Hostages to Fortune? Group Representation in the Committee Systems of Post-Communist Legislatures

Two and a half decades after the collapse of communism, we know surprisingly little about the committee systems of Central and East European legislatures. With a few notable exceptions (Kopecky 2001, Olson and Crowther 2002, Olson and Ilonszki 2011), the literature has largely ignored the role that committees have played in the emergence of strong legislatures in the (mostly parliamentary) political systems in post-communist Europe. This paper starts from the empirical observation that, although the Inter-Parliamentary Union currently lists dozens of specialised committees on gender equality and/or ethnic minorities in legislatures across the world, these have been seldom examined from a theoretical perspective. The central concern of this paper is with the question of whether, and how, these committees have become institutionalised in the legislative politics, and how such processes of institutionalisation have shaped the politics of group representation in the region. I draw on Levitsky and Murillo’s (2009) two-dimensional model of variation in institutional strength in arguing that, while standing committees on national minorities helped to establish and enforce the norms of ethnic minority representation, committee structures on gender equality have been considerably more unstable and therefore less successful in achieving the institutional strength required for successfully representing women’s interests. The paper begins with an overview of the committee systems of post-communist legislatures, and then discusses ethnic minority committees and gender-focused committees respectively. The case studies are Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia between 1990 and 2015.