The variation in salience of political dimensions over parties along their political ideologies is a core characteristic of modern party systems. The extent to which this reverberates into actual legislative activity of parliamentary parties is however usually inquired into only indirectly, predominantly by analysis of political texts, or of legislative outcomes. While the former especially concerns the beginning of the legislative process, the latter only addresses its end. Consequently, while the former is silent on whether parties also act in line with what they claim to be important to them in terms of their parliamentary activity, the latter is bound to ignore instances where parties tried their best but failed.
In this paper, I propose to complement these two approaches with an analysis of party activity at the intermittent parliamentary stages, especially with a view to the introduction of bills and amendments, i.e. to adopt a direct rather than indirect approach to identifying conditions of legislative activity. I argue on ways to analytically address this activity, especially with a view to non-policy characteristics of parties, e.g. government/opposition status, age, size, and with a view to these activities as interdependent behavior.
I then empirically address parliamentary activity of German parties in the three periods 1890-1918, 1919-1932, and 1949-1967 along policy fields as identified under the Comparative Agendas Project coding scheme. The ensuing long-term perspective lends itself to analysis of parliamentary party activity, as it allows controlling for variation in the variables named above and for changes in the composition of the party system while keeping variation of parliamentary institutions at a very low level. I employ two sets of measures, each detailed by party: bills and amendments, and requests for roll call votes. A series of count models covers a total of 52.137 documents and 1.579 roll call votes, covering the activity of 4.083 members of the Reichstag and the Bundestag over 17 legislative terms.
Findings are broadly in line with the literature on the role of policy salience as a necessary condition for party activity. But they point towards considerable variation over time and parties in the extent to which the related policy dimensions achieved actual prominence in this. The paper thus adds to the literature on the role of ideology for party behavior, in terms of identifying sufficient conditions of party legislative activity.
