Political Parties, Parliaments and Legislative Speechmaking

by Bäck, Hanna; Debus, Marc

• ISBN13: 9781137484543
• ISBN10: 1137484543
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2016-03-23
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Why do some Members of Parliament (MPs) take the parliamentary floor and speak more than others? Why do some MPs deviate more than others from the ideological position of their party? This book develops hypotheses on legislative speechmaking and evaluates them by analysing parliamentary debates in seven European democracies: Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Norway and Sweden. Assuming that MPs are concerned with policy-making, career advancement, and re-election, the authors discuss various incentives to taking the floor, and elaborate on the role of gender and psychological incentives in speechmaking. They test their expectations on a novel dataset that covers information on the number of speeches held by MPs and on the ideological positions MPs adopted when delivering a speech.

Author Biography

Hanna Bäck is Professor of Political Science at Lund University, Sweden, and has previously held positions at the European University Institute and the University of Mannheim, Germany. Her research focuses mainly on political parties and coalition politics.

Marc Debus is Professor of Comparative Government at the University of Mannheim, Germany. His research interests include political institutions, party competition, coalition politics, and political decision-making in multi-level systems.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Theoretical Expectations about Speechmaking
3. How to Analyse Speeches and Legislative Debates
4. Who Speaks in European Parliaments?
5. Who Speaks Against the Party?
6. Conclusions about Legislative Speechmaking