Questioning the Locals: Local-Related Parliamentary Questions Across Regimes

Parliamentary questions have several functions in modern democracies. Academic literature also presents that this tool also exist in non-democratic regimes, even though with limited functions. Previously, we investigated its function as representing local interests. We compared the non-democratic communist and democratic post-regime change periods of Hungary between 1949 and 2018. We verified that in the 1980s by the collapse of the communist regime, the proportion of local-related parliamentary questions significantly decreased, while the ones focusing on national and international issues became dominant. Two basic question raises from these findings. The first one focuses on the grey zone: we can state that MPs of clear dictatorships pose more questions on local issues than their colleagues in clear democracies. However, it is not known where we can place regimes with limited democracy. The second one focuses on the temporal dimension. We found the sharp decrease of the local-related parliamentary questions’ proportion, but maybe it is a result of their changing nature, not of the democratisation process. The interpellations (specific parliamentary questions) of Hungary can answer these questions. During the 20th century a conservative limited democracy was followed by a totalitarian communist regime, and by again a democratic one. We investigate these interpellations comparing three periods of Hungary: the conservative semi-democracy (1920-1944), the communist dictatorship (1949-1990) and the post-regime change democracy (1990-2018). Our hypotheses investigate whether (1) the proportion of local-related interpellations is tendentiously decreasing by time, or (2) proportion of local-related interpellations is higher in more democratic regimes.