Radoslaw Zubek (2020) `Committee Strength in Parliamentary Democracies: A New Index’. European Journal of Political Research.

Much recent research on coalitions and policy-making in parliamentary democracies requires high quality data on the strength of legislative institutions. In this note, 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.