Paradoxes of legislatures

Daedalus, Summer 2007 by Loewenberg, Gerhard

A specific example taken from the period of democratization after World War II can illustrate the point. A group of members of the new postwar German parliament, on a study trip to Washington in 1949, was impressed by the hearings procedure of the U.S. Congress. Their enthusiasm led to the adoption of hearings in the rules of the German Bundestag in 1951. But in the following fourteen years only nine days of committee hearings took place among all of the Bundestag's committees. Suddenly, in 1968, the number of hearings exploded. In the most recent term of the Bundestag there were over three hundred days of committee hearings. What had happened was that, for completely unrelated reasons, the executive-legislative relationship changed in Germany in the 1960s, giving to legislative hearings a relevant political function they had not had before. In the absence of the Congressional blueprint, the hearings procedure would not have developed. But without internal changes in German politics it would not have thrived.

In the contemporary world, the transfer of institutional blueprints is no longer limited to countries that adjoin each other geographically, or that speak the same language, as once was the case. And the rate at which legislatures have been newly established or reestablished in the last thirty years is unprecedented. Political scientists have been struggling to identify the determinants of success in transplanting legislatures. The paradox is that legislatures are representations of a nation's political culture and therefore vary as national cultures do, and yet they have genetic properties that none of them can escape. The result can be a mutation, either interesting, vital, or, occasionally, debilitating. The failure of parliaments in post -World War I Europe provides many examples of the morbidity of parliaments. Some parliaments in effect dissolved themselves, like the German Reichstag in 1933, and others became so incapable of acting that they easily fell victim to dictators.

I have explained that the paradoxes of legislatures - the apparent contradictions they exhibit - result from the evolution of medieval parliaments into instruments of democracy. On the surface legislatures may appear as democratic, majoritarian, and egalitarian institutions. But experience shows that, to be effective, they must accept internal hierarchies ; they must adopt procedures that structure their voting sequence and constrain majority rule ; they must at least partly hide their decision-making processes from their constituents ; and they must symbolize their national distinctiveness while also accepting certain structural imperatives.

These contradictions feed public cynicism toward legislatures as institutions. That cynicism is often especially marked among the captains of industry. Their criticism is not only specific to the issues that concern business leaders. It extends to the legislature's characteristic mode of procedure, which consists of decentralized authority, bargaining, compromise, and partisanship - all of which stand in sharp contrast to the strictly hierarchical structure of decision making common in much of the business world.