PARLIAMENT AND DEMOCRACY - Inter-Parliamentary Union

An effective parliament (I): The national level I 115
6. An effective parliament (I):
The national level
This and the following chapter will consider ways in which parliaments
organise themselves effectively to carry out their key functions. Although
‘effectiveness’ may not at first sight seem a distinctively democratic value, it
becomes so where the functions performed are those necessary to the working
of the democratic process: law making, oversight of the executive, financial
control, and so on. Electorates are not well served if parliaments do not have
sufficient resources to carry out these functions, or are wasteful or ineffective
in the use made of the resources they have. What may seem at first sight as
merely ‘technical’ or ‘procedural’ considerations turn out to be relevant to
outcomes, in terms of legislation and financial expenditure that serves societal
needs. The same goes for a wider aspect of a parliament’s effectiveness, and
that lies in its capacity to perform the important role of sustaining and promoting
national integration, especially in situations where this may be threatened.
Parliamentary effectiveness cannot be satisfactorily treated without confronting
issues of power. ‘Power’ has many different meanings, but two are
particularly relevant here. The first is power as a capacity: having the relevant
legal rights and resources – financial, human and organisational – to carry out
necessary tasks. The second is power as relational: here having sufficient
power and independence in relation to the executive to oversee it effectively.
Of course parliaments have to strike a balance between cooperation with, and
oversight over, an elected executive; sheer obstructionism rarely serves the
public. Yet the more likely danger in the contemporary period is that of undue
executive dominance, whether through lack of parliamentary capacity or an
unwillingness on the part of parliaments to exercise the powers they have.
Naturally there are important differences between presidential and parliamentary
systems, in that the former have a more clearly demarcated separation
of powers between legislature and executive. It has been a feature of some
presidential systems, for example in Latin America, that elected presidents
have been unable to effect their legislative programmes because of their
inability to sustain more than temporary majorities in Congress. Even here,
however, democracy is not served by a weak or ineffective legislature.
A recent comparative survey of democratisation in post-Communist states
concluded that it was not so much the type of constitutional system (presidential,
‘semi-presidential’ or parliamentary) that determined the level and