Increasingly, scholars of legislative politics propose comparative analyses of roll call votes across different countries and parliaments. Yet parliamentary voting procedures under which roll call votes occur differ dramatically across countries and time. Ignoring these differences may, in the extreme, lead to meaningless comparisons. In this paper we present first results from an expert survey that covers more than 100 countries and gives detailed information on the parliamentary voting procedures. Our analyses, which focus on the rules that give parliamentary minorities rights against the majority in European national parliaments, find considerable variation casting doubt on many comparative analyses of parliamentary roll call voting records.
