What do representatives produce? Work profiles of representatives

Abstract

Legislative effectiveness and legislators’ productivity are important issues in parliamentary life. The literature about legislative effectiveness and legislators’ productivity deals mainly with the characteristics of its use, while that on legislation attempts to define and measure the productivity of legislators. The main objective of this research is to develop a new productivity scale, reflecting a new way of looking at productivity. The scale includes various parameters such as private bills, parliamentary questions, motions for the agenda and one-minute speeches, which have never been explored together. As a secondary objective, we determine the characteristics shared by the most productive legislators and those shared by the least productive. We test the scale using data from the Israeli parliament (the Knesset). The findings show that while legislators have a variety of tools available to them, most do not realize the full potential of the tools. Furthermore, party size and gender explained 43.4% of the variance in the productivity level in the 14th Knesset. In the 16th Knesset, we found a similar pattern except that gender was replaced by nationality; the larger the party, the less productive the legislators associated with it. Furthermore, non-Jewish legislators were more productive than Jewish legislators.