Specialists and Generalists: Explaining Issue Diversity in Individual Political Elites’ Parliamentary Speeches

How diverse is the range of issues upon which political elites act? In an era of information abundance, this question has become highly relevant. Politicians are bombarded with information every day—and adequately selecting and processing this information is crucial for high-quality policy output—but their time and resources to do so are severely constrained (Walgrave & Dejaeghere, 2016). Therefore, politicians need to make a choice: either they specialize in one or a few issues about which they know everything; or they become a generalist who knows a little bit about many different issues. Institutions, and individual legislators, are incentivized to specialize as well as to generalize. Parliaments install committees to enhance expertise and efficiency in policy-making on specific issues; but they also need coordination across domains to reach broader policy goals (Gilligan and Krehbiel, 1990). Individual parliamentarians are valued as specialists with expertise and quality in a particular field, but may equally benefit from being generalists with competence on many issues, hence appealing to a broader audience (Searing, 1987). As a consequence, there is variation between institutions, and between individual legislators, in the degree of specialization (Van Vonno, 2012). The goal of this paper is to explain this variation. It uses data from an automated (dictionary-approach) content analysis of parliamentary speeches in three countries—Belgium, Canada, and Israel—to measure issue diversity. By linking these behavioral findings to biodata and data from an elite survey with MPs in the three countries (N=376), the paper explores how MPs’ position, goals and attitudes affect issue diversity. Results show, for instance, that Canadian MPs’ issue profile is more diverse than that of their Belgian colleagues; that opposition MPs are more generalist than government MPs; and that so-called ‘party warriors’ deal with more different issues than ‘policy advocates’.