Comparative legislative behaviour: research explorations in Indian perspectives

THE LAST TWO decades have witnessed the emergence of a number of comparative studies in the field of behavioural sciences. Students of comparative politics have evolved different conceptual constructs and sophisticated methodological tools to study political phenomena in a truly comparative framework. The apparent growth and the resurgence of scholarly interest in the functioning of legislative institutions has compelled many scholars of legislative behaviour to look beyond the array of descriptive, institutional analysis in order to be able to build the foundations for deductive theory in the comparative analysis of legislative systems. In the process, studies in legislative behaviour began to discern an impressive accumulation of meaningful data and increasingly scientific analytical techniques. However, the literature that emerged as a consequence had a very narrow focus confined only to the study of Western legislative and parliamentary institutions. In a way, such studies did not quite succeed in giving the kind of breadth, diversity and interpretation that was necessary for explicit theoretical formulations. Happily, some groups of scholars soon realised this predicament of legislative research and started looking beyond the frontiers of Western nations to that of the socialist and developing countries for meaningful comparisons in the behaviour of parliamentary and legislative institutions and the legislators.
The present study seeks to analyse and evaluate the attempts of such scholars to develop behavioural information about law makers and legislative assemblies. An effort has been made to delineate the several kinds of behavioural approaches to comparative legislative analysis assessing their promises and limitations from Indian perspective. The first essay in this volume attempts a critical survey of the more important trends in the study of comparative legislative behaviour with a view to identify the possible research formulations and areas of study in the Indian context. The second essay seeks to assess the traditional functions of the legislative institutions in the back ground of the commonly held belief that there has been a general 'decline' of legislatures and makes an effort to con struct a new typology of legislative fuctioning in developmental perspective. The third essay evaluates the concept of 'repre sentation as an emerging focus for comparative legislative research and probes into its potential for meaningful legislative researches in the Indian situation. The last essay is concern ed with a plea for a realistic recognition of the role of professional public administrator in legislative management and emphasises greater attention by the public administrationists in India to legislative administration'-if the legislative bodies in this country are to be reorganized into more efficient mechanism to cope with their increasingly significant role in the governmental process. The essays have been bound together in a thematic unity through certain general conclusions that can be discerned from the emerging Indian perspectives on comparative research.