Measuring Floor Agenda Power in Parliamentary Democracies

The power to set the floor agenda is a critical political resource in democratic legislatures. Accurate measurement of agenda power is therefore essential for understanding legislative processes and outcomes. In this paper, we introduce a new index of floor agenda power in parliamentary systems. Focusing on authority codified in formal parliamentary rules, we construct a time series of floor agenda power for 17 western and eastern European democracies from 1945 to the present. We validate the index through convergent validation and demonstrate how it captures meaningful variation across countries and over time. Finally, we discuss how the new measure can contribute to future research.