If there is nothing else to say: the local content of interpellations

Abstract

ABSTRACT Parliamentary questions have several functions in modern democracies. Academic literature also presents that this tool also exists in non-democratic regimes, even though with limited functions. In this paper, we investigate the more than 14,000 interpellations posed in the Hungarian parliament between 1867 and 2018 through various regimes, asking the question how does the regime and its institutional settings influence local content of interpellations. We investigated three hypotheses regarding them. We have found that (1) lower level of democracy increases the probability of local content’s occurrence in interpellations; (2) MPs elected in local level pose interpellations concerning local issues with a higher probability; and finally (3) MPs pose interpellations with local content with a higher probability if the local governments are more powerful.