Evaluating the Performance of Parliamentary Committees

Abstract

Assessing parliamentary committees’ performance is important as it can ensure good governance. This has prompted various scholars and practitioners to devise several evaluation methods over the past two decades. Some of the methods include measuring the number of important bills that committees pass, measuring the number of important issues that committees address and measuring the number of unimportant bills, which committees block. While all these methods are important in advancing the knowledge of assessing committees’ performance, they are not very useful to parliamentary actors such as parliamentarians as they lack the sense of contemporaneousness in their measurements. It is in this context that using documentary review and data from reliable sources such as World Governance Indicators, this paper innovatively presents a rule of thumb proposing that parliamentary committees’ performance should instantaneously, be measured by the extent to which actions of a particular committee are consistent with three E’s namely, economy, effectiveness and efficiency.