Mapping and Explaining Parliamentary Rule Changes in Europe: A Research Program

• Published date: 01 February 2016
• Author: Julia F. Keh,Peter Meißner,Ulrich Sieberer,Wolfgang C. Müller
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12106
• Date: 01 February 2016

ULRICH SIEBERER

PETER MEIßNER

JULIA F. KEH

University of Konstanz

WOLFGANG C. M€

ULLER

University of Vienna

Mapping and Explaining

Parliamentary Rule Changes in

Europe: A Research Program

We outline a comprehensive research program on institutional reforms in Euro-

pean parliaments. Original data show that parliamentary rules in Western European

parliaments have been changed frequently and massively during the period from 1945

to 2010 suggesting that actors use institutional reforms as a distinct strategy to pursue

their substantive goals. We discuss how institutional instability affects existing theoreti-

cal and empirical arguments about institutional effects. Furthermore, we present four

ideal-typical approaches to analyzing rule changes, present new software tools for identi-

fying and coding changes in large text corpora, and demonstrate their usefulness for

valid measurement of the overall change between subsequent text versions.

Over the last two decades, the new institutionalism, especially of

the rational choice variant, has become the predominant paradigm of

comparative legislative research. This body of research has greatly

advanced our theoretical and empirical understanding of how institu-

tional rules affect parliamentary behavior and outcomes (for a review,

see M€

uller and Sieberer 2014). Most of this research treats institutions as

exogenous to study their effects on behavior. While this assumption is

analytically useful and often methodologically necessary to generate

equilibrium predictions of institutional effects (Diermeier and Krehbiel

2003), it is empirically problematic. There are prominent examples of

changes in theoretically central parliamentary rules: the French opposi-

tion got relevant access to the parliamentary agenda in 2008, the British

Prime Minister lost his power to unilaterally dissolve parliament and call

new elections in 2011, and the Italian Chamber of Deputies drastically

reduced the use of secret votes for legislation in 1988. These examples

are not just exceptions from a rule of stability. As we show below,

LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, 41, 1, February 2016 61

DOI: 10.1111/lsq.12106

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C2016 Washington University in St. Louis

parliamentary rules in Western European parliaments are changed

frequently and massively.

This f‌inding raises two problems. First, it begs the theoretical ques-

tion under what conditions we have to take rule change into account to

arrive at valid inferences about institutional effects. Second, frequent

change indicates that static measures of parliamentary rules which are

frequently employed in the literature as explanatory variables may not

be valid over time.

In this article, we outline a comprehensive research program that

addresses these problems and more generally studies the politics of

institutional change in Western European parliaments since 1945.

1

This

research program is relevant and promising for at least three reasons.

First, as formal parliamentary rules affect processes and outcomes,

reforming these rules provides parliamentary actors with a distinct strat-

egy to further their substantive goals. Describing and explaining such

reforms is thus interesting in its own right and relevant for understanding

broader dynamics of parliamentary politics. Second, institutional design

and change is one of the most important frontiers of the new institution-

alist research program more generally. Parliamentary rules are a

particularly useful object for studying under which conditions political

actors shift from taking existing rules as granted to actively seeking to

redesign them because these rules can usually be altered by the very

same actors bound by them. Many of the conceptual arguments and

methodological tools we develop to study parliamentary rule change can

be applied to reforms in any type of formal institutions. Third, the data

generated by our project will be a major resource for scholars in compar-

ative legislative studies because they allow time-specif‌ic and dynamic

measures of any aspect of parliamentary rules in 16 Western European

parliaments over a period of more than 60 years.

Our ambition in this article relates primarily to conceptual issues,

descriptive analysis, and setting an agenda for future research. In the

next section, we present f‌irst systematic data on the frequency and

amount of parliamentary rule changes in 15 European parliaments from

1945 until 2010 demonstrating that these rules are far from stable. On

this basis, the third section provides an overview of how existing litera-

ture deals with institutional change in parliament both theoretically and

empirically. Building on the nested-games framework (Diermeier and

Krehbiel 2003; Ostrom 2005), we argue that assuming institutional

stability is theoretically problematic if actors adapt their strategies based

on their expectation of institutional change as is arguably the case when

looking at the usage of obstructive powers in parliament. Furthermore,

we identify various longitudinal studies that use static institutional

62 Ulrich Sieberer et al.