Introduction: Comparing the legislative performance of legislatures

Abstract

The problem with the central ‘Mezey question’ – ‘how much policy-making power does a legislature have?’ – is not so much the question itself, since legislatures have to do with law-making, however tenuously in some cases, as the absence of the precision tools with which to calibrate the extent of a legislature's policy power. This in turn has fed a tendency to accept rather than confront the legislative stereotypes embedded in the existing classifications of legislatures. There has also been a propensity to conflate ‘legislative capacity’ and ‘legislative performance’ and to reach conclusions about strength and weakness in legislatures from an assessment of a legislature's capacity – its potential policy power – rather than analysing the nature of its policy output. Strong committees, for example, do not in themselves betoken a strong, policy-making legislature. The starting point of this special issue is the need for systematic output analysis in comparative legislative research and, accordingly, the Introduction seeks to devise a series of indicators with which to make at least a rudimentary cross-national assessment of legislative performance.

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