Has legislative power declined globally?

ABSTRACT

In recent years several scholars have argued that there has been a weakening of the power of national legislatures. This paper addresses two empirical questions: Has global legislative power indeed declined (as has been claimed)? And if so, what factors might explain where legislative power has declined and where it has not? Using data from the Varieties of Democracy (V-dem) project from 1990 to 2020 to measure changes in legislative power, I find that the decline of legislative power has not been monotonic globally, and that there is considerable variation by countries in the world. In this paper, I test a set of institutional, economic, cultural and global explanations for legislative decline that has been proposed by the literature and find that much of this literature is either not supported, or only partially supported.

KEYWORDS:

• Legislative decline
• globalisation
• legislative power
• V-dem

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 It is important to note that this literature has focused on National Legislatures, and not ontransnational legislatures, such as the European Parliament. Although clearly the European Parliament has grown in power, this is beyond the scope of this paper. However, one might imagine that the growth of the power of transnational legislative bodies, like the European Parliament may contribute to the decline in the power of national legislatures.

2 Although admittedly the V-dem data regarding legislative decline is based on judgement coding by experts, subjective biases are mitigated by having multiple coders, which is not unlike many other commonly used data sets such as Polity (to measure democracy) or Correlates of War. Further it is the only currently available systematic data set that includes both de jure and de facto measures of legislative power.

3 https://tcdata360.worldbank.org/indicators/gim.public.own?country=BRA&indicator=3302&viz=line_chart&years=1998,2013#comparison-link.

4 One key historical reason that was not fully explored in this article, but could be explored in a future iteration of this project, is that older legislatures.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John Ishiyama

John Ishiyama is University Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of North Texas. He has published extensively on political parties, democratization, and institutional development. He is also currently the President of the American Political Science Association.