Parliamentary roles of MPs in sharp and soft focus: interviews and behavioural record compared: Marcelo Jenny and Wolfgang C. Müller

Abstract

The lay observer of politics tends to see parliamentary work as the main or even sole task of MPs. Work in parliament in general and giving speeches in particular is the yardstick that some Austrian news media apply when hunting down the laziest MP of the year and putting all others in pecking order at the end of a parliamentary year. They should know better. It is no secret to politicians and professional observers of politics, whether journalists or academics, that parliamentary work in the narrow sense is only part of their many obligations resulting from public office. Indeed, for some MPs it may not be among their most important tasks. While the floor of parliament in many ways is the most important arena in which MPs act, their contribution to the collective goals of both the nation and their party may be greater if they adhere to some division of labour and concentrate the greater amount of effort on their activities in less visible arenas. These other arenas include constituency rallies, media events such as talk shows on national or regional TV and radio stations, attending meetings of their party organization, visiting administrative agencies and businesses, attending events organized by interest group, and having contacts with ordinary citizens. Notwithstanding that the job of an MP includes such a broad spectrum of often essential tasks this chapter confines itself to analysing what MPs do in parliament. We choose Kaare Strom’s definition of parliamentary roles as “routines, regular patterns of behavior” (Strom 1997: 158) as the conceptual anchor of our study. Behavioral data should thus be an excellent, if not the best source of data to capture the roles of MPs. The alternative methodological approach that is used by most classic contributions and is still dominant in the research field on parliamentary roles is the analysis of interviews with MPs (see e.g. Muller and Saalfeld 1997). In this chapter we combine the two approaches. We compare roles or types of Austrian national MPs derived from behavioural data with the role descriptions derived from personal interviews. The MPs are from the twentieth legislative period (1996-1999) of the National Council, the lower and dominant chamber of the Austrian parliament. We describe the two interview questions most relevant to the topic and the patterns of answers given. Then we present data on MPs’ parliamentary activities and develop our typology of MPs based on their behavioural record inparliament. We analyse the match between the behavioural data and the interview data, show where they differ or concur and draw some conclusions on how the different sources of data impact on the roles and types of MPs found in empirical research.