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. However, the overriding focus on parliaments does not mean that intervening institutional variables are ignored; Barkan's deep and broad understanding of African politics ensures that the role of legislatures is appropriately contextualised. In particular, Barkan's early work on the local pressures faced by African MPs in East Africa, and his knowledge of electoral systems, serve as the building blocks for a nuanced analysis of how a range of factors combine to shape the role played by parliaments.

A central theme running through the book is the inherent tension that lies at the heart of the main functions we need legislators to perform: representation, policy formation, oversight, and constituency service. In the introduction and conclusion Barkan clearly and concisely draws this tension out in a number of different ways. Perhaps most significantly, legislators cannot both dedicate themselves to contributing to national policy debates and scrutinizing the executive, for which time and energy must be invested within the chamber, and also fulfil their supporters' demands for constituency service, for which legislators must return to their locales. As Barkan argues, this tension is all the more important as the most effective MPs within a given parliament are least likely to gain re-election precisely because they fail to meet local expectations. As a result, constituency-based electoral systems in political systems shot through with patron–client relationships place an inherent check on the development of more effective legislators. Barkan's main argument, which is supported by the case-study chapters, is that legislatures become more powerful when a ‘constituency for change’ emerges within the parliament. Such constituencies tend to be marriages of convenience between genuine reformers and opportunists simply seeking to improve their own conditions of service. When these two groups come together, even in relatively small numbers, they can increase the autonomy of individual legislators and so create greater barriers to executive manipulation. While such coalitions tend to be fragile, Barkan persuasively argues that they have contributed to a significant expansion of legislative capacity in cases as unpromising as Kenya under Moi and Uganda under Museveni.

The volume benefits from the decision to afford more space to six thorough case studies, avoiding the temptation to pack in as many chapters as possible in order to maximise the reach of the analysis. Each chapter included here offers new insights grounded in serious fieldwork and a deep understanding of institutional history. Much of the work takes off from Barkan's considerable experience: he contributes the introduction, conclusion, a chapter on South Africa, and a chapter on Kenya co-authored with Fred Matiangi. Staffan Lindberg contributes an insightful and considered chapter on the Ghanaian parliament co-authored with Yongmei Zhou, building on his recent research into Ghanaian legislative dynamics. The remaining chapters by Adamolekun and Laleye on Benin, Lewis on Nigeria, and Kasfir and Twebaze on Uganda, are equally rewarding, in no small part because these parliaments are understudied, even compared to their African counterparts.

Legislative Power in Emerging African Democracies is a much needed and impressively coherent collection that brings together some of the finest political scientists working on Africa to break new ground in the study of African politics, presenting a range of original hypotheses for other researchers to test and take forward. It should be essential reading not just for those interested in legislative development, but for students of African politics and democratisation more generally. As with any ‘first-slice’ work, it inevitably raises a number of questions that we are not yet in a position to answer; as Barkan notes in the conclusion, we currently lack the data that would make possible a more ambitious research design by allowing us to account for all of the relevant factors. Most obviously, we have yet to develop a means of quantitatively measuring legislative performance in the African context. The volume also raises a number of problematic theoretical issues that demand further clarification. Most significantly, the impact of the strength of parties on parliamentary performance remains unclear: while the extant literature on legislative development typically assumes that stronger legislatures are more likely to emerge in the presence of more disciplined parties, in Africa the development of legislative capacity has been correlated with weaker parties in Kenya, while the absence of parties seems to have facilitated a stronger legislature in Uganda's ‘no-party’ state. The next round of research on parliaments must face these questions head-on, and in doing so will be all the stronger as a result of the excellent foundation provided by this important collection.