Speaker:  Svitlana Chernykh is a Lecturer at the School of Politics and International Relations at the Australian National University. She received her PhD in 2011 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Prior to coming to ANU, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Oxford and a Junior Research Fellow at St Antony’s College. Her research focuses on democratisation, comparative political institutions (parties, constitutions, elections), and executive-legislative relations. Her work has appeared in journals such as Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Politics, Constitutional Political Economy, and Political Communication.

Paper Title:  Improving Cross-National Measurement of Legislative Power: Preliminary Results from an Expert Survey

Paper Abstract:  A large literature in comparative politics claims that variation in the power of legislatures has important implications for policy and inter-branch relations. Surprisingly however, unlike other political institutions such as executive power or judicial independence, very few attempts have been made to quantify legislative power. Fish and Kroenig (2009) have produced one of the few cross-national datasets of legislative power. Their original Parliamentary Powers Survey aimed to create an indicator of legislative strength by counting, with the help of an expert survey, the presence or absence of 32 distinct powers that can be held by parliaments. This assumes however, that these 32 different powers have the same level of importance and utility to a legislature. In reality, these powers may have different levels of significance: some may be very relevant for legislative strength, while others may be less so. Thus, in 2014 we fielded a follow-up survey that ascribed weights to these attributes of parliaments. In doing so, we created a weighted and more accurate cross-national measure of legislative power. We demonstrate the implications of this new measure in terms of our understanding of patterns of legislative strength, and provide a short example of how this new measure may be used in empirical studies.