We’re doing a project involving political representation in different countries (related to the USA Today effect), and one thing we need is a measure of the relative power of the lower and upper house in each country. In the U.S., the power is divided roughly evenly between House and Senate; in the U.K., it’s nearly all in the House of Commons; in other countries, …? Is there a standard measure of this somewhere?
Lijphart has a pretty crude metric. Let me know if you find a better one!
You can get a strong/weak/none measure from Gerring, Thacker and Moreno (2005): http://www.bu.edu/sthacker/data.htm
I'm guessing George Tsebelis' book on Bicameralism has some comparative data, but I doubt it'll be that much finer-grained.
I don't know of any dataset like that. Could be a tricky thing to make one. If I recall correctly the house of lords is weaker in practice than they need be by statute. Similarly, while all spending bills have to originate in the house, in practice both houses and the executive write them. I imagine those classification issues are everywhere.
What about the Shapley-Shubik or Banzhaf power indices? I know those are used for individual legislators, not sure about bodies …
Tricky. Some countries (like Sweden) have only one house and no president. Others, have two houses and a president, and other still have one or two houses, a government with a prime minister, _and_ a president, all whom share power in very different ways.
Not sure how you'd even go about quantifying the vast differences in structure and working methods – how much is final say of the foreign policy worth, depending on how that is shared between those two to four actors, for instance? How much is a veto power worth, compared to the ability to inject new legislation?
I don't know about a standard measure, but I read a book a while back by George Tsebelis called Veto Players. The first part of the book describes a game-theory based schema for classifying governments by the number of veto players there are. The second part of the book uses various data sets (EU heavy) and legislative records to support / test his schema. It might be worth a look at what he used. He touches on Lijphart but I can't remember what, if any, interaction there is between them.
it depends on what exactly you are interested in: e.g. lawmaking & veto powers; cohesion, centralization. Lijphard, Tsebelis, Beck's database of political institutions, various federalisms measures tap into difference between lower and upper house….
I'm not convinced the House and Senate have roughly even power.
You may want to check out: The Handbook of National Legislatures A Global Survey by Fish and Kroenig (you can e-mail Matt Kroenig at Georgetown to see if he has the scores). You could also check Henisz POLCON database: http://www-management.wharton.upenn.edu/henisz/
To my knowledge, there is no good off-the-shelf measure. Worse, constructing one would be extremely difficult because there are so many dimensions involved: formal vs. informal authority, variation across issue areas (e.g., power to tax, power to veto, power to establish treaties), how legislators are selected, etc. A project at Binghamton University collected historical data on many of the formal aspects of this distribution of powers, but the data only run through 2005 and are not meant to get at informal variations. In any case, you can find those data at the URL below, and the codebook gives a good feel for the complexity of the problem:
http://www2.binghamton.edu/political-science/inst…