If there is nothing else to say: the local content of interpellations

ABSTRACT

Parliamentary questions have several functions in modern democracies. Academic literature also presents that this tool also exists in non-democratic regimes, even though with limited functions. In this paper, we investigate the more than 14,000 interpellations posed in the Hungarian parliament between 1867 and 2018 through various regimes, asking the question how does the regime and its institutional settings influence local content of interpellations. We investigated three hypotheses regarding them. We have found that (1) lower level of democracy increases the probability of local content’s occurrence in interpellations; (2) MPs elected in local level pose interpellations concerning local issues with a higher probability; and finally (3) MPs pose interpellations with local content with a higher probability if the local governments are more powerful.

KEYWORDS:

• Parliamentary question
• representation
• non-democratic regimes
• comparative politics

Acknowledgements

We would like to express our thanks to Bálint György Kubik for his help in the dictionary-based method. We would also like to express our thanks to Bence Ablonczay, Sarah Contu and Zsófia Zsuzsanna Vajda for their help in preparation of our dataset.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Our data on interpellations start in 1867, although it was the midpoint of the 1865–1869 electoral cycle.

2 The term ’higher level of democracy’ needs a bit more explanation. While previously dichotomy was a widespread way to classify regimes (as democracy or autocracy), a new perspective emerged in recent years. Its most common concept is that distinction between the two aforementioned categories is blurred (see Bogaards, 2009; Levitsky & Way, 2010; Morlino, 2009). Thus, the ‘higher level of democracy’ means the stronger presence of democratic characteristics within the regime. Other interesting question emerges, if we think about Figure 2. Sharp debates dominate the media agenda on the conditions of democracy in Hungary in recent years. These data do not corroborate the expectations regarding democratic backsliding. Based on this, two possible explanations are possible. The first one is that there is nothing to see, no democratic backsliding appears in Hungary. The second possible one is that, although there is a democratic backlash, it does not indicate changes regarding the local content of interpellations. It can happen if the MPs’ freedom of expression is not limited significantly, or if they are just not interested in non-national issues.

3 Some of these changes were the result of reorganisation of territorial units (e.g. Győr-Moson and Sopron counties were united to Győr-Sopron county in 1950), others’ goal was to renew the historical name of a territorial unit (like the renaming of the aforementioned Győr-Sopron county to Győr-Moson-Sopron county in 1990). In other cases, the main reason of the renaming was symbolic (e.g. after 1945, when the formal landowners fled, the village Szolgaegyháza, literally ’Church of Servant’, was renamed to Szabadegyháza, literally ’Church of Freeman’, in 1950) or political (e.g. Dunapentele, literally ’Pentele-on-Danube’, was renamed Sztálinváros, literally ’Stalin City’, in 1951, and later in 1961 it was renamed to Dunaújváros, literally ’New-City-on-Danube’).

4 See: http://bencsik.adatbank.transindex.ro/index.php?action=keres, downloaded 10 May 2019. The two databases together contained 10,218 settlement names for Central Europe (some settlements have names in different languages, like Gyula in Southeast Hungary is called Giula in Romanian and Deutsch-Jula in German) and 97 county names for Hungary.

5 It was crucial, because many settlement names in Hungarian have other meanings too, like given names (e.g. Buda) or other expressions (e.g. Baja also means ’his problem’).

6 E.g. until 1920, Pozsony (in Slovakian Bratislava), the current capital of Slovakia is classified as Hungarian geographical term.

7 Macroeconomics, civil rights, health, agriculture, labour, education, environment, energy, immigration, transportation, law and crime, social welfare, housing, domestic commerce, defence, technology, foreign trade, international affairs, government operations, public lands and culture, see https://www.comparativeagendas.net/pages/master-codebook.

8 The intercoder reliability was relatively high (80.09%).

9 See cap.tk.hu/en.

10 Although the capital city of Hungary was not changed during the investigated period (although Pest, Buda and Óbuda was united only in 1873), its territory was significantly expanded in 1950 by the incorporation of several towns and villages of the agglomeration.

Additional information

Funding

The research was supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research & innovation programme under Grant Agreement no. 951832 and by the European Union project RRF-2.3.1-21-2022-00004 within the framework of the Artificial Intelligence National Laboratory of Hungary.

Notes on contributors

Csaba Molnár

Csaba Molnár is a junior research fellow of the Institute for Political Science Centre for Social Sciences in Budapest. He is also assistant lecturer of the Corvinus University of Budapest. His main research fields are legislative studies, policy agenda and rightwing radicalism.