Legislative Oversight and the Quality of Democracy

Abstract

The paper shows that the quality of democracy is significantly affected by a legislature's ability to perform its oversight function. Building on a growing body of research and analysing original data from 97 national legislatures, the paper first provides a theoretial justification for why legislative overisght may affect the quality of democarcy and then it performs extensive statistical analyses. The key conclusion of the paper is that while international organizations, that have devoted so much attention to legislative strengthening, were correct in suggesting that oversight effectiveness is important for making democracy work well, they need to change the focus of their legislative strengthening programs from increasing oversight capacity to ensuring that oversight capacity is put to good use.