Institutional development of legislative supporting agencies (LSAs) from a perspective of difference between presidential and parliamentary systems
| Author | Jun Makita |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/20578911221138475 |
| Published date | 01 March 2023 |
| Date | 01 March 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Theoretical Endeavors |
Institutional development of
legislative supporting agencies
(LSAs) from a perspective of
difference between presidential
and parliamentary systems
Jun Makita
Faculty of Education, Hirosaki University, Japan
Abstract
This article focuses on legislative supporting agencies (LSAs) as agencies supporting the activities of
legislature and elucidates the relation between LSAs’institutional development and other political
factors, paying attention to the difference between the presidential system and the parliamentary
system. The concrete factors that would influence LSAs’development, i.e. ‘presidential system or
parliamentary system’,‘whether a government has a right to initiate a bill’and ‘whether a person
can concurrently have positions in both the executive and the legislative branches’, are presented,
and as a result of statistical analyses, it is clarified that these factors have an impact on the devel-
opment level of LSAs to some extent.
Keywords
executive-legislative relation, fusion-separation, legislative supporting agencies (LSAs), parliamentary
system, president ial system
Introduction
Legislative supporting agencies (LSAs) are agencies supporting legislature
1
and members’legisla-
tive activities. Although playing a huge role through information provision and support for drafting
members’bills, they seldom attract attention because of their duties of supporting legislative activ-
ities from the sidelines. This is true in both real-life politics and the academic world. Arguably, in
political science, it is quite rare for LSAs to be recognized as actors in the legislative process and to
Corresponding author:
Jun Makita, Faculty of Education, Hirosaki University, 1 Bunkyocho Hirosaki-shi, Aomori-ken, Japan.
Email: jun.makita@hirosaki-u.ac.jp
Theoretical Endeavors
Asian Journal of Comparative Politics
2023, Vol. 8(1) 422–441
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/20578911221138475
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feature as the main object of analysis except in the case of the US Congress with its overwhelmingly
developed LSAs.
However, because of their roles, LSAs are deeply related to the legislature and its members’
activities, and they and the other political institutions and actors have a mutual effect on one
another. In this respect, more attention could be paid to them when examining the state of institu-
tions and actors in the legislative process. In particular, the extent to which LSAs have institution-
ally developed is considerably connected with the basic political systems; thus, detailed analysis
regarding the relation between the development level of LSAs and the condition of other legislative
institutions leads to clarifying a whole picture of political institutional structures and understandin g
the correlational state of the legislative environment in a democratic legislature.
Based on the above, this article focuses on LSAs, especially in terms of institutional develop-
ment, and engages in comparative analysis to assay which factors promote LSAs’development
–an approach that may elucidate how LSAs strongly pertain to the surrounding political
systems. When analysing this subject, the article pays attention to the difference between the presi-
dential system and the parliamentary system, concentrating in particular on assessing whether LSAs
are organized differently according to different political systems and why this may be the case. In
the following sections, the definition and classification of LSAs will first be given. Subsequently,
LSAs of the US, the UK, Germany and Japan will be compared, and their differences will be exam-
ined. The factors that cause LSAs’development will be explained, distinguishing the two major
political systems, i.e. the presidential and parliamentary systems. Finally, the causation between
LSAs’development and the aforementioned factors will be verified statistically.
Existing research
As mentioned above, there are only a few academic research studies on LSAs, most of which focus
on one particular country: the US. The US is a country that has exceptionally developed LSAs, and
many academic analyses regarding LSAs’institutions and functions have been undertaken by
various scholars. In particular, so-called ‘congressional staff’including committee staff and
members’staff have been paid a great deal of attention in the academic field, and there have
been numerous works analysing their roles and influences: Fox and Hammond (1977) and
Malbin (1980) as classical achievements, DeGregorio (1988, 1992, 1994, 1995), Mooney
(1991), Weiss (1987, 1989), Webber (1987), Whiteman (1995), Romzek and Utter (1996) and
Herrnson (1994) as typical positive analyses of their functions and careers and McCrain (2018),
Montgomery and Nyhan (2017), Shepherd and You (2020) and Hertel-Fernandez et al. (2019)
as more recent efforts are representative achievements, and this article pays significant regard to
them when examining the relation between LSAs and other political institutions.
Also, some works regarding other countries’LSAs exist though the numbers are quite limited.
Baaklini (1992) on Brazil, Park (1986) on South Korea, Sager (1985) on Israel, Solomon (1986) on
Australia and Tani (1995, 2003), Hirata (1998) and Nishikawa (1998, 2002) on Japan are important
examples, and they play a vital role for this article in grasping a general state of each country’s
LSAs.
Although most of the abovementioned works focus on legislative studies, there are some efforts
in the policy studies field that also deal with legislative supporting structures. The International
Library of Policy Analysis Series, edited by Geva-May and Howlett, brings together a detailed
examination of the theory and practice of policy analysis systems, with some chapters, such as
Joyce (2018) on the US, Marschall (2013) on Germany and Makita (2015) on Japan, assaying
Makita 423
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