Parliament in Pandemic
With Dr. Sven Siefken, Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany. Dr. Petra Guasti, University of Jena, Germany, and Institute of Sociology, Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic. Profesor Ken Coghill, Swinburne University, Australia. And Professor Werner Patzelt Dresden University of Technology, Germany.
An international collaboration organized by the Research Committee 08 - Legislative Specialists (RCLS/RC08) of the International Political Science Association (IPSA).
The COVID-19 pandemic has been an unparalleled global crisis with far- reaching implications all over the world. But they have varied significantly between political systems. It is our goal to analyze the immediate and broader effects of the pandemic on parliaments through a global collaboration of parliamentary experts on different countries.
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Building on existing compilations, our collaboration will generate a unique dataset on parliamentary adjustments to the COVID-19 crisis which can be used for much research to come – and may be helpful for institutional learning among parliaments.
Our research is based on historical institutionalism in order to cater to the particular temporal dimension in the pandemic response. We assume…​
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​that the pandemic has hit representative institutions (shifting and sometimes fragile as they are) as an “external shock”;
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that this shock has consisted in sudden, new environmental challenges for parliaments, as they were posed by the “double shock” of the virus itself and the executive’s prerogative in such a situation;
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that this external shock interacted with system-internal procedures and patterns of attitudes and behavior, either by stopping routines and transforming them, or by stimulating the search for new procedures and the acquisition of new behavioral and attitudinal patterns;
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that either lacking institutional resilience or – so far unnoticed – institutional potential for power-preserving (or power-regaining) reforms has become visible due to the aforementioned factors.
Based on the “process tracing” by country case studies, we want to find out empirically …​​
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how exactly this double external shock has hit different parliaments;
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what those parliaments’ concrete reactions have been to this “double shock”, and what effects in terms of institutional change or shifts in power have resulted from them;
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what connections can be found between those reactions/consequences and the structural, procedural, attitudinal, and legal characteristics of the political systems under study.
Our research framework provides the basis for a deeper understanding of how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected parliamentary power in political systems across the globe by investigating five core perspectives:
(P1)
What were the immediate organizational adjustments of parliament?​​
(P2)
How has the fulfillment of parliamentary functions been affected?​​​​​​
(P3)
What has been the public perception of parliament’s role in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic?​
(P4)
Has parliament done its job correctly?​​​​​​​​​​​​
(P5)
What shifts of power have emerged between parliament and the executive and within parliament?​​​
Coalition governance beyond Europe
With Torbjörn Bergman, Johan Hellström, Andrea Fumarola (editors)
The goal of this project is to study what Strøm and colleagues (2008) define as the ‘life cycle’ of cabinets in parliamentary democracies. This covers the three main phases applied to cabinets – formation (birth), governance (life), and termination (death).
These phases are relevant to all parliamentary systems in democratic Europe. To date, there have also been important individual contributions to studying parts of the life cycle outside of Europe. In this project, in contrast, we apply the contemporary approach to the full coalition life cycle on political systems outside of Europe.
This will allow us to highlight comparative patterns of similarities and differences between parliamentary democracies around the world. In doing so, we provide an up-to-date analysis of six non-European parliamentary democracies, which all display patterns of European-style parliamentary politics: Australia, Canada, India, Israel, Japan, and New Zealand. In this research project Prof. Osnat Akirav is the expert of Israel.
