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Parliamentary Questions, the Behaviour of Legislators, and the Function of

Legislatures: An Introduction

Shane Martin

Abstract:

The ability of parliamentarians to ask questions of members of the executive either in

written form or on the floor of the chamber is a feature of many legislatures, and

parliamentary questions often generate significant media attention and public interest.

Despite the interest and importance, the nature and consequences of questioning in

parliament remains obscure. As a working tool of parliamentarians, questions provide

recorded data on individual members and the parliament as a collective institution.

This paper suggests an analysis of parliamentary questions as a method for gaining

better understanding of the preferences and behaviour of individual legislators and the

role and function of modern-day parliaments.

Keywords:

parliamentary questions; measuring legislator behaviour and roles; constituency

orientation; legislative function; accountability

DRAFT 30 December 2010, Pre ared for The Journal o Le islative Studies, Vol. 17, No.3, Se tember 2011


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Parliamentary questions (PQs) are a feature of almost all national legislatures (Norton,

1993).1

Typically, an individual member or group of members tables a question to a

member of the government.2

The number of questions tabled in parliament can be

staggeringly high. Significantly, the media tend to pay relatively more attention to the

period devoted to questions than to many other activities within the legislature, and

the nature of question time appears to have consequences for citizens levels of

engagement with the political process (Salmond, 2010). In many countries,

questioning is a mechanism used to impose parliamentary accountability on the

government (Wiberg, 1994a).

Despite the centrality of PQs to the life of parliament, the content and nature

of questions posed by parliamentarians in most legislatures remains relatively

obscure, leaving the specifics of the questions parliamentarians ask and their reasons

for asking open to conjecture. More generally, the value and specific usefulness of

the institution of questioning to modern-day parliaments is contentious.

The core suggestion of this essay is that an analysis of PQs provides unique

opportunities to identify effectively the behaviour of individual parliamentarians and

the function of modern legislatures. As recorded behaviour, PQs provide unique and

exact insight into parliamentarians concerns. Arguably, questions are an important

tool for measuring an individual legislators role orientation and the functions of

parliament. Unlike much unrecorded or unobserved parliamentary activity, or

recorded activity which may be subject to significant behavioural constraints from the

party leadership, PQs can provide data for empirical analysis permitting reasonable

inferences. The aim is to obtain a clearer understanding, theoretically and empirically,

of the behaviour of legislators and the function of legislatures. The aim of the research


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agenda is not simply to present a summary of questions asked, but also to use this data

to test and empirically assess theories of legislative behaviour and function.

For legislative or comparative scholars, or country-specific experts, each PQ

provides at least two pieces of informational interest: First, PQs allow identification

of a questions topic and thus formation of an opinion regarding the policy interests

and agenda of the questioner. Second, the representative orientation of individual

parliamentarians may become apparent from examining the question. By focusing, as

many of the papers in this volume do, on the difference between personal and non-

personal vote cultivation (Carey and Shugart 1995; Cain, Ferejohn, and Fiorina,

1987), the personal-vote earning orientation, if any, of a parliamentarian should be

evident from the content of questions asked. Consequently, questions may reveal

interests in national and/or international policy or for more parochial, local

constituency-oriented issues. A legislators choices for using the questioning tool

provides unique insight into that members legislative behaviour and role-orientation.

Importantly, PQs are a more valid measure of legislators activities in

comparison with other recorded behaviour some of which has received significant

attention from legislative scholars. Analyses of plenary speeches have become more

common due to the advent of computer-assisted text analysis (see, for example, Laver

and Benoit, 2003; Proksch and Slapin, 2010a; and Quinn et al., 2010; for criticism

see, Budge and Pennings, 2007). However, access to the legislative chamber floor for

speeches tends to be controlled and restricted, thus limiting the validity of floor

speech analysis as a measure of legislators activity. Problematically, even in

legislatures recording publicly roll-call votes, the choice of which votes to select for

plenary roll-calls creates difficulty for inferring significances from roll-call analyses

(Hug, 2010). Even in legislatures which record all votes, such as roll-call decisions


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are frequently party-based due to disciplined legislative parties (Depauw and Martin,

2009). In contrast, PQs allow discerning the true preferences and interests of

individual members.

Beyond the individual legislator, an analysis of PQs also permits the potential

to discover new insights into the operating mechanisms and ultimate performances of

parliament as a central institution in the political process. Such an analysis provides

an opportunity to reconsider whether or not theories which point to the weaknesses of

parliament, especially in terms of executive accountability, provide an accurate

picture of legislative function and performance.

The remainder of this introduction includes: a brief review of existing research

on PQs; an explanation and illustration of the analysis of parliamentary questions as a

way to uncover the true preferences and interests of individual parliamentarians; a

discussion of individual-level behaviours simultaneously reflecting and shaping the

function of modern legislatures. The final section constitutes a preview of the research

reported in this volume. At the core of all the discussions is the idea that analysing

PQs can improve understanding of both the activities of individual legislators and that

of the legislative institution as a whole.

Parliamentary Questions: Existing Research

Most studies of PQs tended to focus on the issue of accountability and control. A

series of country-specific studies indicate that PQs are somewhat useful for holding

the government to account. Such research covered the national parliaments of Canada

(Franks, 1985), Denmark (Damgaard, 1994), Finland (Wiberg, 1994b), Israel (Osnat,

2011), Norway (Rasch, 1994), Sweden (Mattson, 1994), Turkey (Hazama, Genckaya,

and Genckaya, 2007), the United Kingdom (Chester and Bowring, 1962; Franklin and


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Norton, 1993; Cole, 1999) and New Zealand (Salmond, 2004). Yet, virtually all of

these studies also note the weaknesses of PQs as a tool for legislative oversight.

Examining PQs in four commonwealth countries, McGowan (2008) found

considerable variation in the usefulness of PQs, dependent on the exact procedures

used. Opedal and Rommetvedt (2010) note the importance of PQs for ensuring

democratic accountability regarding non-departmental governmental agencies but find

considerable variation in their usefulness for oversight of government health agencies

in Denmark, Norway and the United Kingdom. Significantly, Wiberg (1994a)

asserted that fulfilment of the control function occurs despite individual

parliamentarians lack of motivation to table questions designed to hold the executive

accountable. Wiberg (1995) noted a temporal, cross- sectional co-variation between

the size of the public sector and the number of PQ queries, which suggests that the

demand for questions. arising from greater levels of governmental activity, drives the

observed increase in PQs identified in many European parliaments.

Beyond national parliaments, Proksch and Slapin (2010b) discovered that

written questions in the European Parliament are an important source of control and

oversight for national opposition parties. Unable to control European affairs in the

domestic arena, MEPs from domestic opposition parties are more likely to ask

questions of Commissioners. Furthermore, the evidence suggested that patterns of

questioning relate to the policy specialism (as indicated by committee assignments) of

MEPs and by their attitudes toward European integration, with euro-sceptical MEPs

more likely to table questions. Examining the European Parliament (Raunio, 1996)

found that PQs can serve as a two-way informational channel MEPs use questions

not only to obtain information but also to highlight problems to the Council and

Commission.


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Bird (2005) used content of a sample of parliamentary questions in the

1997/98 session of the British House of Commons to gauge the prominence of

gender-related issues among parliamentarians. Less than one percent of questions

included the terms men women or gender, and female MPs were most likely to

be the source of questions containing the latter two terms. Birds findings are

significant for identifying the continued relative weakness of substantive

representation of womens interests even at a time of greater descriptive

representation of women in the British House of Commons.

Russo and Wiberg (2010) attempt to explain the cause of variation in the

structure and significance of PQs among different national legislatures. Given the

importance of the legislature in managing coalition government, the Russo and

Wiberg finding that parliaments in which single-party government is the norm tend to

have questioning procedures with a higher potential for information, is particularly

counterintuitive. Russo and Wiberg also find that PQ procedures tend not to co-vary

with the electoral system or party system. In short, the causes of the variation in PQ

procedures among different national legislatures remain largely unexplained.

In much of the academic literature mentioned above, the assumption is that

questions are a mechanism for holding the executive branch accountable, and

questions have little application to cultivating relationships with constituents. One

dissent to the conventional view is Raschs (2009) study which finds an electoral

connection to PQs in Norway;3

however, this study only considered the total number

of questions asked, not the nature or content of the questions. Exploring patterns of

questions in the French National Assembly, Lazardeux (2005) found no support for an

electoral connection. In this instance, the independent variable in the study was the

total number of written questions submitted by each deputy. The total number of


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questions asked is, at best, a rough proxy for constituency-focused behaviour and a

deputys personal vote-earning strategy. Questions can take different forms in terms

of content and role orientation being pursued. The significance of the alternative

approach suggested next is to make a distinction between the constituency-based and

extra-constituency-based questions by means of a relatively simple content analysis.

Parliamentary Questions as a Measure of Behaviour

To illustrate the potential of parliamentary questions to reveal the preferences and

role-behaviour of individual parliamentarians, consider two questions posed to the

Prime Minister in the British House of Commons in October 2010. A Labour MP

asked:

Yorkshire Forward, the Yorkshire regional development agency,

owns assets in my constituency in Barnsley that are crucial for a

major redevelopment programme in the town centre. Will the Prime

Minister look urgently at ensuring that the ownership of those assets

is transferred from Yorkshire Forward to the local authority so that

the programme can go ahead? Could that transfer be facilitated

before the body's abolition in 2012?

( Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons, 27 Oct 2010, Volume

517, Col 309)

The content of the question clearly relates to a concern of local voters. The

MP sought to ensure that the local authority in the constituency obtained control of

assets necessary to facilitate regional development. The question has little

consequence for national politics and is noticeably parochial.

In contrast, the very next question to the Prime Minister dealt with the issue of

government policy towards the European Union. A conservative MP asked the Prime

Minister:

It is claimed that the EU will need a new treaty to legitimise money

going to Greece. What is the Prime Minister's response?


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(Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons, 27 Oct 2010, Volume

517, Col 309)

Interestingly, in the cited example, a member of the prime ministers own

party is asking a policy-related question, likely motivated by a desire to compel the

prime minister to state clearly his position on a potentially controversial topic. In

contrast, an opposition MP used a PQ to the Prime Minister to raise a constituency

matter. That question was not an attempt to embarrass the prime minister, but rather to

probe the policy of the government, an assumed role of opposition members. Aside

from indicating the depth of knowledge required to provide immediate answers to a

variety of questions at PM query sessions, the previous examples illustrate very

different uses for PQs.4

Questions can tend towards representation of local interests or

towards national and international policy concerns.

An analysis of parliamentary questions to discover role-orientation provides a

number of distinct advantages over existing mechanisms used to identify personal

vote earning behaviour:

1. An allocation of time and resources occurs when tabling a parliamentary

question. A parliamentarian or a staffer must research the question, format it

appropriately, submit it, and await a reply. Tabling PQs, even if undertaken by staff,

and even if the process is efficient and rapid, is not an entirely costless exercise in

terms of time and opportunity cost. Effective limits restrict a legislator or staffer in the

number of possibly posed questions. As such, the applications of parliamentary

questions provide an indication of the priorities of legislators.

2. Unlike most other parliamentary activities, such as legislative voting and

parliamentary speeches, the party leadership tends to exercise less control over

parliamentary questions (Judge 1974). The control governing oral questioning, in


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particular, does appear to vary cross-nationally, but control appears to be minimal,

relative to the control exercised for floor debate and voting. Hence, questions provide

a more reliable perspective of the choices parliamentarians exercise for focusing on

parochial, national, or international issues.

3. Problems of selection bias and internal validity inherent in observational,

interview and survey-based research of legislators activities are eliminated, because

the behaviour of all backbench legislators can be examined through parliamentary

questions.

4. Instead of relying on a legislators recollection and self-analysis of role-

orientation and behaviour, the analysis of parliamentary questions provides a direct

and unmediated measure of role-behaviour: Observations are of actual behaviour in

the analysis of PQs, thereby eliminating differences between a parliamentarians

normative perception of role and the actual behaviour.

5. The data is readily available. Parliamentary questions are on record and

generally publicly available. In many cases, the data is electronically readable,

making the raw data easily accessible for (computer-assisted) textual analysis.

6. Unlike many other data collection methods in role-orientation and role-

behaviour studies, replication is possible, thus enhancing the scientific process (King,

Keohane and Verba, 1996). To aid replication, specific guidelines should direct

determination of whether or not questions have a national or local focus. To aid in

replication, the following procedure for content analysis of PQs is a suggested

guideline for researchers:

The Comparative Policy Agendas Project (Baumgartner, Green-Pedersen, and

Jones, 2006) provides an ideal framework to code subject matter of PQs.


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That project provides a framework to code 19 major topics covering 200

subtopics.5

To code localism, a PQ should have one or more of the following

characteristics:

a. Did the member mention a geographic constituency specifically? For

example, did the member say, in my constituency. or identify by name the

constituency?

b. Did the member mention a geographical location that the coder can confirm

is within the geographical constituency of the member?

c. Did the member mention a constituent or particular case surrounding an

individual, reasonably assumed to be a constituent?

d. Did the member mention a particular building or facility that the coder can

confirm to be located in the geographical constituency of the member?

e. Did the member mention a particular organisation or business that the coder

can confirm to be located in the geographical constituency of the member? If

the organisation or business is country-wide and the question is not

specifically related to the part of the organisation or business in the members

constituency the coding does not designate a local question.

f. Did the member mention an event, such as a local festival, specifically

taking place in the geographical constituency of the member,?

It should be accepted that PQs are just one of several tools that legislators can

use to represent local interests. Legislators can write directly to a government

minister; they can communicate directly with public service providers, and in many

jurisdictions, legislators can petition the public service Ombudsman to investigate a


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constituents concern. If these alternatives are available, considering a single

mechanism to for addressing service concerns for a constituency provides an

incomplete picture of legislative behaviour. Yet, the content analysis of PQs across

many legislatures indicates that questions are a standard tool for constituency

representation and gathering personal votes. Collective needs within the constituency,

as well as representation concerning constituents individual cases, are frequently the

subject of questions to government ministers. At the same time, parliamentary

questions are also the method for obtaining information from, and construct

challenges to, the government on national-level policies.

Parliamentary Questions and the Function of Parliament

The resurgence of interest within political science in the origin and consequences of

institutional design, allied perhaps with the prominent role of legislatures in newly-

democratised societies, has reinvigorated the study of the roles parliaments play in

their respective political systems. The assumption of strong legislatures operating

under presidentialism and parliaments in decline within parliamentary systems has

encountered significant challenge in recent years (see, for example, Lijphart, 1999).

An exploration of PQs should provide new insights into the roles and

functions of parliaments. As discussed earlier, the long-held assumption is that PQs

are a method for holding governments accountable. PQs are, apparently, effective for

extracting information from government. From a principal-agent perspective, citizens

delegate authority to the legislature, and particularly in parliamentary systems of

government, the parliament subsequently delegates authority to the executive branch.

An important control mechanism is the ability of the parliament to hold this executive

authority accountable, and importantly, information regarding the executives actions


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or inactions is critical for the smooth operation of democracy. PQs solicit information

from the government on issues of policy development and policy implementation, and

therefore, have the potential to be an important ex postcontrol mechanisms (Saalfeld,

2000).

Much anecdotal evidence suggests that ministers and civil servants are highly

sensitive to the content of PQs and carefully research and word responses to the

parliamentarian asking the question. Indeed, while a relatively junior civil servant

may draft the question, the practice in many governmental departments is for the most

senior civil servant to approve the draft before providing the answer. As such, PQs

maintain accountability for both the civil service and the elected government. Indeed,

without PQs, opposition parties would have great difficulty extracting information

from the executive branch.6

An important empirical question, then, concerns the degree to which PQs

focus on holding the government accountable or the degree to which PQs are

opportunities for the interrogator to build a reputation among a local constituency.

The lack of content analysis of questions has, to date, hindered a clear differentiation

for these two motivations. In the strongly candidate-cantered Irish parliament, Martin

(2010) analysed written parliamentary questions from 1997 to 2002, and found that 55

per cent of questions do not have a constituency basis. This evidence suggests that

parliamentary questions are frequently used to monitor government, and a portion of

Irish parliamentarians maintain interest in issues beyond those of a narrow

constituency, despite electoral incentives to focus on local matters.

Recent innovative accounting of the activities of parliaments in Western

Europe highlighted their partisan roles in coalition government to gather intelligence

of each others manoeuvrings. Building on the intelligence gathering perspective


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(Thies 2001), parties use the legislative process to overcome problems of ministerial

drift in coalition governments by scrutinizing more closely policies that have been

drafted by coalition partners (Martin and Vanberg, 2011). PQs, ostensibly, provide an

important avenue to achieve this. Yet, Russo and Wiberg (2010) find that PQs as

accountability tools are no more effective in coalition parliaments than in parliaments

with single party governments. An interesting empirical exercise would be explore the

degree two which patterns in questioning within parliaments with coalition

government align with the allocation of ministerial portfolios between parties. In other

words, are ministers from Party A questioned more by members of party B, etc., and

do patterns of inter-coalition PQs reflect the areas of most conflict between parties in

the coalition? The suggestion then, is that PQs are a method of monitoring which

legislators could use to scrutinize the activities and positions of each other. The

opposition can monitor the executive, but also coalition parties in government can

monitor each other.

Plan of this Volume

In his research, Saalfeld uses parliamentary questions to uncover MPs preferences on

issues related to Britains Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) groups. He finds mixed

evidence that such MPs are most likely to substantively represent the interests of

BME communities in Britain.

Highlighting the weakness of assuming that electoral systems explain

legislators behaviour, Russo finds that many Italian parliaments do play a

constituency servant role despite the closed-list electoral system. Attempting to

explain significant variation in the patterns of questioning, the research finds that

Italian legislators without previous national roles are those most likely to focus on


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constituency-oriented questions, as are members of the Lega Nord and Alleanza

Nazionale parties.

Combining a content analysis of PQs in the Swiss Nationalrat with a survey of

Swiss parliamentarians, Bailer finds little evidence of an electoral connection or

interest-group connection in questioning patterns. Instead, junior legislators who use

the tool to showcase their activity and commitment to political affairs dominate

questioning. The results suggest evidence of the use of PQs as a signalling tool to

other political elites.

In his research, Dandoy suggests and finds evidence of a link between roll-call

voting unity and the number of questions asked in the Belgian House of

Representatives. Questions are an efficient method of extracting information from the

government and better organised Belgian parties use this mechanism more so than

smaller, factionalised parties do.

Looking at PQs in the Canadian House of Commons, Blidook and Kerby uses

interest, electoral, and institutional variables to explain patterns of questioning.

Combining an analysis of the agenda topic of each question with constituency and MP

variables, they find that constituency representation through PQs are strongest when

local interests have an economic component.

The contribution of Sanchez De Dios and Wiberg provides an overview of the

structure and function of questions in European parliaments combined with a detailed

analysis of patterns of questioning in three cases (the United Kingdom, France and

Spain).

Rozenberg et al. suggests that oral questioning may perform functions other

than creating a political battleground. Their research on oral questions of defence

policies identify questions with political conflict between government and opposition


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in Germany but within parties in the United Kingdom. In Spain, policy interests

dominate questions while in France local issues are dominant.

Salmond argues that the form of parliamentary question periods has

consequences for the willingness of government ministers to delegate authority to the

bureaucracy. He asserts that spontaneous or quick-fire question procedures lead to

less delegation, as politicians are fearful of reputational risks resulting from being

identified as the public face of misadministration. Greater levels of delegation

between minister and their agents occur in regimes with least effective questioning

procedures within parliament.

Looking at the Norwegian Storting, Rasch identifies the importance of rules

and agenda power in explaining patterns of parliamentary questioning. Parties exert

no (or only mild) control over written questions with formulation of questions left to

individual discretion. The same can be said about ordinary (oral) questions in

the Stortings Question Time. The Question Hour, on the other hand, is subject to

the party leaderships centralization of agenda power. This observationis a reminder

of not only the importance of rules but also the ever presence of party discipline as an

institutional boundary of all behaviour in European legislatures.

Bringing the volume to a conclusion, Olivier Rozenberg and Shane Martin

review the main findings of the research, comparing the benefits derived from

analysing PQs with the ambitions established in the introduction. The final discussion

encompasses opportunities for further research involving the nature and impact of

parliamentary questions.


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Acknowledgements

The papers in the volume were original presentations at a conference on

Parliamentary Questions, organised by Olivier Rozenberg and Shane Martin under the

auspices of the ECPR Standing Group on Parliaments. We are grateful to Science Po

and the French Snat for their hospitality in hosting the event and to Professor Lord

Norton of Louth for his support in bringing this volume to fruition.


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Endnotes

1. A notable exception is the United States Congress which lacks the mechanism of

questions so familiar a part of parliamentary procedures in other countries.

Congressional committees are empowered to question witnesses, but no formal

question time takes place on the floor of the House or Senate. Neither can Members of

Congress table written questions. Indeed, the absence of PQs in American politics

(both at the federal level but also as a tool at the level of state legislatures) is a likely

reason for the lack of research on PQs, given the dominance and research-agenda

setting role of American scholarship in the study of legislatures.

2. The rules governing the exact format of PQs vary greatly from parliament to

parliament and tend to be codified in the Parliaments Standing Orders and/orRules

of Procedure. The main differentiation tends to be among questions asked and

answered orally in the chamber and questions tabled in written form (which tend to

receive a written reply from the minister after associated civil servants have

researched and drafted the answer). For example, in the British House of Commons,

three types of PQs are common (Questions for Oral Answer in the Chamber with

notice, Questions for Written Answer, and Urgent Questions in the Chamber

[formerly Private Notice Questions]).

3. Again, this finding is particularly counter-intuitive give the party-centred nature of

the electoral system and the related lack of incentive to cultivate personal votes.

4. A number of British television stations cover, live, Prime Ministers Questions, and

the performance of the Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition (who gets to

ask more questions than any other individual member) encounters close scrutiny,

Little wonder then, that some Prime Ministers, reportedly, spend considerable time

studying likely topics on the day of Prime Ministers Questions.


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5. Further information and code guidelines are available at:

http://comparativeagendas.org/.

6. A strong committee system with the tools to inquire into ministerial and

departmental action and Freedom of Information requests are two obvious tools which

may compliment or even replace the need for PQs.

shane martin questions

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