(How) do parliaments analyse policy?

Policy analysis has two meanings that are closely related, yet must be analytically distinguished: in an applied sense, it refers to a process of gaining a deep understanding of the contents and intricacies of policy issues, with the aim of generating ‘usable knowledge’ (Lindblom and Cohen, 1979) as a foundation for concrete policy advice or action. The scholarly sense aims at understanding ‘what governments do, why they do it and what difference it makes’ (Dye, 1976).

Dye's often-quoted title evokes an interesting question: what about parliaments? An obvious answer is that government must be understood in a broad sense, comprising the whole policy-making system, as in Congressional government (Wilson, 1892), hence also the parliament. However, in German textbooks on policy analysis, the Bundestag is never systematically covered and rarely mentioned – if at all in the context of case studies (cf Schneider and Janning, 2006, pp 66ff; Schneider, 2009, pp 196ff; Blum and Schubert, 2011, pp 98ff). Similarly, textbooks on the German parliament largely overlook the perspectives, models and theories of policy analysis.

This mutual ignorance is very likely due to an unfortunate rift in German political science between parliamentary research on the one hand and the policy perspective on the other (cf Kropp and Ruschke, 2010). A probably much more relevant and much more severe reason is that parliaments (at least those operating in parliamentary systems of government) are not taken very seriously when it comes to the core business of actually shaping policy decisions. Governments in the narrow sense of the word, that is, cabinets, ministers and in particular the ministerial bureaucracy, are regarded as the key political actors in this process. This perception of the distribution of weights is long-standing and has been further strengthened by developments of globalisation and European integration, where a dominance of the executive cannot be denied, but it has gained an almost dramatic momentum in recent years with the dawning of the debate on ‘deparliamentarisation’ or ‘post-parliamentarism’. These two catchwords claim that parliaments are neither able to represent the large variety of differentiated interests nor command sufficient expertise and specialisation to regulate ever more complicated subjects. In this view, ‘parliaments would be rivalled or even superseded by expert commissions, neo-corporatist structures and policy networks.