As Joel Barkan notes in his introduction to this impressive edited collection on African parliaments, legislatures are perhaps the least studied formal political institution in Africa. This gap in the literature is significant, because parliaments combine vertical and horizontal accountability and so are of great import to the process of democratisation. Furthermore, as this excellent volume ably demonstrates, parliaments are not nearly as irrelevant as the conventional wisdom would have it; rather, they are becoming more important actors in a small but significant number of countries. This timely and well-conceived edited collection aims to bring parliaments 'back in' to the study of African politics, taking legislatures as both a dependent variable, when seeking to explain what factors contribute to parliamentary capacity, and an independent variable, when asking whether or not stronger legislatures contribute to the process of democratisation.
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