Personal or Partisan Agenda? Exploring the Use of Written Questions as Information-Seeking Tools.

Most parliaments allow legislators to submit written questions to the government, a key instrument for monitoring executive action and ensuring accountability. Existing research shows that legislators use written questions to advance personal agendas, including the representation of constituents or specific social groups. Yet we still know little about how legislators strategically select policy topics when using this instrument, and how personal and partisan incentives interact in shaping this behavior. In this article, we develop a framework that links written questions to legislators’ career motivations—reselection, reelection, and advancement—by distinguishing between partisan priorities and individual-level sources of expertise and electoral incentives. We argue that MPs are more likely to engage with policy areas that are salient to their party and electoral district, but that this partisan logic is conditioned by individual characteristics such as pre-parliamentary professional experience and committee membership, which lower information costs and foster issue specialization. We test these expectations using an original dataset of nearly 940,000 CAP-coded written questions submitted in the Spanish Congreso de los Diputados between 1996 and 2023. The paper highlights written questions as a strategic venue through which legislators combine collective party goals with personal career incentives, contributing to broader debates on agenda-setting, parliamentary behavior, and legislative representation.