Reforming the Rules of the Parliamentary Game: Measuring and Explaining Changes in Parliamentary Rules in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland, 1945–2010

Abstract

Questions of institutional change have recently received increased attention in comparative politics. Even though comparative legislative research has identified important effects of parliamentary rules on processes and outputs as well as large variation across countries, we know very little about changes in these rules. This article takes several steps towards mapping and explaining rule changes in European parliaments. Theoretically, it sketches a model explaining such changes based on the rational choice notion of institutions as endogenous equilibria. Methodologically, it proposes two complementary approaches to measure rule changes. In combination, these measures allow us to identify the content, relevance, and effects of changes in parliamentary rules. Empirically, the article provides the first systematic analysis of all changes in the parliamentary standing orders of Austria, Germany, and Switzerland since 1945. This analysis demonstrates that parliamentary rules are changed frequently and massively. It also identifies differences across countries and content areas that are largely in line with theoretical expectations.

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of the article was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Section Comparative Politics of the Deutsche Vereinigung für Politikwissenschaft (DVPW) in Duisburg, 20–22 September 2010. We gratefully acknowledge helpful comments and suggestions by Michael Stoiber, Philipp Harfst, and Julia Keh, and excellent research assistance by Evelyn Pauls, Fabian Siegel, and Franziska Steidle-Sailer. We also thank Michael Becher who worked with us earlier in the project. Our research was or is supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Grant SI 1470/2-1), the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES) at the University of Mannheim, and the Zukunftskolleg at the University of Konstanz.

Notes

1. We confine our argument to formal rules for both theoretical and practical reasons. Theoretically, the effects of informal rules like conventions on appropriate behaviour rest on shakier ground because they lack formal enforcement mechanisms. Even though conventions can at times be enforced by informal sanctions, they should not have the same continuous constraining effect on actors as enforceable formal rules. Practically, it is almost impossible to identify all relevant conventions that were in force in a large set of parliaments over an extended period of time as even country experts often have problems specifying when a behavioural pattern solidified into a universally accepted informal rule.

By focusing on formal rules we certainly miss some conventions that influence actors' behaviour. However, this limitation is mitigated by the fact that informal rules are often codified at a later point in time, especially if their content was contested. Thus, parliamentary actors obviously do differentiate between formal and informal rules and invest resources into formalising only some conventions, most likely the ones they consider worth carrying the costs that come with formalisation.

2. Additional parliamentary rules are sometimes contained in specific laws, as for example the law on parliamentary committees of inquiry in Germany. Including all parliamentary rules in such laws is impossible due to the large number of potentially relevant sources. However, it is plausible to assume that the overwhelming part of parliamentary rules including the most important ones is contained in either the constitution or the standing orders.

3. Similarly, rules themselves can be characterised as efficient or redistributive depending on whether they are in the interest of all parliamentary actors or only a subset of them.

4. If the current majority fears to lose in upcoming elections, it may have incentives to strengthen the position of the opposition in order to profit from these very rights in the future.

5. Of course, such rules can be overthrown by extra-legal means in a revolutionary move. We do not discuss such instances as they are clearly beyond the scope of democratic institutional design.

6. To some extent, this conclusion depends on additional assumptions regarding actors' attitudes towards risk. Our conclusions hold for risk-neutral and risk-averse actors but may be different under the assumption of risk-acceptance. However, risk-acceptant behaviour, i.e. an inclination to gamble, is unlikely in the parliamentary context where stakes tend to be high.

7. The comparison was performed using DiffDoc (http://www.softinterface.com/index.htm, accessed 18 April 2011).

8. In future work, we will also use the alternative measurement approach based on specific institutional variables.

9. A subparagraph is any syntactic unit under a legal paragraph (§) or article that is marked off by an own numbering, e.g. ‘a’ or ‘(1)’. Such subparagraphs can still consist of more than one sentence. We treat the subparagraph as the smallest unit of analysis and assign it to one category as a whole.

10. As these are not rigorously derived from a theoretical model, we use the term ‘expectations’ instead of ‘hypotheses’.

11. From 1949 to 1951, the Bundestag used a slightly revised version of the 1922 rules from the Weimar Republic while drawing up new rules that were passed in December 1951.

12. These miscellaneous rules often refer to country-specific factors (e.g. language issues in Switzerland) or to matters of parliamentary administration that should be quite stable over time.

13. However, the largest reform in 1975 was passed under a one-party SPÖ cabinet with the support of the opposition. This theoretically surprising finding is quite understandable in light of the competitive context after 1945. The Grand Coalition governments of the immediate post-war period – commanding more than 90 per cent of the parliamentary seats – had not been concerned with strengthening minority rights. When the series of Grand Coalition cabinets gave way to the single-party majority cabinet of the ÖVP in 1966, the then opposition SPÖ raised the issue of strengthening minority rights. Consistent with a redistributive logic, the ÖVP rejected the demand. When the SPÖ replaced the ÖVP in government in 1970, installing a minority cabinet, the situation suggested that it was politically opportune for the SPÖ to uphold its demand. It nevertheless took several years to conclude inter-party negotiations, and the final decision was made shortly before the 1975 elections. As Fischer (1975: 309) put it, it was enacted in a situation where neither the government nor the opposition could be certain who would be the main beneficiary of the more opposition-friendly rules. All other larger reforms comprising net changes of more than 1,000 words were passed under Grand Coalitions.

14. The total number of words increased from 7,908 to 23,540 in Austria, from 7,417 to 19,201 in Germany, and from 6,592 to 17,757 in Switzerland. Headings and numbers of paragraphs are not included in the word counts. In addition, the constitutions of the three countries contain rules on parliament. These rules are changed over time as well, albeit less frequently and less extensively. We currently have measures on the length of constitutional rules referring to parliament for three points in time spaced about equally over the period of investigation. In Austria, the number of words relating to parliament increased from 2,562 in 1948 via 2,843 in 1980 to 5,071 in 2010. In Germany, the respective numbers are 1,855 (1949), 2,746 (1980), and 2,980 (2010). The Swiss constitution contains by far the fewest rules on parliament, amounting to a total number of 385 words in 1946, 391 words in 1980 and 865 words in 2010. These numbers show that the largest part of parliamentary rules is indeed contained in the parliamentary standing orders analysed in this article.

15. The length of the Swiss rules temporarily dropped in October 2002 when the Geschäftsreglement was cut by more than 30 per cent. However, this cut was part of the larger reform that replaced the old Geschäftsverkehrsgesetz with the new Parlamentsgesetz two months later. At the end of the reform, the total number of words had grown considerably due to a massive increase in the length of the Parlamentsgesetz.

16. The same ordering of countries is observed in constitutional rules on parliament (see note 14).

17. As these five categories are mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive, an addition of the five lines would recreate the total number of words displayed in Figure 1 for each country.

18. A larger increase is observed for the 2002 reform in Switzerland. This increase is mainly due to extensive final provisions on the coming into force of new and expiry of old rules.

19. As this category is rather heterogeneous, we also calculated stability only for rules that refer to ordinary lawmaking (initiation of bills; debate, amendment, and voting on bills; referral of bills to committees). The resulting ratios for the length of the last compared to the first version are lower for Austria (2.25) and especially Germany (1.49) but higher for Switzerland (3.05) when compared with the ratios for the broader category in Table 1. Thus, the rules on lawmaking in a narrow sense also grew considerably since 1945.

20. We cannot calculate the number of changed words for the first observation in Germany and Switzerland because of missing data on the rules in effect before 1951 (in Germany) and 1946 (in Switzerland), respectively.

21. We use the absolute value of the net change measure in order to make the cases of net decrease in Switzerland comparable.

22. These differences highlight another advantage of our country selection. Among Western European democracies, Switzerland is one of only three non-EU countries (besides Norway and Iceland) while Germany and Austria have very distinct trajectories of EU membership.

23. Since 2001, a special law regulates procedures of committees of inquiry in the Bundestag (Untersuchungsausschussgesetz). In 2010, this law comprised 3,519 words. If these rules are included in the count, the total number of words regarding democratic reform in Germany is much closer to the level observed in Austria from 2001 onwards.