This paper measures government acceptance of parliamentary committee recommendations: one of the ways in which a committee can demonstrate its effectiveness. Of the reports in this sample recommending new action by the government, 60.0 per cent demonstrated a minimum level of effectiveness in that at least one of their recommendations was accepted. The most important...

Most efforts to assess the performance of parliamentary committees have focused on anecdotal reporting, which is unreliable. This paper argues that it is both possible and valuable to assess their impact quantitatively. The few studies that have collected quantitative information have been small in scale and have not used recognised sampling methods. The approach suggested...