Why Change When We Can Stay the Same? Institutional Change in Legislative Budgeting in Southern Africa

Recent evidence suggests that legislatures in Southern Africa are becoming active in the budget process, particularly in the formulation phase. These developments are surprising given their Westminster heritage, long periods of executive dominance, and longstanding capacity constraints. Why change, when these legislatures could simply stay the same? This paper tests four possible explanations against the documented trends, applying data collected through extensive fieldwork in Southern Africa over the course of the 2016/2017 fiscal year, complimented by publicly available cross-national historical records. Results find leading political, legal, and technical explanations are unable to fully account for the organisational and behavioural changes underway. Instead, evidence suggests a process of legislative socialisation, precipitated by US-based legislative assistance programmes around the millennium, may have planted the seeds that pushed this institutional trajectory along. This means that scholarship on legislatures would do well to consider the ways in which a quintessentially national institution is ultimately shaped not by citizens, but by international influences. And parliaments in Africa might wish to think carefully about with whom they socialise, if self-stewardship, and home-grown values are prized.