The rise and fall of the legislature

What explains the emergence of a relatively independent legislature in Kenya since the early 1990s? In this chapter, I situate the evolution and institutional development of the Kenyan legislature in historical context. In so doing, I show how legislative organizational development under both colonialism and the era of single-party rule provided the foundation for the emergence of a relatively strong legislature after 1992. The primary lesson that emerges from this chapter is that to understand contemporary legislative independence in Kenya requires an appreciation of the country’s history of contested executive–legislative relations, and the impact of this on legislative institutional development.

Colonialism · Context (archaeology) · Independence (probability theory) · Kenya · Legislature · Political economy · Political science · Sociology · Asian Geopolitics and Ethnography · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · History · Judicial and Constitutional Studies · Law · Public Administration