Committee strength in parliamentary democracies: A new index

Much recent research on coalitions and policy-making in parliamentary democracies requires high-quality data on the strength of legislative institutions. In this article, I introduce a new index of committee policing strength which improves on existing measures in important ways. I specify key index parameters using a binary rooted tree model and engage human coders to score formal rules. I obtain a novel time series of committee policing strength in 17 western and eastern European democracies since 1945. I validate the new estimates through convergent validation and discuss ways in which the new index contributes to future work.