Parliamentary Institutions: Institutional Varieties

How to evaluate parliaments, committees and second chambers? What theoretical framework can we use and what conclusions can we draw from empirical studies? Fish has developed the Parliamentary Power Index (PPI) to measure the strength of a parliament. He concludes that powerful legislature will assure both horizontal and vertical accountability. Fish shows the evidence that the strength of the national legislature may be an institutional key to democratization. He recommends constitutional reforms to empower legislatures in constitutions where the parliament is institutionally weak. Moreover, PPI should be improved (especially from the perspective of Baltic states it seems ill-defined). Mughan and Patterson emphasizes that second chambers remain “essentially contested institutions”. They have proposed that the two central functions of second chambers are “representation” and “stability” (or “redundancy” as referred in other literature).…