Measuring Legislative Power: An Expert Reweighting of the Fish‐Kroenig Parliamentary Powers Index

• Author: Svitlana Chernykh,David Doyle,Timothy J. Power
• Date: 01 May 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12154
• Published date: 01 May 2017

SVITLANA CHERNYKH

Australian National University

DAVID DOYLE

TIMOTHY J. POWER

University of Oxford

Measuring Legislative Power:

An Expert Reweighting of the

Fish-Kroenig Parliamentary

Powers Index

The Parliamentary Powers Index (PPI) developed by Fish and Kroenig (2009) is

the most important effort to date to measure legislative power in cross-national perspec-

tive, but it has been criticized on both theoretical and methodological grounds. We build

on the 32-item PPI to develop an alternative indicator of legislative strength that is based

on an expert survey of 296 political scientists in 2014. We reweight each of the powers

by expert opinion, creating a new Weighted Legislative Powers Score (WLPS) for the

158 national legislatures in the Fish and Kroenig data set. In addition, the article reports

the expert-assigned weight factors for the entire set of 32 powers contained in the

original PPI, thus allowing researchers to innovate alternative, disaggregated indicators

of legislative power.

How should we measure the power of legislative bodies? Surpris-

ingly, only in recent years has this question become central to

comparative legislative studies. Beginning in the mid-1990s, there was

an explosion in the production of cross-national political variables of all

types, including new indicators of presidential power, party system insti-

tutionalization, electoral system design, constitutional isomorphism,

cabinet stability, judicial independence, and the like.

1

Surprisingly

enough, legislative power was not initially a concern of this measure-

ment revolution. Empirically, the executive-centric nature of numerous

third-wave democracies and the classif‌ication of many new legislatures

as “reactive” seemed to downgrade their relevance. Theoretically, many

studies seemed to assume that the power of the assembly could be

inferred from the power of other institutions (for example, as the comple-

ment of presidential power in the context of executive-legislative

LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, 42, 2, May 2017 295

DOI: 10.1111/lsq.12154

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C2016 Washington University in St. Louis

relations) or could be adequately captured by looking to nonlegislative

elements of formal institutional design (for example, via assumptions

about legislative behavior based on electoral system incentives). Little

attention was given to direct measurement of powers specif‌ic to elected

legislatures.

This scenario changed in 2009 with the publication of Steven Fish

and Matthew Kroenig’s Handbook of National Legislatures. Relying on

a major expert survey using country specialists, Fish and Kroenig were

able to generate a measure of legislative power for 158 countries circa

2005. This indicator, known as the Parliamentary Powers Index (PPI),

essentially counts the presence or absence, in each country case, of 32

investigator-def‌ined attributes (“powers”) of legislative assemblies. Fish

and Kroenig’s work is by far the most ambitious effort to date to quantify

the power of legislative bodies and is a praiseworthy achievement by

any standard. However, some early reviewers of the indicator (e.g.,

Desposato 2012) have raised serious conceptual and methodological

objections to the PPI. Although several of these criticisms have been

thoughtfully rebutted by the original investigators (Fish and Kroenig

2012), some fundamental issues remain, and these recommend some

theoretical and operational adjustments to their original measurement of

legislative power.

In this article, we build on Fish and Kroenig’s excellent data-

collection efforts. We report the results of our own expert survey,

conducted in 2014, in which political scientists were asked to evaluate

the importance of the 32 researcher-def‌ined powers included in the PPI.

This allows us to reweight the component variables in the indicator, gen-

erating more nuanced distinctions about what is more or less important

with regard to the substantive content of legislative power. With these

new weighted measures of legislative power, we can reconstruct the PPI.

What our new indicator demonstrates is that while scholars do strongly

disagree with Fish and Kroenig’s original decision to weight each legis-

lative power equally, this has few practical implications for cross-

national measurement of legislative power. Our reweighted index is

highly correlated with the original PPI. This is good news for scholars of

legislative studies as we demonstrate that a widely adopted index in the

subdiscipline can be used robustly in cross-sectional research designs.

The article proceeds as follows. First, we review the main

criticisms applied to the PPI and propose some concrete solutions.

Second, we describe the methodology used in our own expert survey of

2014, which rewarded us with the input of 296 colleagues. Third, we

report our empirical results. We illustrate the expert upweighting or

downweighting of the 32 constituent variables posed by Fish and

296 Svitlana Chernykh, David Doyle, and Timothy J. Power