Parliamentary Voting Procedures in Comparison

Abstract

Increasingly, scholars of legislative politics propose comparative analyses of parliamentary voting behavior across different countries and parliaments. Yet parliamentary voting procedures differ dramatically across parliamentary chambers and ignoring these differences may, in the extreme, lead to meaningless comparisons. In this paper we present a first glimpse at a comprehensive data collection effort covering more than 250 parliamentary chambers in 176 countries. Focusing on European legislatures we find some notable differences as compared to previous studies on parliamentary voting procedures. We propose to analyze what explains the presence of various voting procedures and find that electoral institutions play a non-negligeable role.

Keywords: parliaments, voting behavior, roll call votes

JEL Classification: D72, P59