Authors: Rick Stapenhurst, Kerry Jacobs and Thomas Cedric Eboutou
Over the past decade, scholars and practitioners have constructed various indices of general, or specific legislative power, including Fish and Kroenig (2009), the Parliamentary Centre (2011) and Chernykh, Doyle, and Power (2017). In particular, Wehner (2006) developed a comparative framework to assess ex-ante legislative budget capacity, which captured legislative power to formulate and amend the national budget, before its enactment. Combining a set of variables into an index to measure legislative budgeting capacity, Wehner provided scholars with a ‘ … methodological toolkit for cross-national research on the legislative power of the purse’. His analysis highlighted the weaker relative power of the purse of legislatures in countries with Westminster parliamentary forms of government, namely Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, than those with presidential or other parliamentary forms of government.
