The Government’s Way or the Highway? The Rules of Parliamentary Publicity in Western Europe

The rules of parliamentary publicity, defined as ‘parliamentary activities with the main purpose of directly addressing the public, which are available to all parliamentary actors and allow all actors to address each other, are secured by the rule of law, and are visible to the public’ (own definition), play an important role when it comes to parties’ prospects for re-election. Consequently, parties care about the design of those rules. However, existing research focuses almost exclusively on parliamentary questioning while disregarding other activities that also matter for parliamentary publicity. To fill this gap, I will provide the first theoretical model of parties’ incentives to design the rules of all activities constituting parliamentary publicity. To set up the model, I will introduce a novel distinction between closed and open parliamentary activities. I define an activity as closed if it involves two parliamentary actors, one addressing the other and the latter responding to the former (e.g. parliamentary questions). Conversely, open parliamentary activities are accessible to all actors and do not require one actor specifically targeting another actor (e.g. parliamentary debates). This distinction allows analyzing all activities that constitute parliamentary publicity in one common framework.