The Professionalization of Legislatures: Explaining Differences & Similarities on Subnational Level

Parliaments are pivotal institutions in political systems, but their reforms are highly discussed. By now, different patterns of professionalization can be found (e.g. professionalization of legislatures and legislators, Rosenthal 1998). Several but conflicting theoretical references and empirical findings are discussed in literature when explaining parliamentary reforms. All in all, differences between reform patterns are often explained by different institutional settings. But we can find different patterns within the same national political system, within the same institutional setting. This cannot be explained in a sufficient way yet. What we need is an integrated model, explaining these diverse ways of institutional professionalization. This integrated model will be developed in the paper. A first empirical test will also be done, by a comparative analysis of the subnational parliaments in Germany, which is an ideal case for the aim of this paper – explaining different patterns of professionalization within the same institutional context.