Parliaments of strangers. Legislative turnover in Asian, African and Latin American parliaments 1945-2020

Parliaments of strangers are assemblies of ‘transient’ and ‘relatively inexperienced legislators. They are the products of legislative turnover ‘hyperinflation’, meaning the mass exodus of incumbent members of parliament from one legislative term to the next. These legislatures exhibit few common behavioural norms and under-developed political skills, little capacity and lack of institutional memory. They can have a huge cost to political development, the stabilisation of democracy and to building the resilience and continuity of democratic. These parliaments of strangers cannot work effectively in holding government to account, developing policy and improving delivery of services to citizens. Parliaments in emerging democracies tend to suffer most from high MP turnover with legislative turnover hyperinflation being an endemic problem in many legislatures in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Funding agencies pour large amounts of money into training initiatives for new MPs in these assemblies. From the perspective of donors high turnover rates make the training of MPs a ‘Sisyphean task’. Legislators can only build up the skills to be effective over multiple legislative cycles meaning that a) donor efforts have limited impact within one parliamentary cycle and b) after each election training efforts have ‘to start all over again’. From the point of view of political science the widespread presence of these parliaments of strangers in emerging democracies is puzzling. To begin with, many of the background conditions that favour ‘victorious incumbents’ are present in all political systems. Additionally, in many emerging democracies there exists a whole range of institutions that should further facilitate the stability of incumbents via the cultivation of personal votes: weak electoral integrity; sanctioning or even outright ban of opposition parties and candidates; corruption and control over state resources. It is therefore important to understand what causes the high turnover of MPs in many Asian, African and Latin American parliaments and develop solutions that are evidence-informed. The present paper presents the research design for an internationally comparative longitudinal project with three main objectives: a) map the magnitude of the problem by developing the World Legislator Dataset (WLD); b) understand variability in legislative turnover rates in emerging democracies; c) develop policy evidence informed policy solutions.