The Australian and New Zealand parliaments: Context, response and capacity

We compare Australian and New Zealand parliamentary demands on executive governments to 'do something' about globalisation, noting that parliaments are distinctive institutionally - functioning as umbrellas protecting arenas of adversarial competitiveness, with little scope for cohesive institutional capacity. We define 'globalisation' as it is defined by the parliamentary actors themselves: that is, quite broadly with different actors taking different postures towards globalisation depending on party and on political and institutional perspectives. Whether parliaments can respond effectively to globalisation depends on their institutional capacity and political composition - their political resources. We establish the international context in which the two parliaments operate, establishing our hypotheses about institutional capacity from Lisa Martin's book Democratic Commitments: Legislatures and International Cooperation . We conclude that both parliaments have made significant, if often unnoticed, contributions to the political management of globalisation.