Issue Engagement of Legislators and a Trend towards Issue Specialization

• In Event: Expertise and Professionalization in Legislatures

Abstract

What strategies push members of parliament (MPs) to engage in different political topics or issues?
In Switzerland, the federal parliament was founded as a lay parliament, where the vast majority of MPs pursued a career outside the parliament. Until the late 1980ies, it was uncommon for MPs to devote their full time to their legislative duties. However, the Swiss parliament has undergone a wave of professionalization. Over the past decades, an increasing number of MPs started to devote a larger share of their working time and resources available to their parliamentary duties. The biggest push of professionalization took place after 1992, as a parliamentary reform introduced stable committees, moving away from ad-hoc committee assignments.

In this paper, we ask which strategies MPs pursue when choosing how to allocate their resources within their parliamentary work: Do they decide to focus on specializing in a few select topics? If so, can we observe a trend of specialization of MPs in the Swiss parliament?
Current literature on the specialization of MPs within parliaments focuses largely on committee-affiliations of MPs as a metric for specialization. However, not only is this a narrow view of specialization, it also cannot be applied to all parliamentary systems. In Switzerland, for instance, committee meetings are held in secret and thus, committee work of cannot be studied fully. Furthermore, a mere membership of a committee might not be sufficient to claim a specialization of an MP.
Consequently, this has led us to ask the following question: Can we extend the specialization of MPs from a purely committee-affiliations perspective to one that comprehends the content of all legislative proposals submitted by an MP? We show that taking on the perspective of issue engagement is helpful in examining professionalization strategies of MPs.

Our study focuses on MPs issue engagement between 1950 and today. We gather all parliamentary bills proposed by MPs (including motions, postulates, interpellations and questions) to examine which issues MPs bring to parliament and which topics they focus on. Our data set consists of a newly comprised knowledge graph, called DemocraSci. Over 70,000 bills are recorded in the knowledge graph, together with information on the bills’ content, their sponsorship, who cosponsored the bills and their submission date. Furthermore, from the text of the legislative bills we extract the respective topics. We do so by creating a topical space based on the text of the bills, thus creating so called bill embeddings. Embeddings are a numerical representation of a word in a high-dimensional space. This representation captures the semantic and syntactic relationships between words in a continuous vector space, making it easier to process and understand. The topical space allows us to account for topics that are closer to each other, as for instance the topics of Energy and Environment. By examining the topical space of bills proposed by one single MP, we can gauge whether they can be considered specialists or generalists. Specialists propose bills on few topics (and topics are close together in the topical space), whereas generalists choose to engage in a broad variety of topics. By including a temporal lens, we can observe general trends in specialization and generalization of MPs in the Swiss parliament.

These insights enable us to cover further relevant questions, for instance, whether specialized MPs are more successful in getting their bills passed in the parliament, or how these choices play into collaboration dynamics in parliament.

Authors

• Sophia Schlosser

• Laurence Brandenberger, University of Zurich