Parliamentary Oversight: A Critical Review of Literature

Abstract

The main of this paper is to define what is meant by ‘legislative’ or parliamentary oversight. The other objective is to assess the role of the Legislature in the Budget Ex Post. The Objectives, tools, and mechanisms of parliamentary oversight shall be discussed. The review of the literature was used as a methodology in this paper. The review found that there are various definitions of parliamentary oversight The Portal for Parliamentary Development was a great source of literature that was reviewed and analyzed in this study. It was reviewed that different scholars define parliamentary oversight differently. Not all definitions capture all the key roles of parliamentary oversight. paper reviews several scholarly articles that provides various definitions of parliamentary oversight. Furthermore, it is revealed that government reporting and legislative scrutiny of public accounts is more common in parliamentary and semi-presidential systems than in presidential systems; even so, 84 percent of legislatures in presidential systems analyze financial reports from the government. From the literature reviewed, it has been concluded that the robust monitoring of the executive by the parliament is an indicator of good governance. Besides the parliament’s legislative function, it is through oversight that the parliament can ensure a balance of power and assert its role as the defender of the people’s interests. Keywords: Parliamentary Oversight; Legislative Oversight; Public Accounts Committee DOI: 10.7176/PPAR/12-6-01 Publication date: August 31 st 2022