The Role and Dynamics of Parliamentary Questions in Democratic and Non-Democratic Regimes: the Case of Hungary

A new research area of the policy agenda is the comparison of democratic and non-democratic regimes (see Comparative Agendas Project). The dynamics of policy changes present the ability of regimes to adapt to the changing socio-economical environment. In this paper I examine the most important kind of parliamentary questions of the Hungarian polity: the interpellations. I examine the function and policy agenda of interpellations based on the theory of punctuated equilibrium in Hungary. I compare the dynamics of the non-democratic regime from 1949 to 1990 to the democratic one from 1990. I test the hypotheses of Baumgartner et al reflecting to ‘institutional efficiency’ and ‘informational advantage’. My main finding is that the policy agenda’ equilibrium during the non-democratic period is much more punctuated than it is during the democratic one. This supports the thesis that MPs working in a freer democratic regime can collect information on the population faster and more effectively than the ones in a non-democratic regime. And it also means that the more centralised activity of MPs in a non-democratic polity cannot compensate the immanent advantage of democracies in collecting information.