Even though there is no lack of studies identifying trends of ‘de-parliamentarisation’, ‘post-parliamentarism’, or even ‘post-democracy’ (to name but a few), at least two fundamental questions with respect to parliamentary change in established democracies remain heavily disputed: How can we assess parliamentary change? And which trends in parliamentary change can be identified? This paper argues that the major reason underlying these desiderata is the lacking integration of the normative and empirical literatures on parliamentarism. The paper aims to assess an implicit assumption of the normative literature on post-parliamentary governance, namely the growing importance of parliamentary legitimacy (ensuring the democratic character of the political process) as opposed to its effectiveness (i.e. ability to control the executive, which becomes more difficult due to the intergovernmental character of governance) and efficiency (of legislation, in which parliaments play a less and less important role). Taking the empirical debate on parliamentary agenda control as a starting point, the paper identifies three indicators of post-parliamentary governance: (a) a more proportional distribution of parliamentary time (since the major argument for an unequal distribution, the need to ensure parliamentary efficiency, becomes more and more disputable); (b) a growing independence of agenda control rules and their constitutional context (due to the looser coupling between different institutional regimes) and (c) a growing importance of non-partisan organisational resources within parliaments (in order to enable these to fulfil their legitimising role). A long-time analysis of agenda control in two contrasting cases (Britain and Germany) addresses the question whether there is a trend towards post-parliamentary governance amongst Western European parliaments.
