ABSTRACT
Introduction: parliaments in consensus democracies Parliamentarianism in all European countries has come under considerable pressure since the 1970s. The growing complexity of policy-making has further increased dependency on the information provided by governments. The European integration process has also been an important factor leading to major transformations of parliaments. Parliaments are an important arena for the integration of new political parties into the overall political culture of consensual politics. In this sense, the institutional performance of such inclusive legislatures is of the utmost importance. The purpose of this chapter is to compare the performance of our five parliaments. The next section discusses the various parliaments in the context of their political systems. Subsequently, we delve deeper to analyse the performance of each of the legislatures before drawing some conclusions.
