ABSTRACT
Interest in the details of parliamentary procedures and how they affect outcomes can be traced back to ancient times, as Riker (1986) reminds us in his story of Pliny the Younger. During the formative years of the political science discipline, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, scholarly work on legislative organization was already underway. During this time comparative institutional analysis of legislatures was typically restricted to comparisons between Britain and the United States or among U.S. state legislatures. Throughout the course of the twentieth century the comparative aspect of legislative research declined, and the U.S. House of Representatives became the focal point of most cutting-edge studies (Gamm and Huber 2002). The spread of democracy and democratic institutions after World War II and then again after the 1970s, fostered greater interest in the comparative analysis of legislative politics, including legislative organization. For the last couple of decades legislative scholars have examined a variety of organizational arrangements and behavioral patterns that have expanded our understanding of institutions and have moved the field forward. Theoretical insights from analysis of the U.S. Congress continue to inform many of the institutional arguments about legislative organization, but the institutional variation provided by comparative research is essential to move from narrow arguments about the House of Representatives to general theories of legislative organization.
