensive in the scope of powers and the range of countries considered.' John Carey, Dartmouth College 'This is a unique volume of enormous importance in its contribution to the creation of rich and truly comparative data on the formal and informal power of national legislatures across the world. The detailed and disaggregated information on no less than 32 indicators of legislative power, capacity, and capabilities provides a wealth of possibilities for future research that until now has been impossible. This book is destined to become a chief source for many important contributions in the future.' Staffan I. Lindberg, University of Florida 'A Handbook of National Legislatures by M. Steven Fish and Matthew Kroenig is a signal achievement. This compilation of basic information about 32 distinct features of the power and capacity of the national legislatures of 158 countries is based on careful study of the formal constitutional and legal rules as well as a comprehensive survey of country experts, who assessed how the powers are used in practice. The result is a valuable cross-national index of parliamentary powers and an authoritative reference guide to each of the world's major national legislatures.' Thomas F. Remington, Emory University