The Inaugural General Conference of the ECPR Standing Group on Parliaments, Dublin, June 24-27, 2012
Simon Hug
Département de science politique et relations internationales,
Université de Genève
Email: simon.hug@unige.ch
Simone Wegmann
Département de science politique et relations internationales,
Université de Genève
Email: simone.wegmann@unige.ch
Reto Wüest
Département de science politique et relations internationales,
Université de Genève
Email: reto.wuest@unige.ch
Parliamentary Voting Procedures in Comparison
Increasingly, scholars of legislative politics propose comparative analyses of roll call votes across different countries and parliaments. Yet parliamentary voting procedures under which roll call votes occur differ dramatically across contexts and time. Ignoring these cross-country and cross-temporal variations may, in the extreme, lead to meaningless comparisons. So far, however, very little systematic and comprehensive information is available on the exact rules under which votes are taken on parliamentary floors.
The Inter-Parliamentary Union (1986) provides a systematic but now rather dated source for institutional rules of voting in parliaments, whereas more recent datasets provide only partial coverage of legislatures. The paper we propose thus intends to address the following research question: under what circumstances are roll call votes requested in national parliaments?
To answer this question, we draw on an expert survey, covering more than 100 countries around the world, that has detailed information on the procedural rules under which roll call votes occur. Based on this original dataset, our analyses focus on the rules that give individual members and/or minority parties rights against the parliamentary majority. We find considerable variation, which casts doubt on the results of many comparative analyses based on parliamentary voting records. Our findings have both theoretical and empirical importance: they provide a starting point for future theory-building to better understand the reasons for which roll call votes occur, and for attempts to correct for potential biases in inferences about legislative behavior that are based on selective roll call records.