Parliamentary Affairs

Russell, Meg; James, Lisa

doi: 10.1093/pa/gsae005pmid: N/A

Representations of UK parliamentary power in the popular media have attracted little attention, despite shaping citizens’ impressions of the institution. We begin to close this gap, through a content analysis of 657 articles in the national newspapers 2013–2019—a period straddling the Brexit referendum. Pre-referendum, media representations of parliamentary power were mixed, while afterwards, as parliament exerted influence over Brexit, it was presented as more powerful. But right-leaning newspapers shifted their normative position from lamenting parliament’s weakness to criticising its strength. Parliament hence faced a lose-lose situation, with key media outlets depicting it either as dangerously weak or dangerously strong.

Bramah, Helen A

doi: 10.1093/pa/gsae004pmid: N/A

The low and declining level of political trust in the UK is well documented but less is known about how citizens form trust judgements and how politicians can influence perceptions of trustworthiness through social media. This article addresses these important questions using a novel combination of content analysis and survey research, operationalising academic theory on political trust within the context of Facebook communication through a new lens. The findings offer a unique insight into how trustworthiness is conveyed on social media and the types of content that display competence, integrity and authenticity. UK citizens’ perceptions of MP communication are tested in an original survey using embedded Facebook content, allowing key features of high- and low-trust posts to be identified.

Pearson, Mitya; Wager, Alan

doi: 10.1093/pa/gsae012pmid: N/A

There is a growing literature investigating the attitudes of political elites and citizens in a range of areas, and this article uses matched survey data of British MPs and voters to contribute a new comparison of their views on climate change. It finds limited evidence of systematic differences between MPs’ and voters’ attitudes to climate change: neither group is clearly more concerned about the issue than the other nor more polarized along partisan lines. However, there does appear to be incongruence between MPs’ and voters’ views on some specific climate policies. The research builds on previous analyses of British MPs’ approaches to climate change, including finding that party identity is more useful in predicting their perspectives on climate change than their perception of public attitudes.

Mannoni, Elisabetta

doi: 10.1093/pa/gsae017pmid: N/A

With this research, I introduce the concept of pro-environmental voting, proposing an outcome-oriented rather than motivation-based definition and measurement. By conceptualizing it as an instance of pro-environmental behavior, I define it as voting for a party that takes a pro-environmental stance and for which environmental protection is also relatively salient—regardless of whether that is why the voter supports that party. I suggest measuring it by multiplying, for the party voted, its salience score on environmental protection with the distance between its position on the environment and the average position of all parties in the system on the same issue. Then, I apply this measurement to the recently released ESS10 (2023) data from 26 European countries. Findings primarily reveal that moral obligation and age are key drivers of pro-environmental voting; they also show that younger individuals vote more consistently with their environmental concern than older voters.

Lago, Ignacio; Lago-Peñas, Santiago

doi: 10.1093/pa/gsae002pmid: N/A

How does rural decline affect electoral politics? A well-known argument is that the growing geographical polarisation of populations between prospering major cities and declining hinterlands is emerging as a cleavage of electoral politics in developed countries. But prior work has focussed on specific outcomes of rural decline rather than examining whether the geographical distribution of political attitudes and behaviours within countries has become more uneven in the last decades. Using a measure of party nationalisation capturing spatial differences in electoral support across districts in OECD countries over the last 60 years, we find that a declining rural population increases differences in the geographical distribution of partisan support within countries. Nationalisation determines a party’s orientation toward distribution of public resources and support for region-specific interests.

Alexander, David A

doi: 10.1093/pa/gsae008pmid: N/A

Despite the significant role they are created to perform, to act as a source of independent information that informs the legislator about policy-choice, the parliamentary library and research service (PLRS) has been an underexplored component of legislatures within Europe. This article explores the Scottish Parliament Information Centre (SPICe), the Parliament’s combined library and research service, investigating how the unit fulfils an expert function, but also its contribution to deliberative democratic efforts. I find that the PLRS staff member could contribute to supporting the quality of deliberative devices, by lowering the cost of information for participants.

Prabhakar, Rajiv

doi: 10.1093/pa/gsae007pmid: N/A

Parliamentary Academic Fellowship (PAF) schemes have been introduced to boost knowledge exchange between legislatures and the academy. Evaluations of these schemes are rare. This article evaluates the UK Parliament’s PAF scheme based on interviews with former PAFs, Parliamentary hosts, and the Knowledge Exchange Unit. I find that PAFs and hosts want different things from the scheme. This is part of a wider issue of the differing incentives that academics and Parliamentary staff face in conducting knowledge exchange. Bringing academics and Parliamentary staff closer together means adapting the PAF scheme and exploring other forms of engagement beyond a formal fellowship scheme.

Borońska-Hryniewiecka, Karolina; Sacriste, Guillaume

doi: 10.1093/pa/gsae006pmid: N/A

In the academic debate about the deficits of representative democracy in the European Union, the views of members of parliaments about their EU-oriented roles remain largely unknown. Against this background, we exploit a novel dataset from an author-designed survey conducted in seven national parliaments to unravel MPs’ preferences with regard to their EU-oriented empowerment. Our findings allow us to identify the dominant cognitive schemas mobilised among parliamentarians which attribute particular legitimacy-related meanings to proposed institutional reforms. They point to a stronger explanatory power of party ideological position over national constitutional orientations, with right-wing parties being more supportive towards parliamentary empowerment than their centre and centre-left counterparts, and mainstream parties being more sceptical of it than radical groups on both sides of the spectrum.

Gambacciani, Paolo

doi: 10.1093/pa/gsae010pmid: N/A

Role theory utilizes sociological and political science tools to study parliamentary functioning and parliamentarians’ behavior. While scholars in the USA (1960–70) and Europe (1990–2010) have extensively applied it, this review focuses on its enduring theoretical validity. It introduces a role choice typology, categorizing parliamentarians in empirical studies. The analysis highlights role theory strengths and weaknesses, highlighting that the goal of reelection represents only one potential explanation of parliamentarian behavior. The article suggests reconsidering the sociological concept of role to derive testable hypotheses. In addition, the article extends role theory applications to studying legislative careers and less institutionalized legislatures.

Campos-Parra, Hernán; Navia, Patricio

doi: 10.1093/pa/gsae009pmid: N/A

What factors account for polarization in constitutional conventions comprised of party members and many independents without prior legislative experience? Using the 4,669 roll call votes in the 155-member constitutional convention in Chile (2021–2), comprised of more independents than party members, we explore the determinants of ideological polarization. Relying on absolute values for the WNominate scores, we find that party members are less polarized than independents and that prior legislative experience does not impact polarization. In institutionalized party systems that allow independents to compete with party members on a level playing field, a larger presence of independents in legislatures might help increase ideological polarization while a larger number of party members helps reduce ideological polarization in roll call votes.