It is often complained that the social sciences are really no more than pseudo‐sciences. One defence mechanism much used by social scientists is to employ statistics and measurements wherever possible. This handbook proposes to “assess the strength of the national legislature of every country in the world with a population of at least a half million inhabitants” (though it omits Montenegro, population 600,000). The strength is evaluated by means of a Legislative Powers Survey, comprising 32 questions designed to calculate:
- 1.
The legislature's influence over the executive, e.g. can it dismiss the executive?
- 2.
Its institutional autonomy, e.g. has the executive a veto over legislative acts?
- 3.
Its specific powers, e.g. can it make the decision on a declaration of war? and
- 4.
Its institutional capacity, e.g. does it meet regularly?
Detailed explanations are provided about the significance of the questions chosen. Having compiled the questionnaire, the authors, being well aware that the constitution of a state would not usually reflect every aspect of its political practice, attempted to find five or more academic experts for each country to fill in the answers. Though this goal proved unattainable for a number of states, mostly the authoritarian ones, they amassed a total of 800 (their names, but not their qualifications, are listed) for 158 countries. The date of compilation is taken as 2006/2007, but a few references are later.
Each entry provides a short historical account of the political situation of the relevant legislature, followed by answers to the 32 questions; these are not just “yes” or “no”, but descriptive surveys, often quoting verbatim from the constitution, and noting also where the real political practice of the legislature differs from the theoretical one. A bibliography of 1,100 books and articles demonstrates the extent of the research which has gone into this analysis.
The scoring system would give an all‐powerful legislature a score of 1, and a totally impotent one, 0. In the event, the highest recorded scores are 0.84 (for Italy, Germany, and Mongolia) and the lowest 0 (for Myanmar, where the Parliament has been suspended since 1988, and Somalia, where the State itself appears powerless). The median score is, coincidentally, 0.5. The analytical text suggests that in practice, a parliament with a score of 0.4 or below has no real power. 51 are placed in this category, all but Belarus being in the Third World, whereas all 22 with a score of 0.75 or above are in Europe, with the surprising exception of Mongolia.
However, it may be that the apparent precision of such figures is not fully justified. One or two of the questions seem dubious. For instance, the lack of a directly elected presidency is always counted as a positive score, even when it is because the country has an autocratic monarch. Again, the presence of many legislators who have served several terms is always counted as positive, even when that is due to the continuous rule of a single party. There are some aspects of political life which do not appear in the questionnaire, above all that of whether elections are free and fair. The real political situation of a country may diverge from the theoretical one to a greater degree than the authors have allowed for. Russia, for example, which a few years ago was said to have been ruled by an authoritarian President, is now – without any change in the Constitution – controlled by an all‐powerful Prime Minister (who happens to be the same person), yet this does not mean that the Duma is any stronger than it was. In a less extreme case, it is difficult for a British observer to believe that the Parliament of this country – tightly controlled as it is by party whips subservient to the will of the Prime Minister – is, as its score suggests, more powerful than the US Congress. The substantial amount of constitutional data and analysis so assiduously collected by the authors provides a valuable overview of their chosen subject for students of political science, but the exact numerical scores derived from it should not be taken too literally.
