Recent years have witnessed substantial work in the legislative studies field. But what do we know about legislatures today and are there clear criteria for comparing and classifying them?
This is a new review of the state of our knowledge of parliament and tackles key questions: Do legislatures matter in legislative terms, and, if so, how much? What is the extent of the legislature’s control of the legislative process. How can we classify legislatures on the basis of their relative legislative performance. Five measures of the policy power of parliaments are applied in the country/region chapters.
This book was previously published as a special issue of the leading Journal of Legislative Studies.
1. On Comparing and Classifying Legislatures 2. Legislatures in Presidential Systems: The Latin American Case 3. Does the Folketing Matter? The Legislative Impact of the Danish Parliament 4. The Baltic Parliaments: Legislative Performance in View of EU Accession 5. The Exceptional Assembly? The US Congress in Comparative Perspective 6. On Evaluating the Legislative Worth of the Israeli Knesset 7. Characterising the Italian Parliament. Legislative Change in Longitudinal Perspective 8. Initiatives for Change: Assessing Legislative Performance in Southern Africa 9. Not as Weak as Widely Perceived? The Legislative Impact of the French National Assembly during the Fifth Republic 10. The Legislative Output of the Finnish Eduskunta since the Second World War Conclusions
Biography
David Arter holds the First Chair of Politics at the University of Aberdeen
