Is All Politics Local? The Role-orientation of Irish Parliamentarians towards Foreign Policy

Abstract

Whereas numerous recent studies have explored the structural and procedural ability of national parliaments to provide oversight of transnational issues such as European integration, the nature of individual parliamentarians' interest in foreign policy is a subject that has received little attention. The general assumption is that electoral incentives and informational deficiencies dissuade parliamentarians from actively engaging politics beyond the domestic realm. This paper suggests an analysis of parliamentary questions as a method for measuring individual parliamentarians' interests in foreign policy. Applying this technique to the Dáil uncovers evidence that, contrary to theory-derived conventional expectations, some parliamentarians do seek to monitor the government's foreign policy agenda. While conventional explanations of legislative role-orientation only weakly predict variations in observed behaviour, elite interviews identify lobbying by interest groups and foreign governments as the motivation for some Irish parliamentarians' engagement in foreign affairs.

Keywords:

• Dáil Eireann
• representation

Acknowledgements

The author is extremely indebted to Denis Costelloe for his invaluable research assistance. Funding to support this research was provided by Dublin City University's Office of the Vice-President for Research.

Notes

The recent literature on national parliaments and European integration/the European Union includes Norton (1996), Smith (1996), Bergman (1997), Pahre (1997), Wiberg (1997), Raunio and Hix (2000), Maurer and Wessels (2001), Holzhacker (2002), Benz (2004), Rizzuto (2004), Neunreither (2005), Auel and Benz (2006), Cooper (2006), Auel (2007), Duina and Raunio (2007), O'Brennan and Raunio (2007), Goetz and Meyer-Sahling (2008), Raunio (2011), Winzen (2012), and Brouard et al. (2012).

The dictionary, data and codebook are available at http://sgmartin.org.

Relevant committees identified were the Joint Committee on European Affairs, the Joint Committee on European Scrutiny, the Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs, and the Joint Committee on the Implementation of the Good Friday Agreement.

Available at: http://www.oireachtas.ie/parliament/

Of course, the number of questions does not have an even distribution. Martin (2011) showed that for the period 1997–2002 departments with a significant number of local concerns were subjected to significantly more questioning.

In the subsequent quantitative analysis, the total number of questions on foreign affairs per Dáil Deputy represents the analysis's core unity. The robustness tests exclude questions of an administrative nature (departmental administration/miscellaneous/general). Excluding these questions had no impact on the results.

Members of the cabinet, junior ministers and the presiding officer (Ceann Comhairle) are excluded.

Interview requests focused on the Dáil Deputies who were most engaged in foreign policy. I did consider seeking interviews with Dáil Deputies who did not ask any foreign policy-related questions, but opted not to do so as it would possibly be inappropriate to focus an interview on the politician's non-actions. I recognise that focusing exclusively on those engaged with foreign policy limits the degree to which the interview evidence can be relied upon to understand underlying preferences and goals.

Anonymous interview No. 2.

Anonymous interview No. 2.

Anonymous interview No. 1.

Anonymous interview No. 4.

Anonymous interview No. 1.