Institutional rules that distribute power between majority and minority actors in parliament are central for understanding parliamentary processes and outcomes. Thus parliamentary actors have incentives to design and change rules to suit their individual purposes and to increase their ability to reach their substantive goals. However, our systematic theoretical and empirical knowledge on the extent to which such rules are changed and on how these changes can be explained is largely confined to the United States Congress. Research on European parliaments consists mainly of case studies that do not engage in systematic theorizing and hypothesis testing.
The paper takes first steps towards a comparative study of parliamentary rule changes in Western European democracies. Theoretically, it develops a rational choice model of the conditions favoring institutional reforms based on changes in the actor constellation that disturb established equilibrium institutions. From this model, we derive testable hypotheses on conditions that bring about institutional changes in favor of the parliamentary majority and minority, respectively. Empirically, we describe the occurrence of such changes based on novel comparative data on changes in parliamentary standing orders in Western European parliaments since 1945 and use this data to systematically test our hypotheses.
