Legislative Capacity in Germany's Parliaments

• Published date: 01 May 2022
• Author: Niels H. Appeldorn,David Fortunato
• Date: 01 May 2022
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12338

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LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, 47, 2, May 2022

DOI: 10.1111/lsq.12338

NIELS H. APPELDORN

Texas A&M University

DAVID FORTUNATO

University of California, San Diego

Copenhagen Business School

Legislative Capacity in Germany’s

Parliaments

We present new data on the legislative capacity (or professionalism) of

Germany’s national and subnational parliaments including legislator salary, in-

formational expenditures, and counts of committee and plenary sessions. We de-

scribe these data and aggregate them into a summary measure modeled after the

Squire Index as well as a measure derived from factor analytic decomposition.

The internal validity of these measures is assessed in a case study of recent par-

liamentary reforms in Baden- Württemberg and the external validity is assessed

via comparison to electoral turnover. We conclude with suggestions for future

research and hope that our colleagues will both make use of these data to study

the causes and consequences of legislative capacity in Germany and also be mo-

tivated to collect and disseminate similar data for new contexts.

We present new data on the legislative capacity of 17 German

legislatures— the Landtage, which are the unicameral parliaments

of the 16 GermanBundesänder,1. or states, and the Bundestag,

the popularly elected lower house of federal parliament. The raw

data on legislator compensation, staff expenditures, and time

devoted to both plenary and committee sittings show that there

is substantial variability on these parameters both across cham-

bers and over time. A discussion of recent parliamentary reforms

made in Baden- Württemberg to increase legislative capacity and

pre- and post- reform comparison of the raw data provide inter-

nal validity for using these factors to measure legislative capac-

ity. We then present two summary measures of legislative capacity

in Germany’s parliaments— one built on the industry- standard

Squire Index (1992, 2007, 2017)— a measure cited or applied in

nearly 1,500 scientific publications— and one derived from a fac-

tor analytic decomposition of the data. The external validity of

the data is assessed in a simple analysis of electoral turnover in

© 2021 Washington University in St. Louis

310 Niels H. Appeldorn and David Fortunato

the parliaments. Taken together, the data, analysis, and discus-

sion suggest that the Landtage present a rich new testing ground

for political economic theories involving legislative capacity. We

conclude with several suggestions for future research, emphasizing

how the institutional context (parliamentary rather than presiden-

tial governmental designs) changes what we can and cannot learn

from these data relative to the original Squire Index of the United

States’ state legislatures. It is our hope that our colleagues will be

both motivated to use these data in their own research and collect

and disseminate similar data from within other federalist countries,

following Squire (1992) and this article, or across other groups of

national parliaments.

Research on Legislative Capacity

The capacity to distill policy preferences into policy pro-

posals and practice meaningful oversight of the executive varies

widely across legislatures. Legislative scholars typically think of

this capacity as the product of the time and resources available to

the chamber as well as individual legislators’ willingness and abil-

ity to invest in expertise (Squire 1992). As such, recent research has

found that higher- capacity legislatures are better able to discover

and react to voters’ changing policy preferences and therefore

more likely to deliver the policy outcomes that voters prefer (Lax

and Phillips 2012; Maestas 2000). Of course, the consequences of

capacity are much broader than just responsiveness. Over the past

few decades, we have learned that capacity may impact member

partisanship and diversity (Fiorina 1994; Squire 1992), coattail

effects and reelection rates (Berry, Berkman, and Schneiderman

2000; Carey, Niemi, and Powell 2000), the legislature’s control of

the bureaucracy (Boehmke and Shipan 2015), and even states’

ability to access the bond market (Fortunato and Turner 2018).

Notably, all of these articles have used the state legislatures

of the United States to test their hypotheses, and this is no doubt

in part because subnational legislatures offer an excellent oppor-

tunity to study the causes and consequences of capacity. They

operate under similar constitutional constraints, with similar

party systems, in similar cultural contexts, and can therefore pro-

vide a naturally controlled laboratory. Of course, it goes without

saying that these legislatures are important in their own right as

many policies that have profound impact on local populations are

crafted in and enacted by subnational legislatures. For example, in