The organization of legislative debates has received little attention within the literature on parliamentary institutions (Döring 1995; Kam 2009). Only recently rules for allocating speaking time in parliaments have been examined in a more general attempt to provide an endogenous explanation of parliamentary organization. According to Cox (2006) legislatures are electoral arenas that elect an array of offices endowed with special agenda powers. Agenda powers establish access to (a) the voting agenda, that is the right to make or proposals to the entire legislature or exercise a veto and (b) the debate agenda, reflecting the right of expressing opinions in parliamentary speeches. This perspective on legislatures in which endogenously created offices are the key to securing control of the agenda is seen as an alternative to other mechanisms to confer control of the agenda such as cohesive voting induced by party discipline. Proksch and Slapin (2011) proposed a model explaining the organization of parliamentary debates from the perspective of intra-party politics. In their model party rules for debates are endogenous to strategic considerations and will favour either party leadership control or backbencher MPs position-taking depending on the importance of party reputation for re-election. This is turn vary according to the electoral incentives created by political systems. Proksch and Slapin (2011) test the implications of their model using speech data from Germany and the UK. The proposed paper will test the Proksch and Slapin (2011) model in political systems beyond the UK and Germany. The paper will address the following research question: do rules allocating speaking time change follow electoral law changes? This paper will focus on the Italian case. Italy is a pertinent case study as it changed its electoral systems twice: in 1993 when Italy adopted a mixed member electoral system abandoning proportional representation, and later in 2005 when a PR system with seat bonus was reintroduced.
References
Cox, G. W. (2006), ‘The Organization of Democratic Legislatures’, in B. R. Weingast and D. A. Wittman (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Political Economy, Oxford, Oxford University Press, pp. 141-61.
Döring H. (1995) (ed) Parliaments and Majority Rule in Western Europe, Berlin: Campus Verlag.
Kam C. (2009). Party Discipline and Parliamentary Politics. Cambridge University Press.
Proksch S. and Slapin J.B (2011). “Institutional Foundations of Legislative Speech”, American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming.
