Has legislative power declined globally?

Abstract

ABSTRACT In recent years several scholars have argued that there has been a weakening of the power of national legislatures. This paper addresses two empirical questions: Has global legislative power indeed declined (as has been claimed)? And if so, what factors might explain where legislative power has declined and where it has not? Using data from the Varieties of Democracy (V-dem) project from 1990 to 2020 to measure changes in legislative power, I find that the decline of legislative power has not been monotonic globally, and that there is considerable variation by countries in the world. In this paper, I test a set of institutional, economic, cultural and global explanations for legislative decline that has been proposed by the literature and find that much of this literature is either not supported, or only partially supported.