Parliament and institutional innovation

Abstract

Parliamentary institutionality makes it possible to express the will to compromise through the dialogue of the social forces politically represented, knowing that trust in Parliament lies in the capacity to adopt adequate decisions in the process of law formation, of a strong and critical action in the political control of the State, as well as in the relations between the latter and the Executive. Institutional learning in the daily actions of the Parliament contributes to strengthening or weakening the processes of institutionalization, in the sense that the political-institutional practice contributes to: the generation of inculcated values, processes of reality creation, generation of a system as a class of elements.

When analyzing the processes of parliamentary modernization, the problems of articulation between the operational and strategic vision of the institution frequently emerge as tasks and challenges, but even more than that, the deficits in providing follow-up, evaluation and feedback to the processes, that is, the lack of "a culture of knowledge management". Given these deficits, parliaments tend to be more susceptible to the agendas of the external environment, particularly international cooperation.

This conceptual and reflective article assumes as its task to make an approximation of the approaches to parliamentary modernization, seen from the perspective of the importance of institutional change and induced balances. The paper begins the discussion with a conceptual position on Parliament as an institution, followed by an understanding of parliamentary governance and institutional capacity, whose cumulative reflection allows us to address the various approaches to parliamentary modernization.