Analyzing Organization in Parliaments: Causes and Consequences

Parliaments and legislatures are present throughout the world and play a central role in almost all political systems. They engage in a wide variety of tasks including linking citizens to the government, executive oversight, and policy making. However, even if extensive powers are formally granted, parliaments run the risk of being wholly ineffective in their operation. How parliaments organize, and in particular how they allow for an effective division of labor between MPs, determines in large part their actual influence vis à-vis the executive. There is a large variation in how parliaments choose to organize themselves. By far the largest amount of comparative scholarly attention is given to the issue of committees as the core organizational feature of parliaments. While the concepts derived from US congressional theories proved to be somewhat helpful to understand the process of legislative organization there is agreement among scholars that the study of the internal organization of parliaments needs to evolve from drawing too heavily on the congressional literature. More comparative research is needed in order to arrive at a deeper understanding of legislative organization which take into account cross-national variation in political culture and rules. The proposed workshop aims to explore, theoretically and empirically, the nature and evolution of parliamentary committee systems and the consequences of such variation in design. Core questions to be addressed include: (1) descriptively, what do committee systems look like in different parliaments and how have committee systems evolved over time, for example are they becoming more- or less- significant? (2) What explains cross-national and over-time variations, and (3), what are the consequences of such variation in how parliaments are organized for parliament and the wider political system and public policy.