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Measuring Legislative Power: An Expert Reweighting of the Fish‐Kroenig Parliamentary Powers Index
Author(s) -
Chernykh Svitlana,
Doyle David,
Power Timothy J.
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
legislative studies quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.728
H-Index - 54
eISSN - 1939-9162
pISSN - 0362-9805
DOI - 10.1111/lsq.12154
Subject(s) - legislature , index (typography) , power (physics) , fish <actinopterygii> , set (abstract data type) , politics , political science , power index , public economics , measure (data warehouse) , public administration , economics , computer science , law , data mining , fishery , biology , physics , mathematical economics , quantum mechanics , world wide web , programming language
The Parliamentary Powers Index (PPI) developed by Fish and Kroenig (2009) is the most important effort to date to measure legislative power in cross‐national perspective, but it has been criticized on both theoretical and methodological grounds. We build on the 32‐item PPI to develop an alternative indicator of legislative strength that is based on an expert survey of 296 political scientists in 2014. We reweight each of the powers by expert opinion, creating a new Weighted Legislative Powers Score (WLPS) for the 158 national legislatures in the Fish and Kroenig data set. In addition, the article reports the expert‐assigned weight factors for the entire set of 32 powers contained in the original PPI, thus allowing researchers to innovate alternative, disaggregated indicators of legislative power.