Measuring Party Cohesion on Parliamentary Question Keywords

• In Event: Electoral Rules and Legislative Politics

Abstract

Understanding the positions of parties and legislators is key to conceptualizing party cohesion and their representation in most democracies. This study is to measure intra-party heterogeneity and variability in issue attention by looking at what and why legislators are more likely to oversight the ministry officials on one specific topic or another during the question time. We answer this question using the case of Taiwan Legislative Yuan, and data on written parliamentary questions through an electoral reform from 1993 to 2020. We estimate the position of each legislator on the left-right dimensions using the keywords extracted from the questions that legislators request for information on policies and activities of ministries from executive officials. We document how the electoral reform shapes legislators' ideological position and variability on their issue attentions: party cohesion increases when high variability in issue attention in Single Member District (SMD) and decreases when low variability under Single Non-transferable Vote (SNTV). These findings shed new light on providing a different approach to estimating party cohesion as well as to understanding the changes of political behaviour in representation and political accountability through the electoral reform.

Authors

• Yen-Chieh Liao, University of Essex

• Yu-Ceng Liao, National Chengchi University