Remuneration of Legislative Body Members

A. Constitutional Context and Forms of Remuneration1 Membership in a legislative assembly comes with financial remuneration, paid by the state, in most of today's constitutional systems ( legislative bodies; legislative body members).Payments fall into two broad categories: compensation for costs incurred in the exercise of the mandate, and an income plus other forms of living sustenance like pension rights and health insurance.2 In liberal representative democracies, remuneration of the members of legislative assemblies serves the constitutional aim of keeping the political processes and institutions accessible to all citizens, including those not of independent means.Payment of members by the state is, therefore, a concrete measure that complements the universal right to participate in elections and equal eligibility for public office.Once members are elected, remuneration ensures their material independence from outside influences, along with the free mandate and free-speech immunity of legislative body members that are the defining features of representation in the liberal tradition.In the socialist tradition, more specifically that of Marxism-Leninism, a different logic underlies the payment of legislative assembly members, one that is intertwined with the general task of the state to guarantee the material sustenance of all citizens and which emphasizes members' duties in fulfilling their representative function ( socialism).3 The legal instruments that regulate the members' remuneration are typically, but not always, a guarantee enshrined in the constitution; an ordinary law or a higher-ranking instrument like an organic law on the precise forms of remuneration and their modalities; and often lower-ranking instruments specifying concrete amounts that can be adjusted periodically.The day-to-day administration of payment regimes is mostly performed by the legislature itself, by its secretariat or by another internal administrative service, but it is sometimes the responsibility of an independent agency.Payment by a ministry or other department of the executive branch is generally avoided, which reflects the institutional autonomy of parliamentary assemblies, an aspect of the separation of powers. 4The option not to pay members of the legislative body has comparably little tradition, with the important exception of the Westminster Parliament, which in turn influenced nineteenth-century conservatism in continental Europe.Today, the institution of payment for members is firmly established and to be found in most constitutional systems.If the remuneration of members of the legislative body is uncontroversial in this basic sense, the same cannot be said of the modalities and amounts of pay, which are a matter of recurrent political controversy in many constitutional systems.From the perspective of constitutional design, such controversies come with a peculiar allocation-of-powers problem and a lack of checks and balances: the modalities and amounts of remuneration of legislative body members are set by law, thus usually by members of the legislative body themselves (on the phenomenon of legislating in one's own cause, see Lang; Vermeule (2012)).Constitutional systems around the world have developed several different institutional design strategies to temper the problem.5 This entry focuses on the remuneration of members of the directly elected legislative body or its directly elected parts.Legislative assemblies that are composed through selection in the lower echelons of the representative hierarchy-like the National People's Congress in China-raise problems differing from those discussed here, as do second chambers comprising delegates from sub-federal executives-like the German Bundesrat--