The Quality of Parliamentary Deliberation: The Case of the Family Code Debates in the Slovenian Parliament

Abstract

Using content analysis on a sample of 525 statements from the Slovenian Parliament we introduce the selected aspects of (non-)deliberation in the debates on the Family Code in the 2009–2011 period, thereby elaborating the Discourse Quality Index: participation, justification of demands presented within the debates and (dis)respect. We explore which of the following factors were associated with the level of deliberation about the Family Code: the type of the parliamentary body, the type of the actor (political groups, civil society, the government), (non-)support for the proposed Family Code, the time of the statement with regard to individual parliamentary readings, the length of the statement and the gender of the speaker. The results showed that the debate on the Family Code in the Slovenian Parliament was characterised by a modest level of deliberation. In addition, the multiple classificatory analysis indicated that the Discourse Quality Index was significantly associated with the (non-)support variable, the length of the statement and the parliamentary body.