Mapping and Explaining Parliamentary Rule Changes in Europe: A Research Program

The article outlines a comprehensive research program for describing and explaining institutional reforms in European parliaments. Original data show that the standing orders of 15 Western European parliaments have been changed frequently and massively during the period from 1945 to 2010. This finding suggests that political actors use institutional reforms as a distinct strategy to pursue their substantive goals. We discuss how institutional instability affects existing theoretical arguments and empirical analyses of institutional effects. Furthermore, we present four ideal-typical approaches to analyzing changes in parliamentary rules, present new software tools for systematically identifying and coding changes in large text corpora, and demonstrate their usefulness for constructing valid quantitative measures of the overall change between subsequent versions of standing orders. Our approach is applicable beyond parliaments to formal institutional change in general.