The paper discusses how the variation of the strength of parliaments in Africa can be explained by analyzing their niche conditions in combination with researching the memetic (that is cultural shaped) structure of their surrounding societies. The institutional architecture of parliaments is highly determined by cultural patterns that are build out of the history of a society and replicated from one cohort generation to another. The hierarchy of these ‘memes’ is mirrored in the arrangement of the social reality in a parliament: what is evident between all actors in a parliament shapes their daily habits. It is also shown that allocating resources out of their environment by performing certain functions for it is the main purpose of every parliament. These functions are assured and processed by an amount of institutional mechanisms that work quite automatic inside social institutions like parliaments. With this in mind it is obvious that niche actors with the most resources transferred to the parliament have the most influence on it. As a result, parliaments can not only be described by investigating their memetic structures and their niche conditions, they can also be compared. Therefore, the paper attempts a comparison of the Ghanaian and the Cameroonian parliaments, which are quite different. While Ghana is widely stable and working democracy with an autonomous parliament, Cameroon is an authoritarian system with a parliament heavily depending on the governing elites. The thoughts of the Evolutional Institutionalism presented at the beginning can explain these differences alongside the same research and comparison methods and can come to a conclusion that goes farther than a simple enumeration of facts.
