Legislative Oversight in the Anthropocene: How MPs use Parliamentary Questions in relation to Climate Policy

Climate policy pledges have become significantly more ambitious in the aftermath of the 2015 Paris agreement, yet open questions remain as to how exactly nation states will succeed in their quest for long term emission reduction targets. Scholars and pundits widely agree that reaching those goals will require a substantial and continuous level of political will. Parliamentary oversight over the making and implementation of climate policy is likely to play an important role for the perpetuation of that will. Members of parliament are the key actors who have a number of oversight tools at their disposal that allow them to scrutinise that climate policies are not subject to short-term political fluctuations and that governments are held accountable for their actions and decisions and stay committed to addressing climate challenges over time. Thereby, MPs can assess the effectiveness of existing climate policies and suggest adjustments based on changing circumstances, which is vital for achieving long-term climate goals. Moreover, parliamentary oversight increases transparency in decision-making, allowing the public to understand whether and how policies are being influenced by special interest groups, such that decisions become more likely to be made in the best interest of society as a whole and future generations. However, despite the critical role that legislative oversight is likely to play in the realisation of the Paris agreement, there is a dearth of empirical research into whether, how and due to what factors MPs actually use legislative oversight tools in the realm of climate policy. To address this conundrum, this study leverages large-scale text corpora of parliamentary questions - a key tool of legislative oversight - covering two consecutive legislative periods between 2010 and 2021 in 5 countries covering the Global North and South: Canada, Chile, Germany, South Africa and the United Kingdom. It uses methods of quantitative text analysis, in particular the semi-supervised document classification algorithm proposed by King et al (2017), to shed light on the following research questions. What is the prevalence of parliamentary climate policy scrutiny in these countries? What are the issues, sectors and longitudinal trends characterising this corpus? And what are the factors that make MPs focus their parliamentary oversight activities on climate policy? References: King G, Lam P and Roberts ME (2017) Computer-Assisted Keyword and Document Set Discovery from Unstructured Text. American Journal of Political Science 61(4): 971–988.