Disseminating legislative debates: How legislators communicate the parliamentary agenda.

Lena Maria Huber,Anita Bodlos,Thomas M Meyer,Elisabeth Graf

doi:10.1177/1354068820982555

Lena Maria Huber, Anita Bodlos + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1177/1354068820982555

Copy DOI

Abstract

While a rich literature addresses legislative agenda-setting in multiparty democracies, relatively little is known how members of parliament disseminate the legislative agenda beyond the parliamentary floor. Drawing on content analyses of 110 legislative debates and 5,847 press releases from Austrian MPs (2013–2017), we test whether legislators are more likely to send press releases on issues that are salient to their party (party agenda-setting) and to other parties in the party system (systemic salience). MPs should also communicate more on issues that fall within their area of expertise (issue specialization) and when they have given a speech on that issue during the legislative debate (intra-party delegation). While we find empirical support for all these expectations, communication of the legislative agenda largely rests on each parties’ issue specialists and their speakers in plenary debates. Importantly, there is no significant discrepancy overall between the actual parliamentary issue agenda and the agenda communicated by party MPs.

Highlights

In parliamentary democracies, citizens delegate decisionmaking competencies to the legislature, whose members are in turn accountable to voters in the election (Strøm, 2000; Strøm et al, 2003)
We know surprisingly little about the role of political elites for informing the public about political decisions throughout the electoral cycle: How much effort do legislators invest in communicating the legislative agenda and their issue positions to citizens and the media? How does the dissemination of the legislative agenda vary across parties, legislators, and policy issues? Is there a gap between the actual parliamentary issue agenda and the issues communicated by members of parliament (MPs)? Answering these questions is crucial to understand the efforts of elected representatives to inform and to communicate with the electorate
The results of our analysis suggest that political elites are quite active in distributing messages about their legislative activities to a broader public

Summary

Introduction

Citizens delegate decisionmaking competencies to the legislature, whose members are in turn accountable to voters in the election (Strøm, 2000; Strøm et al, 2003). To make the delegation and accountability mechanisms work, citizens need to develop an understanding of the issues on the political agenda and their representatives’ positions on them We know surprisingly little about the role of political elites for informing the public about political decisions throughout the electoral cycle: How much effort do legislators invest in communicating the legislative agenda and their issue positions to citizens and the media? We aim to narrow this gap by studying how MPs disseminate the legislative agenda beyond the parliamentary floor. We argue that incentives to highlight particular items from the parliamentary agenda vary across legislators and parties. We distinguish four factors to explain the dissemination of the legislative agenda: on a party- or system-level, MPs should be more

Objectives

Findings

Conclusion