The Metronome of Legislation: Measuring the Pace of the German Legislature

How fast are law-making processes, how often do lawmakers exploit institutional fast lanes and to what degree is a “fast” process more accelerated than a “normal” one? To this day, political science has not managed to give an answer to such time-related questions in a quantitative manner, and for example to inform quantitatively about the effects of fast legislation on parliamentary oversight: „such a study might involve an analysis of the number of committees to which a bill is referred …, the number of hearings scheduled, the number of expert witnesses ... At the moment, such data is not available in a systematic fashion“ [1]. Instead, quantitative research tries to analyse legislative pace by using duration as proxy. However, duration does not give sufficient insights into the actual parliamentary participation and oversight as a bill might very well just “wait” in the process for a considerable amount of time. Hence, it is essential to examine what actually happens within a given duration. The paper puts its scientific focus on this challenge: In analogy to the tempo of music, the beats per minute, the paper conceptualises a quantitative measure for legislative pace. To do so it is necessary to identify what exactly happens at what point in time during the law-making process and to qualify the “beats”. Moreover, the paper presents a database which lists every single procedural step within any given legislature for each adopted law between autumn 1990 and autumn 2013 (from the twelfth to the seventeens electoral period of the German Bundestag). The foundation of all raw data is formed by the entire body of indexes of legislative material, issued and published for every adopted law by the Parliamentary Archives of the German Bundestag. This raw data was extracted and transformed into a machine readable representation. Additional data was integrated from other sources, e.g. DIP-Bundestag. My results reveal for example that the German government and the parliamentarian government factions – which have power over the political time-agenda – rarely are able (or willing) to speed up the legislative process. Moreover the results show to what extend an institutional fast lane can be stretched, e.g. when comparing the pace of the so-called “Finanzmarkstabilisierungsgesetz” (financial market stabilisation law) in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis with all other laws in this legislative period. This quantification has no end in itself. It is one possibility to place the (subjective) temporal perception of law-making procedures in the overall context of legislature and thus to enriche the (interpretative) policy analysis. The paper has important implications for the study of temporality in policy analysis by establishing a database to measure and compare duration, pace and acceleration of law making. Moreover, the database makes legislative processes generally more transparent and provides a solid foundation for future research. References [1] Martin/Vanberg (2004): Policing the Bargain. Coalition Government and Parliamentary Scrutiny. American Journal of Political Science 48, pp. 13–27.