Parliaments in the Global South: Challenges and Transformations

This panel examines the challenges and transformations confronting parliaments and legislatures across the Global South amid ongoing processes of democratic backsliding, executive dominance, and institutional adaptation under conditions of constrained resources.
Over the past decade, many Global South democracies have experienced intensifying pressure on legislative institutions. Executives have expanded their reach through emergency powers, plebiscitary appeals, and control over legislative agendas, while parliaments have often struggled to sustain effective representation, lawmaking, and oversight. At the same time, legislatures are not merely passive actors in this process. Depending on institutional design, party system configuration, and levels of professionalization, they retain varying capacities to resist executive encroachment, adapt informal practices, and reshape their own relevance under adverse conditions.
This panel welcomes contributions addressing questions such as, but not limited to, the following:
How are parliaments in the Global South responding to democratic backsliding, autocratization, and processes of re-democratization?
What explains the shifting balance between executive dominance and legislative autonomy across different regions and regime types?
How do institutional capacity constraints and professionalization challenges shape legislative performance?
How do legislatures carry out lawmaking and oversight functions under conditions of limited resources and political pressure?
What role do party discipline, informal practices, and legislative culture play in shaping legislative behavior?
How do representation, inclusion, and citizen trust affect legislative legitimacy in Global South contexts?
What methodological and conceptual innovations are advancing the comparative study of legislatures beyond the traditional cases of the Global North?
We welcome theoretical, comparative, qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods contributions from scholars working across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and other Global South regions, including single country studies with clear comparative or theoretical relevance.