Parliaments and Democratic Resilience: Trust, Capacity, and Performance

In an era characterised by growing uncertainty, the stability of political institutions is of utmost importance. The idea of democratic resilience implies the performance of parliaments as being vital for the functioning of modern representative democracy via MP’s democratic mandate resulting from the trust expressed by the electorate. Consequently, government and opposition parties have distinct roles within the parliamentary arena. The capacity of parliaments - regarding the administration, policy expertise and communication - affect policy outputs and outcomes with a major impact on citizens’ day to day life. The Organizers of this Section welcome submissions of theoretical and empirical papers from all methodological approaches. 1. Coalitions and party alliances Parliaments represent citizens through political parties that interact with each other in coalitions, and alliances within and outside government. This panel takes outset in the work for a special issue on parties and coalitions but is open for other papers on coalitions and party alliances in and beyond Europe. 2. Party government beyond Europe Party government is predominant in European legislatures but not limited to Europe. This panel extends, through comparisons and case studies, the study of party government beyond a European setting. This panel takes outset in the work for a special issue but is open for other papers too. 3. Agenda-Control by Individual Ministers, and Effect on Legislative Policy Output The literature ascribes governments a strong control over the legislative agenda of parliament. Furthermore, the coalition governance literature points at centralizing decision-making in coalition agreements and central cabinet committees, reducing agency-loss upon ministerial appointment. Which agenda setting powers, if any, does this leave individual ministers with? Besides this main theme, the panel also welcomes other papers with particular focus on legislative agenda setting and change in policy output. 4. The Capacity of Parliaments for Legislative Control Elected parliaments act as representatives for the public control of the government. Judicially, this follows from constitutions and parliamentary orders, and may even be regulated by courts (Szábo 2023). Broader, the capacity of parliaments – administration, policy expertise, and communication – is likely to impact on legislation and control. Within these themes this panel welcomes theoretical as well as empirical papers, either comparative in scope, or within single countries. 5. The Legislative Organization of Gender Equality Issues Gender equality issues are frequently decided by national parliaments, but they are cross-sectional in the sense that they affect different policy areas: social issues, trades, family law, labor, etc. How are decision on gender equality made, and which committees deal with them: A special committee, or several committees? Special spokespersons or not. Does this impact on how the gender equality dimension is taken into account when parliament works with the legislation? The panel welcomes papers that include quantitative and qualitative research designs. 6. Historical Studies of Parliaments With digitalization more data has become available from back in time. This panel welcomes papers that studies parliaments or legislators using historical data. These may involve time series up to our own time (such as the Who Governs dataset – see Bértoa & Enyedi 2021), sequences, studies of ‘critical junctures’ in the development of a parliament’s history, or case studies – such as the use of ‘lotteries’ (Cirone & Van Coppenolle 2019). The panel also welcomes methodological papers discussing the possibilities and problems of using historical data in a legislative setting. 7. Public trust in Parliament Trust of citizens in institutions is a central requirement for working democracies. This is even more relevant if we think about trust in parliament that is the main representation body within the political institutions. Not only the Parliament as an institution as well as the MPs, as individual representatives, have extra responsibilities in the connection between themselves and the citizens they represent, thus, they should not only be responsible for ethical and transparent behaviours, as they should, without any doubt, be above any corruption suspicious or other questions regarding non-ethical behavior. The latter is particularly relevant because of trust issues between voters and representants what when not respected may question the entire democratic system. 8. Legislative Bargaining: Votes, and Institutional Frameworks Policy negotiations prior to decision-making is common in parliaments. Which actors take part in such negotiations: Cabinet ministers, party leaders, party spokespersons, committee members, or backbenchers? What is the form, output in form of roll-call votes, and how does the institutional framework allow or hinder such policy negotiations? 9. Quitting parliament? Legislative career patterns in perspective MPs are public representatives but at the same time politicians pursuing a career. An MP may not seek reelection, or even quit parliament before the end of an electoral term? What impacts on such decisions by MPs? Is it not advancing fast enough, age, gender, electoral system or other institutional rules (such as seniority). The data to study such and similar questions related to legislative career has improved significantly. The purpose of this panel is to study the political careers of parliamentarians with this focus but also more broadly. It seeks to analyse career patterns in various institutional contexts. 10. Legislative speeches – Methodological Advances With text from legislative speeches becoming accessible, and machine learning techniques entering methodologically, the possibility for quantative and qualitative analyses have expanded (e.g. ParlSpeech and ParlSpeechV2). This provides possibilities to evaluate theories about deliberation, position-taking, agenda-control, and empirical patterns such as length of speeches. The purpose of this panel is to present papers studying legislative speeches, and to discuss possibilities and limitations of studying legislative speeches.