How to assess legislative performance? A methodological proposal for classifying legislative initiatives in Mexico and Latin America

Abstract

This article discusses how legislative performance in Latin American democratic transitions is assessed. In contexts where legislatures have resumed the formal circuit of public decision-making, congressmen have become increasingly active in promoting law reforms. However indicators used so far assess legislative performance based on the number of bills presented by legislators, making no distinction between irrelevant and transcendental proposals. Considering such methodological lack, this article suggests an assessment tool that can be applied to the Mexican case - with the view of extrapolating it to other Latin American presidential contexts - to classify legislative performance according to the relevance, depth, and transformative capacity of bills proposed by the parliamentary representatives.