Speeches, Strategies and Institutions in Parliamentary Systems of Government

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

In parliamentary systems of government, legislatures have three main functions: ‘making’ and ‘breaking’ the government, making laws and serving as an arena for debate and deliberation (Wheare, 1963). While always being acknowledged in theoretical accounts, the deliberative function is the least tangible and has therefore long been neglected in rigorous empirical research. Two developments have brought it back into focus: First, there is a growing concern with claims of a ‘disconnect’ between political elites and representatives. Second, the availability of legislative proceedings in digital form, methodological advances in analyzing text and computational advances in the handling of big data have made rigorous empirical work far more feasible. In the meantime, there is a thriving community of legislative scholars using text as data (Bäck & Debus, 2016; Gillion, 2016; Grimmer, 2013; Grimmer & Stewart, 2013; Proksch & Slapin, 2014).
The study of legislators' behavior and their use of the parliamentary tools available to them in order to communicate with their voters and other outside groups have changed focus over the years. Traditional studies have concentrated on a single parliamentary tool such as legislative initiatives, parliamentary questions, speeches, committee work, and analyzed its procedures, use, effect and consequences regarding the connection between legislators and their voters. They show that legislators vary a great deal in their use of these tools. Explanations for the variance are multiple including the effects of electoral systems, candidate selection methods, the procedures governing the employment of such tools in the respective chamber, the power of parliamentary party leaderships, individual characteristics of legislators and more.
The proposed panel will bring together scholars who employ some of these methods in the context of parliamentary systems of government. David Willumsen (University of Innsbruck) will assess how individual legislative (introduction of bills and amendments) and non-legislative behavior (parliamentary questions and speeches) are affected by electoral systems and, in particular, how they change through electoral reforms. Sven-Oliver Proksch, Jan Schwalbach and Jens Wäckerle (University of Cologne) will investigate how the quantitative analysis of legislative speech can be used to understand the survival and dynamics of minority governments. While most analyses of non-legislative activity are concerned with the ‘electoral connection’ (Cain, Ferejohn, & Fiorina, 1987), Stefanie Bailer (University of Basle) will analyze the extent to which legislators employ a variety of parliamentary activities (parliamentary questions, interpellations, motions and other parliamentary initiatives) to signal their positions to interest groups. All three papers are quantitative. The forth paper by Osnat Akirav (Western Galilee College) and Thomas Saalfeld (University of Bamberg) is an attempt to explore in more detail the strategic reasons for legislators in Germany, Israel and the United Kingdom to use personal policy statements such as parliamentary questions, asking about the motivations legislators have to speak in parliament and to use a particular type of language.
Overall, the panel seeks to contribute to a conversation about innovative theoretical perspectives, discuss the opportunities arising from the growing number of methods for the extraction and analysis of relevant data, new sources of information about legislator behavior, and the opportunities arising from innovative experimental and observational methods regarding the subject.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 22: Legislative Studies

Individual Presentations

• Minority Governments and Legislative Debate - Sven-Oliver Proksch, University of Cologne

• The Effect of Electoral Systems on Legislator Behaviour - David Munck Willumsen, University of Innsbruck

• Parliamentarians’ Appeal to Interest Groups: Patterns of Signalling Interest - Stefanie Bailer, University of Basel

• Why Do Legislators Use Personal Policy Statements in the Chamber? - Osnat Akirav, Western Galilee College; Thomas Saalfeld, University of Bamberg

Chair

• Amie Kreppel University of Florida

Discussants

• Shane Martin University of Essex

• Justin Grimmer Stanford University