Making Legislatures Matter: The Paradox and Potential of South African Parliamentary Reform

Calls for parliamentary reform and strengthening, especially the budget oversight and scrutiny function, are common among parliamentarians. Experience, however, shows that parliamentarians rarely actually enact significant reforms to enhance parliament’s effectiveness. Legislative studies scholarship focuses primarily on explaining why major reform rarely occurs. This study explains a South African case of major provincial parliamentary strengthening that occurred in a manner and during specific conditions that legislative studies theory suggests would either prohibit reform or weaken the legislature. The Gauteng Provincial Legislature (GPL) initiated and adopted a full reform package under the name ‘Programme Evaluation and Budget Analysis’ (PEBA) between 1998 and 2004. This reform expanded and deepened budget oversight and scrutiny processes in just six years, surpassing various formal reform efforts in the United Kingdom and Canada over roughly sixty years. This contrast in reform outcomes is explored at length. The GPL’s reforms also made public participation a formally integral component of budget oversight and scrutiny. PEBA’s development, adoption, and implementation overturn conventional theorizing in the legislative studies field on parliamentary reform and transformation. This study uses the heuristic case study design and a theoretically eclectic approach in light of the truly paradoxical nature of the GPL’s reforms. After exploring the full scope of the paradox in light of a century’s worth of legislative studies theorizing, the study incorporates elements of the theoretical structure advanced by critical liberalism, federalism studies, and deliberative democratic theory to develop a working hypothesis. Testing the working hypothesis produces refinements that increase confidence in the study’s findings and justify optimism about prospects for parliamentary strengthening. Future research to expand testing of the hypothesis may lay the foundations for a new theory of parliamentary transformation and demonstrates the necessity of being open to developments in parliamentary innovation where it is least expected.Ph.D