Research on 19th Century Legislatures: Present Contours and Future Directions

Bringing the Legislature Back In: Examining the Structural Effects of National Legislatures on Effective Democratic Governance

“…Effective democratic governance is conceptualized by the United Nations as a process of policymaking by governmental authorities that involves four important dimensions: (1) accountability; (2) effectiveness and efficiency; (3) openness and transparency; and (4) rule of law entrenchment and the absence of corruption (UN 2009). The underlying principle of effective democratic governance occurs when the public has the opportunity to participate in the political process without discrimination, through freedom of association, where the state's institutions generate tangible results reflecting public needs and demands using resources at their disposal with efficiency, where governments generate policies that are revealed to the public through open communications, and where governments apply legal frameworks and mechanisms fairly reflective of having incorruptible legal agencies (UN 2009). This definition is encapsulated by the World Bank's World Governance Indicators (WGI), widely used by scholars in capturing six important dimensions of governance, which include voice and accountability, governmental effectiveness, regulatory quality, control of corruption, the entrenchment of the rule of law, and political stability 3 .…”

“…Legislatures are also identified as incubators that build and sustain strong party systems, efficient bureaucracies and civic associations that can enhance higher levels of political accountability (Olson 1994). Further, legislative strength temporally precedes other institutional variables of significance in influencing variations on policy outcomes as they historically determine through bargaining how much political power is allocated to the executive over time, the extent to which other branches of government are constrained in terms of raw power and whether the legislature exhibits 'means' independence that conditions the extent and scope of judicial review by the courts (Olson and Norton 1996;Thompson and Silbey 1984). This is particularly evident in both the developing world and Western industrialized democracies (Mezey 1978(Mezey , 1983.…”

The Congress as Research Arena: An Uneasy Partnership between History and Political Science: A Review Essay

“…For home use, the dispersion of studies belonging to a topical fam throughout the series' 10 titles makes it almost mandatory to own the whole ser 8. Cooper and Brady's "Toward a Diachronic Analysis of Congress" (19 leads off title 2; a yeoman-like study of congressional and state roll-call studies by S (1981) is chapter 1 of title 3; a theoretically challenging but empirically limited p Elaine Swift (1987-88), drawing "lessons from congressional history," precedes substantial work on the electoral connection in title 4; and a useful survey of researc nineteenth-century legislatures by Thompson and Silbey (1984) introduces title 9. For home use, the dispersion of studies belonging to a topical fam throughout the series' 10 titles makes it almost mandatory to own the whole ser 8. Cooper and Brady's "Toward a Diachronic Analysis of Congress" (19 leads off title 2; a yeoman-like study of congressional and state roll-call studies by S (1981) is chapter 1 of title 3; a theoretically challenging but empirically limited p Elaine Swift (1987-88), drawing "lessons from congressional history," precedes substantial work on the electoral connection in title 4; and a useful survey of researc nineteenth-century legislatures by Thompson and Silbey (1984) introduces title 9.…”