Who gets to speak for the party? How Parliamentary Party Groups Assign Spokespersonships

Parliamentary debate is key to both representation and policymaking in democracies. This study examines how political party groups decide who speaks for them on specific issues. In many parliamentary systems, MPs are the spokesperson of a specific policy portfolio. They speak only on that issue and are primarily responsible for formulating and articulating their party’s position on that issue in parliament. We explore what criteria political parties use to decide which MPs serve as spokesperson on a specific issue. The key concept in our paper is specialization: the assignment of spokespersonships is the outcome of a process of careful consideration for the party because they distribute and delegate decision-making and policymaking power on day-to-day business in parliament. We build on the literature on committee assignments, which points to informational, distributional and partisan rationales behind MP specialization. The informational rationale of a division of labour suggests that MPs become a spokesperson on the issues that they have specialist knowledge of. The distributional rationale predicts MPs to be the spokesperson on those issues for which they have ties to relevant groups outside parliament, such as voters and interest groups. Finally, according to the partisan rationale, parties will assign issue portfolios that the party leadership prioritizes to the more prominent MPs in the parliamentary party group. We analyse a database of the parliamentary and pre-parliamentary careers of Danish MPs (2011 – 2019) which documents who holds each spokespersonship in each party. Our analysis sheds important light on how parliamentary party groups function, in particular how they divide labour within their ranks.