Abstract
This research note introduces two novel indexes designed to measure legislative activity (ParlAct) and use of digital devices to maintain legislative functions (ParlTech) during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. It will also present a novel comprehensive dataset on the functioning of legislatures during a critical period of the pandemic, providing scores for 152 domestic legislatures on both the ParlAct and ParlTech indexes. It will be argued that both indexes could also serve as templates for future research on legislative activity during other pandemics, crises and contingencies.
1 Introduction*
During Spring 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic brought an unprecedented challenge for parliaments and legislatures all around the world (Bar-Siman-Tov 2020; Norton 2020). Considering the gravity of the health crisis, and the need for prompt action, granting special emergency powers to the executive was the typical, and certainly not unprecedented, response in most countries (Bjørnskov & Voigt 2020; Grogan 2020). At the same time, however, important questions have been raised about the role of the other governmental branches (Ginsburg and Versteeg 2020; Petrov, 2020). Among them, legislatures are especially important given their various functions within political systems – whether these systems are pluralistic or not. Parliaments constitute a universal political institution that has indeed been largely threatened from various standpoints during the pandemic. Three distinct (though interrelated) series of threats posed by the current context are worth mentioning.
First, parliaments have a material dimension: they are places where human beings sit together and engage iteratively in verbal exchanges. Social distancing measures, such as lockdowns and limitations on assembly pose obvious challenges. In countries such as Canada, Fiji, Ireland, Mexico, New Zealand and Oman, business was limited.1 In others, including Haiti, India, Malaysia, Serbia, Switzerland, the UK and Zambia, legislatures were adjourned or dissolved for several weeks even months in some cases.2 It has been estimated that, as of April 8th 2020, two billion people in the world had their legislatures shut or limited due to these policies (Provost et al. 2020). Despite the measures taken, a few assemblies still became clusters of the pandemic with the infection – and sometimes death – of mps, clerks and assistants. This was notably the case in France and Iran (Bar-Siman-Tov 2020).
Second, legislatures also constitute the main institution where opposition to government is susceptible of having an influential voice. Legislatures possess a range of symbolic and material resources in this regard. This, of course, implies that the expression of dissenting or diverging views can be guaranteed from the benches of the parliament. The Covid-19 pandemic was again a challenge from that perspective given the difficulty of expressing alternative views and criticisms in times of national unity. Challenging the responses offered by governmental (often legitimized by medical authorities) was indeed delicate when questions of life and death were at stake.
Thirdly, legislatures are not only law-making authorities but are also expected to engage in a range of oversight activities (Griglio, 2020). Questioning ministers, tabling topical motions for debate or conducting in-depth investigations, sometimes through special committees, are indeed crucial features of the ‘democratic toolkit’ and are essential for ensuring public accountability of elected officials, particularly when it comes to policies. Granted, the context of the Covid-19 has not made these tasks impossible to perform but it has certainly rendered them more difficult. Some of them, such as parliamentary questions, require that the parliament be open. Moreover, as mentioned above, it soon appeared that some governments took advantage of the situation to dispense with major parts of parliamentary scrutiny. A comparative survey thus reports that the risk of ‘pandemic backsliding’ was particularly severe in countries such as El Salvador, Hungary, India, Philippines, Serbia, Sri Lanka and Uganda (Edgell et al. 2020; Lührmann et al., 2020).
Measuring legislative activity during a pandemic (and particularly a pandemic of this specific kind) is thus a crucial issue – not only for political scientists and legal scholars interested in how legislatures responded or were affected by the spread of Covid-19, but also for the public at large. This brief research note aims to provide the foundations for this effort. It introduces two novel indexes measuring legislative operation under Covid-19. The first index (ParlAct) captures legislative activity on an ordinal scale. The second index (ParlTech), also on an ordinal scale, focuses on the use of digital devices that have served to maintain some legislative functions in spite of lockdowns or related social distancing measures. In addition to discussing their properties, we provide scores for both indexes in 152 countries (i.e. nearly all countries in the world with a population of over 1,000,000), based on an original and novel dataset – one of the most comprehensive datasets collected on the operation of parliaments during the first stage of Covid-19. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 briefly reviews existing research on governmental activity during Covid-19. Section 3 presents the method and data collection strategies applied in this research. Sections 4 and 5 introduce the ParlAct and ParlTech indexes, respectively. Section 6 introduces the dataset used in the research. Section 7 discuss the findings, and Section 8 concludes by drawing implications for future research on legislative activity during critical events.
2 Existing Research on Governmental Activity under Covid-19
Significant efforts have been made by a number of academic institutions, ngos, and civic organizations to track and report governments’ responses and activities since the start of the outbreak of Covid-19. Many of these initiatives have gathered various data, documents and visualizations on the policies that have been adopted by different governments around the world (e.g., the Covid-19 Law Lab jointly established by the World Health Organization, the United Nations and others;3 the Worldwide Non-pharmaceutical Interventions Tracker for covid-19 created by ibm;4 the Coronavirus Government Response Tracker developed by the University of Oxford (Hale et al., 2020)). Others have focused on the impact of these policies on democracy and freedoms (e.g., the Global Monitor of covid-19’s Impact on Democracy and Human Rights by International idea and others;5 the covid-19 Civic Freedom Tracker by the icnl, ecnl and others;6 V-Dem’s Pandemic Backsliding Project (Lührmann et al., 2020)). Other Still have focused on gathering substantive qualitative reports and scholarly analysis on legislative and governmental responses from around the world (e.g., the Lex-Atlas: Covid-19 project;7 Comparative Covid Law;8 as well as many special issues in journals and blogs9). Many additional initiatives are listed in covid-dem, an info hub for tracking, compiling, and sharing information on how state responses to Covid-19 are impacting democratic governance (Daly, 2020).
These contributions are useful for gaining a broad picture of the policies that have been adopted across the globe. Subtler cross-national indexes are nonetheless needed to capture how specific institutions have been affected or managed to continue their operation during the pandemic. This particularly applies to legislatures. Recent accounts suggest that the three core functions they fulfil (representation, scrutiny and legislation) require fine-grained analysis, as these activities are inherently multi-dimensional (Rayment and VandenBeukel, 2020). Yet, to our knowledge, existing efforts in that respect essentially consist of single-country or small-n studies (see e.g. the studies discussed in Cormacain and Bar-Siman-Tov, 2020b; and see also Chaplin 2020; Malloy, 2020; Thomas, 2020) or of essentially descriptive reports (e.g., Inter-Parliamentary Union, 2020; Crego and Mańko 2020; Murphy, 2020; Law Library of Congress 2020; Smith et al. 2020).10 To fill this gap, we have developed a novel, quantitative index specifically focused on legislative activity during the Covid-19 pandemic. Moreover, as technological and digital devices have been crucial for many legislatures’ continued operation across the globe (e.g., Del Monte, 2020; Rozenberg, 2020; Williamson 2020), we also developed a separate index to capture the extent to which these devices were used. Offering a second index also also provides a more accurate picture of legislative functioning: some legislatures have been active, although mainly though virtual meetings, whereas other kept working as usual.
It should be acknowledged that the main aim of both indexes is to offer a comparative and quantitative tool on the ability of legislatures to continue to operate during the pandemic. This in itself is a crucial measure, as the continued operation of the legislature is important not only for symbolic reasons, but also as a necessary prerequisite for it to perform its various functions, such as legislating, oversight etc. It should be noted, however, that our indexes provide only a basic (even if prerequisite and indispensable) level of examination of the functioning of legislatures. Our indexes will hopefully be able to provide the basis for follow-up in-depth case-studies that will add the substantive qualitative examination of how well legislatures actually carried out their functions after succeeding in maintaining or resuming operation (e.g., quality of legislative oversight, extent, quality and constitutionality of legislation enacted, etc.). They could also provide the basis for subsequent qualitative studies on how the use of digital tools during the pandemic has influenced the operation of parliament (such as the quality of deliberation, participation and rights of the opposition parties, of back benchers, changes in obstruction, etc.). The data produced by our indexes could also give direction on which countries constitute appropriate cases for such case studies.
3 Methods and Data Collection
First, a comprehensive analysis was undertaken of the ways in which the Covid-19 pandemic and the measures taken to mitigate its effects affected the operation of legislatures. This notably includes an analysis of how the unique characteristics of this crisis interact with the institutional features of legislatures and the way they function (for an elaborate discussion, see Bar-Siman-Tov 2020).
Both indexes were developed by an international multidisciplinary team composed of specialists of law (and especially legisprudence), legislative studies, comparative political science, political methodology and medicine. We used these two indexes to assess the legislative functioning and use of digital tools in legislatures during their response to the initial shock of Covid-19 as a new, threatening and unknown global risk (we focused on legislatures’ operation from March 23rd until April 6th, 2020, which is shortly after Covid-19 was officially declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organization on March 11). To document the country scores for ParlAct and ParlTech in all countries with over 1,000,000 inhabitants, data collection relied on a threefold approach. The first was to mobilize an extensive network of numerous academic experts on legislatures.11 Each expert was asked to complete a substantive report about the current operation of the legislature in her country (which facilitated the development of the index and ensured its validity), and at the next stage, to answer a short survey assessing the legislative activity and the use of technological means in their country of expertise, based on the indexes. One hundred and seventy-two experts kindly shared with us information on their country of expertise.12
Expert surveys inevitably result in some bias (see Hooghe et al. 2010 for a review). We thus complemented our first approach by collecting a range of comparative reports from international and national parliamentary research centres focusing on parliamentary activity in various countries during the same period.13 Finally, we collected reports from hundreds of daily newspaper articles as well as entries in legislatures’ websites with information pertaining to the legislatures’ functioning in each of our countries’ sample. Publications in English, French, Hebrew and Spanish were directly retrieved. Publications in other languages were translated using Google Translate.
We then tested the reliability of both indexes. We independently asked two coders to determine ParlAct and ParlTech scores for each country, based on the information in our datasets, without seeing the scores from the experts’ survey. Intercoder reliability calculated using Krippendorff’s alpha is α = 0.81.
4 Measuring Legislative Activity: the ParlAct Index
The ParlAct Index is an ordinal scale ranging from 1 (legislature is completely closed) to 10 (legislature is fully functioning). Scores from 1 to 4 relate to closed legislatures, differentiating those that shut down due to Covid-19 from the ones that shut down due to a regular break unrelated to the crisis (such as Easter break or elections recess), but whose duration was possibly changed due to Covid-19. Scores from 5 to 9 refer to partially operating legislatures, while differentiating types and levels of partial operation: scores 5–7 focus on partial operation in terms of which legislative institutions (committees or plenum) operate; scores from 8–9 focus on partial operation as regards the frequency of meetings. A score of 10 indicates a fully operating legislature (Table 1). Of course, in-between cases are possible, and therefore optimal use of the indexes allows for in-between scores (e.g., 9.5).
It should be noted that one of our early insights was that the behaviour of legislatures in various countries changed (sometimes multiple times) throughout this ongoing crisis. Moreover, various legislatures around the world have normal recesses (due to holidays etc.) at different times during the year. Therefore, when using our indexes, it is important to instruct respondents from all countries to focus on the same clearly defined period. Our index asks respondents to report whether their legislature was supposed to be in session, and whether (and how) its operation changed due to Covid-19 during this defined period. For example, we asked all our respondents to report only on legislative operation from March 23rd until April 6th 2020 (as we focused on legislatures’ response to the initial shock of a new global health risk). To measure long term effects or changes over time, the data collection based on the index should be repeated, each time focusing on a different carefully defined period throughout this prolonged pandemic.
5 Measuring Legislative Use of Technological and Digital Solutions: the ParlTech Index
In several countries, the use of digital devices helped maintain legislative operations, even if considerable variations are observable from one country to another. Thus, we adopted a similar approach to the ParlAct Index, focusing not only on whether or not digital devices were used (1), but also differentiating between various uses – ranging from mere communication with other governmental bodies and listening to experts (2) to remote voting (4) (Table 2).
6 The Dataset: ParlAct and ParlTech Scores for World Legislatures
Table 3 shares our dataset, displaying the ParlAct and ParlTech scores of legislatures in 152 countries from March 23rd until April 6th 2020.15
7 Discussion
The scores for ParlAct indicate that the situation substantially differs from one country to another. The same proportion of countries – one out of five – are working as usual (10 score) as are closed due to Covid-19 (scores 1 and 2). If we put aside legislatures that were on a usual break during the period under consideration, half of the legislatures of the world have been working partially – which confirms the scientific interest of this issue. The average grade for the countries as a whole is 6.6 and the average varies between continents: 7.8 in Americas and Europe, 6.7 in Asia, 6 in Oceania and 5.3 in Africa.
Further analysis is required to investigate these results. Still, it can be observed that mortality due to Covid-19 seemingly played only a limited role as, at the time of the fieldwork, the pandemic had mostly occurred in Asia and Europe and left Africa almost unaffected. The state of democracy in each country is also to be considered as established democracies may have secured the usual functioning of their legislatures more efficiently. However, again, a complex picture emerges from Table 3, as some established democracies appear at the bottom of the ParlAct ranking (for instance India, Switzerland and the UK) whereas some authoritarian regimes appear among the countries where the parliament maintained its operations (for instance Bahrain, Belarus or Burundi). This observation questions the very category of legislatures and parliaments beyond their obvious commonalities: the constraining power of the parliament vis-à-vis the executive is not similar from one country to another, which may explain why some (democratic or undemocratic) leaders may try to silence it or not.
Finally, the functioning of legislatures is moderately correlated with their capacity to use digital devices (Pearson’s r of 0.34 for the whole sample and 0.15 for the countries situated between 5 and 9 of the ParlAct scale). Figure 1 presents a visualization of how the 152 legislatures are located on both axes.
The location of 152 legislatures on both axes
Citation: International Journal of Parliamentary Studies 1, 1 (2021) ; 10.1163/26668912-bja10006
Note: The size of a circle accounts for the number of legislatures corresponding to a given dot. Countries with populations of more than 100 million inhabitants are located and specified by name.source: the authorsOnline meetings certainly helped many legislatures to keep their committees (and more rarely the plenary) working but cannot be considered as a panacea for parliamentary politics during pandemics. Again, this observation should be considered in the light of the unequal access to digital technologies between countries. Opting for partial or total online functioning of legislatures also raises delicate legal and political issues. In many cases, laws and regulations have not foreseen this largely unprecedented situation. Chile, for instance, had to change its constitution to permit virtual parliamentary decision-making. In Colombia, the Constitutional Court held that Congress cannot hold virtual sessions based on an authorization provided by a governmental emergency decree that allowed all branches of government to hold virtual sessions (Bar-Siman-Tov, 2020). In other countries, such as Canada and the UK, the decision to hold hybrid meetings was a matter of intense political controversy between the government and the opposition (Bar-Siman-Tov, 2020; Malloy, 2020). From a more theoretical standpoint, the capacity of parliamentary politics to fully perform is questioned by the remote functioning of legislatures (Rozenberg, 2020). As a result, the dominant political culture(s) and legal tradition(s) also influence the decision to adopt technology which may account for part of the variation of the ParlTech scale.
8 Conclusion
This brief research note has presented two novel indexes for the assessment of the functioning of legislatures during pandemics. These new indexes constitute a unique universal resource for evaluating and comparing legislatures worldwide. They could allow researchers and civic society to continuously monitor, measure and compare the operation of parliaments during the current pandemic, as well as during future pandemics and other emergencies and crises, such as wars, major terrorist attacks, or environmental catastrophes.
Based on these indexes, we also offered a novel dataset on the functioning of legislatures worldwide during the initial crucial period of the global Covid-19 pandemic. The scores in our dataset indicate that the situation substantially differs across countries; and that, while some parliaments are fully functioning or are completely closed due to Covid-19, the majority of world legislatures are partially working to varying degrees. This demonstrates that a binary report of whether parliament is operating or not is too crude and paints an inaccurate picture of the real world. This confirms the scientific interest and practical importance of the ordinal index we created. Further analyses are required to investigate our dataset.
This study can serve as a basis for future research that would investigate the complex institutional effects of this and future similar crises, and help assess more accurately whether the Covid-19 actually constitutes a potential threat for parliamentary democracy and its most vital organ. We hope that our ParlAct and ParlTech indexes, as well as our dataset, will become helpful tools for academic researchers, parliamentary research institutions, and civic society worldwide.
References
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We wish to thank the 172 experts who sent us reports about their countries, as well as the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. We are grateful to our research assistants: Tair Ben Zeev, Itay Cohen, Ori Harari, Itamar Hashash-Daniel, Eyal Kanfi, Chani Kot, Yuval Maor, Evgeny Saburov, and Nina Stepanets. This research was supported by a research grant from the Israel National Institute for Health Policy Research (#2020/553).
Source: authors’ ParlAct data (March 23rd until April 6th 2020) and InterPares Parliamentary Data-tracker (February to June, 15, 2020).
Ibid.
See, e.g., (Cormacain and Bar-Siman-Tov, 2020a; https://www.theregreview.org/2020/04/20/comparing-nations-responses-covid-19/; https://verfassungsblog.de/category/debates/fighting-covid-19-debates/; https://www.cambridge.org/core/blog/tag/country-responses-to-the-covid19-pandemic/.
Two recent important initiatives which appeared after this article was submitted should also be noted: the InterPares Parliamentary Data-tracker; and the Parliaments in the Pandemic project organized by the Research Committee of Legislative Specialists of the International Political Science Association.
The methodology for creating this network of academic experts was as follows: we contacted our extensive network of leading academic experts on parliaments (emailing over 200 academics). The network was then extended through a snowball method (asking the colleagues in our original network to suggest additional experts), and by asking for recommendations on additional experts through several relevant academic networks: The International Association of Legislation, covid-dem (directed by Tom Daly), the Constitutional Democracy Listserv (edited by Mark Graber), Researchgate, and Academia.edu.
The full list of the experts is available at this address: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3642884.
The full list of reports from international and national parliamentary research centers is available at this address: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3642884.
To avoid too much complexity, we did not add sub-categories for the various interactions between 6–7 and 8–9. Hence, generally, for 8–9, it is possible to count one meeting by day whatever the type of meeting (plenary or committee). However, respondents should be encouraged to provide an in-between number when appropriate and to add verbal explanations in such cases.
We originally examined all 159 countries in the world with a population of over 1,000,000. Eventually seven countries (Benin, Dominican Republic, Malawi, Oman, Qatar, Republic of Yemen, and Trinidad and Tobago) were excluded from the current report, because we were not able to triangulate our data and be confident enough about its reliability. We were still left with a very extensive dataset of 152 countries, making this one of the most comprehensive datasets in the world to explore the operation of legislatures during the initial stage of Covid-19. For Cuba, Pakistan, and Panama, we were able to report for ParlAct, but not ParlTech (indicated by *). For two countries (Palestine and Sudan) we indicate a 0, because we found that they lacked an operating legislature long before Covid-19.
