Who Sits Where? The Parliamentary Power Index and Committee Membership

• In Event: Innovative Approaches to European Legislative Processes

Abstract

Recent advances in the availability of parliamentary data across countries, such as speeches or roll-call votes, have led legislative scholars to increase their focus on the attitudes and behavior of individual Members of Parliament (MPs). This allows us to have a better understanding of topics such as (re)selection, rebellion or compliance with the party line, leadership contests, and substantive representation of women and minorities. However, due to the lack of more fine-grained consolidated data, the distribution of power within parliamentary parties has often been restricted to a leadership-backbench dichotomy, whereby MPs belong to only one of these two categories. While this dichotomy is both substantially well-established as well as (mostly) easy to define, we propose to go significantly beyond this definition and look at other steps on this continuum. Parliamentary power comes from different sources, which leads to different gradations of power: for example, an MP who is not a party leader but chairs the Budget and Taxes committee is certainly more prestigious within parliament and within their party than a backbencher who is only a member of the Sports committee. These differences, which are erased when categorizing all MPs as either leader or backbencher, may have important implications to understand MPs' behavior in areas such as party loyalty, substantive and territorial representation, and promotion and cabinet appointment. By collecting original data on individual committee membership for 19 democracies between 1987 and 2020, and using a hierarchy across policy areas which treat some as more important than others, we propose an index that captures the aggregate level of parliamentary power for each member of parliament in relation to their party: the Parliamentary Power Index (PPI). Given the similar hierarchical structure of parliaments across the democratic world, we show this measure is cross-nationally comparable and present tests showing that the PPI is a valid and reliable measure, which correlates with other indicators of prestige within one's party. Moreover, by making available the original dataset with individual MPs' committee assignments across nineteen countries for more than three decades, we also provide researchers with an important tool to study legislators' behavior.

Authors

• Jens Wäckerle, University of Cologne

• Danielle Pullan, University of Cologne / Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies

• Bruno de Paula Castanho Silva, University of Cologne