Parliaments Under Fire: Conceptualizing and Operationalizing Legislative Closure

• In Event: Parliaments Under Fire: Explaining Legislative Closures

Abstract

Why do political leaders close down legislatures? This question has been notably absent in the recent literature on nominally democratic institutions in authoritarian regimes – work that has demonstrated how non-democratic legislative assemblies can be more than merely “rubber stamps”. There is, in short, a worrying shallowness of existing data about, and scholarship on, parliamentary shutdowns around the world. This paper addresses this gap, pushing knowledge forward conceptually, theoretically, and empirically. Firstly, the paper assesses coding decisions in the V-Dem and Cheibub, Gandhi, and Vreeland (CGV, 2010) datasets for all countries in the post-World War II period regarding whether a legislature is open or closed in each country-year – something that demonstrates the frequent discrepancies between V-Dem and CGV, as well as incorrect and missed codings. From this starting point, the paper proposes an expert recoding of legislative closure for both datasets. Secondly, the paper moves beyond the simplistic focus on whether a legislative body is open in a particular year to a nuanced, conceptual focus on what, in fact, we mean by “legislative closure”. This includes a new typology of different modes of legislative closure – types that are fleshed out with representative empirical case studies. Finally, the paper places legislative closure in theoretical context by locating closure in the broader “menu of legislative manipulation” – the formal and informal ways that both executive and legislative actors use to affect parliamentary powers – which the authors explore in more detail elsewhere.

Authors

• Benjamin Harry Noble, University College London

• Lindsay J. Benstead, Portland State University

• Michaela Collord, University of Oxford

• Margaret Hanson, Arizona State University

• Allison Spencer Hartnett, University of Southern California

• Lee Morgenbesser, Griffith University

• Paul J. Schuler, University of Arizona

• Matthew Charles Wilson, University of South Carolina

• Josef Woldense, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities