Ask Me Something I Know: Government Ministers During Question Time

Question Time in parliament provides a platform for political actors to capture public attention with rhetorical skills, advertise policy achievements or influence the political agenda. The behavior of members of parliament (MPs) during Question Time has been widely explored, and attributed to constituency links, party seniority or rules of parliamentary procedure. However, how do individual government ministers use Question Time to achieve the aforementioned goals? This paper draws upon the rarely explored assumption that ministers anticipate the questions which they receive from co-partisan MPs. Government maintains high degree of control over parliamentary affairs through unified parliamentary party groups. This informal aspect of parliamentary democracies allows governments to dominate the legislative process, but also to actively resist and even take advantage of parliamentary scrutiny procedures. Compared to written questions by MPs, oral questions during Question Time raise the stakes for government ministers, as the event is televised and often discussed in political commentary. Hence, ministers have incentives to present themselves and the work of their department in a favorable light. Ministers may learn about the questions either through informal discussions within the party or by MPs explicitly announcing the question to them (known as ‘Dorothy Dixers’ in Australian parliamentary jargon). As opposed to questions from opposition MPs, the questions from co-partisan MPs should provide government ministers and their aides ample opportunity to prepare a complimentary response which advertises the achievements of the minister and presents her future policy initiatives. The implications of such anticipated questions are twofold. First, prepared responses to questions asked by government backbenchers will be less complex compared to impromptu answers to opposition MPs’ questions, making them more understandable for the broader audience of the Question Time. Second, such prepared responses should provide more statistical evidence on policy achievements, to increase the persuasiveness of the message. The paper tests these implications on the responses of Croatian ministers in Question Time between 7th and 9th terms of Croatian parliament (2011-2020). As in several other European parliamentary democracies, only the broad subject of the oral question is announced to the Speaker at least one day before the Question Time. Government and opposition MPs have equal access to Question Time, and regularly make full use of the procedure. The responses are obtained from the website of the parliamentary documentation center and coded for linguistic complexity and scope of statistical evidence they provide. The relevant variation in patterns of questioning during Question Time allows both comparisons between different ministers, and comparison of single minister’s responses to questions coming from either government party backbenchers or opposition. The analysis advances our understanding of executive-legislative relations in matters of government scrutiny, and particularly the behavior of the government. The findings have important implications for the extent and quality of government accountability, and for public perception of parliamentary debate. The future work plans to expand the number of countries to test for the conditional effect of institutional procedures regulating Question Time.