Electoral Rules, Party Discipline, and Parliamentary Questions in Taiwan

• In Event: Legislative Politics and Emerging Social Issues in Taiwan

Abstract

The design of mixed electoral systems has motivated a rich literature that explores how electoral rules structure legislative behavior. One of the key claims in this literature suggests that district-elected legislators are expected to behave distinctively from legislators elected through party lists. However, this “Best of the Both Worlds” expectation has not been widely observed around the world. In this paper, we evaluate this argument by examining parliamentary questions made to the executive branch in the Taiwan Legislative Yuan from 1992 to 2016.

Asking parliamentary questions often requires policy expertise. Since the interpellation stage is highly visible to the public, it provides a great opportunity for representatives to attract voters’ attention and to establish a professional image, which may further structure the behavior of legislators from different worlds (i.e., elected by different rules). First, for district-elected legislators, since they are primarily personal vote seekers, we expect that they tend to ask more questions than their party list counterparts. Second, for legislators from a party list, party brand management is what matters. We argue that party leaders play a critical role in deciding which party member has the privilege to get access to the opportunity, and that party leaders prefer party loyalists with such privilege.

We evaluate our argument using a unique data set that documents parliamentary questions raised to the executive branch in the Legislative Yuan in Taiwan covering seven legislative terms from 1992 to 2016. Our preliminary data analysis reveals robust evidence that district-elected members make more parliamentary questions than list-elected legislators. Moreover, by measuring party loyalty using ideal points estimation derived from roll call voting data, we further demonstrate that, among party-list legislators, party loyalists get the privilege to ask more questions than party dissidents.

In order to examine the detailed nature of parliamentary questions, we also conduct a subsequent analysis by dividing the parliamentary questions into two categories: questions asked on the floor and at the committee stage. We find no evidence on the effect of electoral rules and ideology on committee-level of interpellation. We believe that this empirical finding strengthens our argument since parliamentary questions made in the floor are more likely to draw public attention than questions introduced at the committee stage. The overall findings of this research therefore advance the scholarly understanding of legislative representation under mixed electoral systems and have implications for future research in this literature.

Authors

• Nick Lin, Academia Sinica

• Jinhyeok Jang, National Sun Yat-sen University