The Legislative Agenda in 13 African Countries: A Comprehensive Database

• Published date: 01 August 2023
• Author: Nikolaos Frantzeskakis,Henrik Bech Seeberg
• Date: 01 August 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12404

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LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, 48, 3, August 2023

DOI: 10.1111/lsq.12404

NIKOLAOS FRANTZESKAKIS

Michigan State University

HENRIK BECH SEEBERG

Aarhus University

The Legislative Agenda in 13

African Countries: A Comprehensive

Database

While African legislatures have been receiving increasing academic atten-

tion in recent years, efforts to expand our understanding of these institutional

bodies have been hampered by a dearth of reliable quantitative data regard-

ing their activity and output. To rectify this issue, we have collected and issue-

classified data on the legislative agenda in 13 African countries. We leverage

this new dataset to explore how democratic development affects the legislative

agenda. We show that legislatures in more democratic countries have a larger,

broader, and more dynamic agenda, and we propose an extensive future research

agenda for legislative politics in Africa.

Traditionally, legislatures in Africa have been considered weak

institutions with marginal influence on politics (Prempeh 2008;

Thomas and Sissokho 2005). However, an ongoing wave of re-

search is producing important new insights concerning the value

of these institutions (e.g., Ofosu2019; Opalo2020) and the balance

of power within the legislature (e.g., Collord2016; Demarest2021;

Opalo2019). Yet as systematic data collection across African leg-

islatures over time is highly demanding, there is currently no time-

series dataset on the output of the legislatures in the region. This

lack of data impedes our capacity to answer even simple descrip-

tive questions like: (1) How many bills or laws are discussed on the

floor? (2) What kinds of issues attract the attention of legislators?

(3) Are there differences across regimes?

© 2022 The Authors. Legislative Studies Quarterly published by Wiley

Periodicals LLC on behalf of Washington University in St. Louis.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons

Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and

reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited

and is not used for commercial purposes.

624 Nikolaos Frantzeskakis and Henrik Bech Seeberg

In a period of rapid change in the levels of parliamentary in-

stitutionalization, this remains a critical blind spot. The legislative

agenda (i.e., the policy topics debated in parliament) is at the core

of representative democracy. Multiple topics, including crime, un-

employment, corruption, and poverty, call for the attention of the

representatives in the legislature— far more topics than any legisla-

ture can possibly attend to (Baumgartner and Jones2005). Hence,

few topics make it onto the legislative agenda and are debated on

the parliament floor. The legislative agenda, typically measured

through the bills and laws in parliament, is at the end of a longer

political decision- making process and marks the ultimate alloca-

tion of the political agenda: Which topics become the subject of

serious political attention and possible policy change?

This study introduces a new dataset on the legislative agenda

in 13 African countries over time. We collected and issue catego-

rized bills and laws in 13 legislatures for which we could find ac-

cessible data, in many cases since the early 2000s. This allows us to

immediately discover the topics on the legislative agenda in a par-

ticular country in a particular year. This will be a major benefit for

future research on African legislatures. To set the stage for an ac-

celeration in legislative research in Africa, we match this data with

a host of relevant variables in the V- Dem. Project (Coppedge et al.

2021) and the Afrobarometer (www.afrob arome ter.org). Since we

use the well- established codebook developed by the Comparative

Agendas Project (Baumgartner et al. 2019) to categorize the 13 leg-

islative agendas, these data can be easily merged with existing and

extensive data sources on legislative agendas in mainly Western

countries (available at www.compa rativ eagen das.net) as well as

the proliferating research agenda on legislatures in Latin America

(e.g., Alemán 2006; Crisp and Schibber 2014 ; Morgenstern and

Nacif 2002). Hence, we enrich the general research agenda on

legislatures and legislative agendas on a global scale, we expand

the scope of variation dramatically, and we provide a comparative

case to learn about African legislatures.

To showcase the value of these data and illustrate how they

might be used, we provide an initial analysis of the relationship

between democratic development within and across African coun-

tries and the shape of the legislative agenda. We use the V- Dem data

to measure democratic development and employ well- established

measures from the policy- agenda literature to distinguish between

the size, width, and stability of the legislative agendas (Chaqués-

Bonafont et al.2020). In accordance with our expectations, our

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The Legislative Agenda in 13 African Countries:

A Comprehensive Database

empirical analysis shows that the legislative agendas of our 13

African countries differ significantly depending on the level of

democratic development. We show that the legislative agenda is

larger— and more diverse— in more democratic countries. In addi-

tion, when the level of democracy is higher, the agenda is more dy-

namic over time, with different issues emerging. In the conclusion,

we discuss how this new dataset can be used to address important

but hitherto overlooked questions regarding African legislative

politics.

African Legislatures

A recent wave of research focuses on the inner workings (i.e.,

the political organization) of legislatures in Africa and beyond

and their effect on policy outcomes (e.g., Collord2016; Gandhi

et al.2020; Opalo 2020; Williamson and Magaloni2020). These

studies indicate how the diverse ways in which these legislatures

function are tailored to their specific political realities (Gandhi et

al.2020) and that, granted the authority, various elites attempt to

influence the final policy product using the institutional tools at

their disposal (Williamson and Magaloni2020). In environments

where electoral contests are more competitive, the executive is

often less capable of exerting this degree of control, despite their

survival in office depending on it.

Several African countries displayed this lack of total control

in presidential bids to extend or abolish executive term limits; usu-

ally, the executive is successful in such attempts. When they do fail,

however, it is often due to resistance in parliament (Cassani2020).

Critically, such resistance takes place within the ranks of both op-

position and government party MPs. Zambia in 2001 offers a case

in point, where the parliament refused to remove the term- limit

clause included in the constitution despite the president’s party

being a dominant force in the assembly (McKie2019).

Even in countries where the executive managed to extend its

tenure, MPs may remain hard to control. In Uganda, where the

National Resistance Movement has maintained an uninterrupted

grasp on power since its creation in 1986, Museveni must often

exert considerable effort and make concessions to bring unruly

MPs in line. Because of this dynamic, MPs occasionally band to-

gether and manage to force policy change. In 2012, for example,

opposition and ruling party MPs successfully pushed for substan-

tial health service spending (Collord2016).