Paradoxes of legislatures

Daedalus, Summer 2007 by Loewenberg, Gerhard

The paradox of transparency has the curious aspect that members try to ingratiate themselves with their constituents by criticizing the institution to which they belong. They run for reelection by running against Congress, in effect blaming their colleagues for everything that the public regards as wrong with Congress. So public criticism of Congress can exist hand-in-hand with each constituency's approval of its own member of Congress. This explains why incumbents are rarely defeated despite the fact that public support of Congress has ranged between just 8 and 28 percent in the last thirty-five years.16 Getting transparency right is a Goldilocks problem : not too little but also not too much.

The fourth paradox of legislatures is that they look alike in so many respects across the world, and yet the legitimacy of each legislature rests on its assertion that it represents a particular people and their culture. As a political institution, every legislature has organizational characteristics in common with every other legislature. This makes it possible to compare them and for countries to copy them from each other. But in spite of their structural commonalities - that their members are equal to each other, that they are 'representatives,' that they are not organized hierarchically - they take various forms from country to country : their members are chosen by different electoral systems ; their members have many nation-specific attributes ; their party groupings, their informal norms of behavior, and their influence within their separate political systerns all differ.

Over their long histories, legislatures have influenced each other across national and cultural boundaries. This interesting diffusion of procedures and practices can be traced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from England to America, in the nineteenth century from the British to the French and Belgian parliaments, from them to parliaments in Central Europe, and from the United States to Latin America. In the twentieth century there was institutional transfer from the British and French parliaments to the parliaments of their former colonies, and from Western and Central European parliaments to the parliaments of newly democratic states in Eastern Europe. The paradox is that legislatures are countryspecific, yet they have often been imitated by one country from another, or imposed by one country on another.

The 'exportability' of legislatures has always been a matter of dispute, but especially in the last thirty years during the so-called third wave of democratization - the proliferation of open, competitive political systems in Latin America, and in Southern and East Central Europe. These newly democratic countries invariably designed legislatures as parts of their political systems, building on their own indigenous assemblies. They have grafted onto their own traditional institutions some features from either the U.S. Congress - in the case of most Latin American countries - or from Western European parliaments - in the case of countries in Southern or East Central Europe. But the results of these exports have varied greatly, from the recent success of institutional transfer to Southern and Eastern Europe, to its frequent failures in Africa and the Middle East. Though blueprints are exportable, applying them in new settings requires adaptation to indigenous political characteristics, which has very uncertain results and unanticipated consequences.