Parliamentarians in the Middle East and North Africa: Analysis of their Roles and Prominence

• In Event: Foreign and Domestic Politics in the Middle East and Africa

Abstract

Parliamentary contact groups (PCGs) are an institutionalized craft of how legislators exchange internationallly. While scholarship on patterns and consequences of this international phenomenon is scarce anyway, the few existing studies focus on democratic states and activities of their respective assemblies and members. In contrast, my paper focuses on parliaments in anocratic and autocratic regimes. Though my theoretical focus strives for a generalization of regime types, I focus on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Using role theory and the notion behind prominence, I hypothesize that MPs use their roles in international activities to compensate for their lack of prominence in national assemblies. Testing this, I use a bidimensional methodology that is firstly based on collected data of MENA-based PCGs of more than twenty locations. Secondly, I employ a questionnaire (N ≈ 95) planned towards MPs from MENA locations to seek what their role concepts maybe based in three levels: MPs’ roles at their home parliaments, their roles in PCGs, and in international parliamentary assemblies (IPAs). In analyzing open-ended survey responses, I employ a semi-supervised document scaling method, Latent Semantic Scaling (LSS), which asseses response items gathered from MPs based in the MENA. By using quantitative text analysis, MPs describe how they view their own roles, in diverse parameters, while recounting their parliamentary engagement on an international level. I speculate that using this mechanism can help us fathom how MPs are involved with PCGs and IPAs abroad, which then speaks to the lack of prominence at their national assemblies.

Author

• Meray Maddah, University of Konstanz