Why Do Legislators Use Personal Policy Statements in the Chamber?

• In Event: Speeches, Strategies and Institutions in Parliamentary Systems of Government

Abstract

The standing orders and practices of most legislatures afford individual representatives with the possibility to make personal policy statements independent of their parties, including oral questions, written questions, interpellations, one-minute speeches and personal statements. Even private members’ bills may be included in such individual initiatives as they are often used to enhance an individual legislator’s public profile. Empirical research on legislative activity has shown that parliamentarians have increasingly made use of such tools. In the case of parliamentary questions, for example, legislators in some chambers ask tens, or even hundreds of thousands of questions per legislative term. Some of this activity is attributable to the conflict between government and opposition parties. Some of it reflects legislators’ individual concerns or strategies. While scholars have mapped the increase in activity and correlated it with various institutional incentives (e.g., legislators’ incentives to cultivate a personal vote), individual motivations are still under-researched. With the exception of a few surveys (such as the one by Franklin and Norton 1993), not much empirical work has been carried out to help us understand the reasons for the use of particular types of statements. What, for example, is the incentive for re-election seeking legislators to ask a few out of tens of thousands of questions? Are such questions motivated by a normative commitment to scrutinize governments? Are they part of a longer-term strategy in which different types of statements and interpellations are combined? Are they part of a strategy to secure visibility and re-selection or re-election? How, in turn, do government ministers view such interpellations and statements – and how will their strategic reasoning affect responses? The proposed paper will seek to provide first answers to such questions based on interviews the authors are going to conduct shortly with a sample of legislators in the British, German and Israeli parliaments. Informed by rational-choice and sociological institutionalism, we will seek to develop a better understanding of the motivations for the choice of personal policy statements and the perceptions of the established norms for their use.

Authors

• Osnat Akirav, Western Galilee College

• Thomas Saalfeld, University of Bamberg