A Complete History of Parliamentary Debates in Zambia

• In Event: Institutions and Parties

Abstract

We present a unique dataset on parliamentary debates in Zambia from 1924 to 2022. This corpus spans the complete history of Zambia’s current National Assembly, back to the creation of the Legislative Council of Northern Rhodesia. Over the course of the century, Zambia changed from an authoritarian colony under British rule, via an independent one-party dictatorship, to a multiparty presidential system. We outline how these regimes implied vastly different accountability structures and identify whether and how this affected both the agenda setting and the level of visible conflict within the institution. We investigate whether these changes can be attributed to changed behavior by individual MPs, or to the changed composition of the parliament. In sum, our corpus provides new leverage on questions related to legislative politics under autocratic and democratic rule.

Authors

• Haakon Gjerløw, Peace Research Institute Oslo

• Anton Mynster Kronborg, University of Oslo

• Lise Rakner, University of Bergen

• Øyvind Stiansen, University of Oslo