Parliamentary current questions’ constituency focus under times of crisis: an examination of the Greek case

ABSTRACT

Do macro-economic conditions affect legislators’ representative focus? This article examines this novel predictor by analysing an original dataset of parliamentary questions from the Greek parliament. Greece is a very informative case since not only is it one of the countries most severely hit by the Eurozone Crisis but it also offers an institutional setting that provides plenty of incentives to re-election-seeking actors for constituency-focused representative work. The data utilised covers an extended period of six Greek legislatures and over 12,000 parliamentary current questions asked pre, during and post-crisis between 2006 and 2019. The stand-alone effect of macro-economic conditions as well as its interaction with known predictors like the legislators’ vulnerability is tested. Findings provide evidence that better national economic performance conditions increase the likelihood that MPs with table current questions about their constituency, although other traditional factors like electoral vulnerability remain important.

KEYWORDS:

• Economic crisis
• representation
• constituency focus
• parliamentary current questions
• legislative behaviour
• Greece

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 EU Commission’s Financial assistance to EU countries page last accessed on 12 June 2021, https://ec.europa.eu/info/business-economy-euro/economic-and-fiscal-policy-coordination/financial-assistance-eu_en.

2 Kinski and Crum (2020) have recently introduced the notion of ‘transnational representation’, referring to claims by national parliamentarians on behalf of citizens of other national constituencies.

3 However, it needs to be noted that there are some studies that, although did not reach contrary results, could not provide enough evidence to support this idea in the cases of the UK (Kellermann, 2016), Ireland (Martin, 2011; Fernandes et al., 2019) and Portugal (Borghetto et al., 2020).

4 More accurately, the Hellenic parliament (Βουλή των Ελλήνων – Vouli ton Ellinon, or simply “Vouli”, literally meaning: will of the Greeks).

5 More than half the districts elect less than 10 seats while there are a handful of districts that are located in and around Athens with more than 40 seats.

6 see Kartalis and Lobo (in press) for a more detailed description.

7 SO, Art. 53.1.

8 SO, Art. 124.4.

9 Together with the Discussions in the Plenum Initiatives for which data is not available (SO, Art. 132A).

10 It is important to understand however that MPs may never actually get to ask these questions on the parliamentary floor. Parties have important leeway in selecting those questions that will eventually make it to the floor. The Conference of Parliamentary Chairpersons, the body which decides the contents of each plenary session and which ensures a disproportionate weight to the dominant party in Parliament (Kartalis & Lobo, in press) has to approve the suitability of each question (SO, Art. 129.4). Additionally, out of the ones approved, the leaders of each parliamentary group, by order of their group’s size, select only two to be discussed in the floor (SO, Art. 130.3) while those not selected, are rescheduled for another session (SO, Art. 130.4) with the possibility to never be discussed at all.

11 Accessible at: https://www.hellenicparliament.gr/Koinovouleftikos-Elenchos/Mesa-Koinovouleutikou-Elegxou.

12 Although data for the 11th Period were only available from 2006 onwards, the empirical design focusing on the current question as the unit of analysis, instead of the mean questions per MP or term, is not affected by its inclusion in the analysis while extending its time frame.

13 Accessing the full body of the questions was impossible for the years prior to 2010 so the study had to rely on the titles only.

14 In the Greek language, each noun belongs to one of three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter. Within each of the three genders, there are several sub-groups (declension classes) with different sets of inflectional endings that would cause the automated search to return many false negatives.

15 This geographic approach comes with limitations. For example, it cannot capture cases in which legislators work for their constituents by asking questions about a company operating in the district, an infrastructure project, a school etc.

16 More precisely, EPI is calculated by subtracting the inflation rate, the unemployment rate, the budget deficit as a percentage of GDP and then adding back the percentage change in real GDP from a total score of 100 per cent. The four sub-components are computed as deviations from desired values as Khramov and Lee state (0.0 per cent for inflation, 4.75 per cent for unemployment, 0.0 per cent for deficit/GDP, and 4.75 per cent for growth rate). Additionally, as suggested in the paper, the scores are normalised for comparability across countries and in order to mitigate potential inconsistencies due to high volatility. Each sub-component is weighted by the inverse of its standard deviation multiplied by the average standard deviation of all four sub-components.

17 Elections in June 2012 and September 2015 were both consecutive elections in the same year that were held less than 18 months before the previous election (May 2012 and January 2015 respectively). In accordance with Presidential Decree 26/2012, those elections took place with a closed-list system. In those cases, the equivalent formula (i.e. Rank in party list) for non-preferential systems was used.

18 1999–2019 Chapel Hill Expert Survey Trend File. Version 1.2. Available on chesdata.eu.

19 To avoid estimation problems caused by the large differences in the scales of the predictors they are rescaled by centring following Sommet and Morselli (2017). An updated descriptives’ table after centring is provided in Table A1 in the appendix.

20 By including the interaction term to the model, the model has improved from the previous one while making both economic performance and government variables more significant. The AIC value has decreased as Table 4 shows but to further substantiate this improvement, an ANOVA is fitted to compare the two models. The anova() function in R returns a statistically significant test of deviance at the 0.05 level.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by H2020 European Research Council [Consolidator Grant 682125]; Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia – FCT [Bolsas de Investigação para Doutoramento].

Notes on contributors

Yani Kartalis

Yani Kartalis is a PhD candidate in Comparative Politics at ICS-ULisboa. He earned his MRes in Political Science at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. His research interests lie in the fields of representation, parliaments and political parties, and text-as-data and automated data collection approaches for the social sciences.