Research on legislative control dynamics has extensively examined how political parties use legislative tools to control portfolios and their respective heads in coalition governments. However, research has focused on partisan-run portfolios and has overlooked how control dynamics are affected when portfolio heads are independent, thus not affiliated with any party. This article addresses this gap by analysing parliamentary questions from 28 German city councils to determine how independent portfolios are controlled relative to partisan portfolios. The results show that all parties control independent portfolios more intensely than partisan portfolios. This is the case for both governing parties and opposition parties. However, while government parties control independent portfolios more than partisan portfolios, they still do so to a lesser extent than opposition parties.

Research on intra-coalition control shows that monitoring increases with the ideological distance between coalition partners. However, the focus of scholarship has been primarily on parliamentary regimes, not mixed regimes. In mixed regimes, intra-coalition control becomes more complex due to a dual executive. Parties must simultaneously monitor each other and the directly elected Head of Executive (HoE). This article examines intra-coalition control in mixed regimes by analyzing parliamentary questions from 21 German city councils. The German local level resembles a mixed regime. The executive consists of the coalition cabinet supported by the council majority and the directly elected mayor as the HoE. The results show that the division of governmental responsibilities affects intra-coalition control. When a coalition party is aligned with the HoE, the balance of power within the coalition is affected, and the other partners intensify controlling the aligned party. Additionally, policy divisiveness and issue salience are driving factors for intra-coalition control.

The issuance of parliamentary questions (PQ) in presidential democracies reflects an effort to connect with the electoral constituency to advance the legislator's career. We postulate six hypotheses on the association between party affiliation, career advancement and district-level incentives and the issuance of PQs in Chile's presidential multiparty democracy. We test them using a novel dataset containing 68,424 inquiries (oficios legislativos) issued by Chamber of Deputies legislators in three legislative terms (2006–2018). Though district-level variables play a role in the issuance of PQs, incentives of political ambition do not. As opposition coalition legislators make more use of PQs than ruling coalition legislators, there is preliminary evidence to associate PQs with a possible oversight role.

Multiparty governments are based on delegation and compromises but, at the same time, coalition parties have at their disposal several legislative instruments to keep tabs on their partners. Whereas previous studies focused on policy divisiveness and issue salience as main factors able to explain parliamentary scrutiny, in this article we suggest uncertainty as a complementary factor. In particular, we theorize that the use of parliamentary questions (PQs) is a function not only of policy characteristics but also of actors involved in coalition governance. When ministers increase intra-coalition uncertainty, cabinet parties use PQs to extract information from ministers and to reduce uncertainty in policy implementation. Statistical analyses of all written and oral parliamentary questions in the Italian Chamber of Deputies between 2006 and 2018 support our main hypothesis that when intra-coalition uncertainty increases, coalition parties ask more questions of ‘hostile’ ministers.

Parliaments are still often criticized for being gendered—that is, for maintaining problematic inequalities between male and female officeholders. While research highlights how female members of parliament (MPs) take the floor less often than men, especially during debates on “hard” policy domains, much remains unknown about the role that political parties play in fostering such differences. Drawing on a novel data set on the use of parliamentary questions in Belgium (N = 180,783), this article examines gendered patterns in the substantive focus of MPs’ parliamentary work. It confirms that differences in the issue concentrations of male and female MPs exist, but they are larger when access to the floor is more restricted and party control is stronger. Our findings yield important insights into the gendered side effects of parliamentary procedure and shed some light on the “choice versus coercion” controversy with regard to women's substantive focus of parliamentary work.

This research note studies the political representation of racial minorities in Singapore. Specifically, it analyzes whether racial minority members of parliament (MPs) are more likely than Chinese MPs to represent the interests of racial minorities in the Parliament. I answer this question through conducting content analyses of the parliamentary questions raised during the plenary meetings of the 10th–12th Parliament of Singapore (2002–2015). In total, 6,678 questions were asked. Our results show that racial minority MPs were significantly more likely (21.79 times) than Chinese MPs to ask questions related to racial minorities. While this study shows that racial minority MPs were significantly more likely than Chinese MPs to ask questions related to racial minorities, it also highlights the inadequacy of representation of racial minority interests in the Parliament of Singapore. During our period of study, only 1.2% of the total number of parliamentary questions focused on racial minorities. Besides MPs' race, this study finds that partisan affiliation crucially influenced the likelihood of MPs to represent racial minority interests. Political parties played an important role in shaping MPs' representational behavior. Compared to the People's Action Party (PAP) MPs, opposition MPs were significantly more likely to raise racial minority-related questions. One possible explanation could be that opposition MPs used parliamentary questions as an important tool to challenge and criticize the governing party's policies on racial minorities. Another explanation could be that PAP racial minority MPs' first loyalty has to be to the party and government rather than their co-ethnics, given that they are beholden to party elites for their seats.

Within the context of the economic downturn in southern Eurozone countries and the imposition of new constraints on national policy-making, this article examines the congruence between party issue prioritization, during and after the electoral phase. This is done through a longitudinal analysis of four countries (Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain) and use of party manifesto and parliamentary question data. We found that between the electoral and parliamentary arenas, parties tend to emphasize different issues. However, this occurs in different ways across time, countries, and parties. We propose a measurement of issue congruence in agenda framing between the pre- and post-electoral phases to assess to what extent elections provide a guide for public policies. Moreover, we propose arguments to explain different results in the analyzed countries and across parties. We show that the crisis magnified the capacity of the opposition to maintain programmatic coherence – a helping hand for opposition parties (including the radical ones) that succeeded in boosting the relevance of their signature issues.

In this article, we explore how electoral systems influence attitudes and behavior of elected representatives. Focusing on constituency representation, we consider how variation in electoral systems may shape forms of political representation. An analysis of written parliamentary questions (PQs) is an important instrument to look at the role of parliamentarians even where, as in the European Parliament, political parties enforce discipline in roll-call voting. This kind of investigation offers the opportunity to partially resolve empirical and theoretical problems related to other methods of research. Unlike voting and speeches, PQs face fewer constrains from party leaders. This article analyses the constituency focus of members of European Parliament from France and Italy. These countries differ with regard to two main dimensions of electoral systems: ballot structure and district magnitude. The study is conducted through a content analysis of 5343 written PQs during the sixth term (2004–09). The results suggest that, despite the lack of strong electoral connection, electoral institutions shape the legislative behavior of the Italian and French parliamentarians providing incentives to cultivate personal reputation and constituency-orientation.

This article examines the behavior of Greek political parties before, as well as during, the recent austerity period. Drawing on coalition oversight and blame avoidance literature, it argues that the unpopularity of austerity governments leads to extreme levels of dissent within the coalition. I operationalize this ‘intra-coalition opposition’ behavior using parliamentary questions, a legislative institution that has not been studied in the context of coalition politics. The analysis demonstrates that junior members in unpopular austerity governments increase their use of parliamentary questions to a degree that matches or even exceeds the formal opposition. However, intra-coalition dissent is conditional on the type of unpopular government policies, and on the ideology of coalition members. Specifically, using a new method of text analysis, I show that while the socialist Panhellenic Socialist Movement uses its parliamentary questions to avoid or minimize the blame associated with austerity policies, the conservative New Democracy does not, because left-leaning parties are electorally vulnerable to austerity measures. The results have implications for studying dissent in coalition politics in general, and the politics of austerity in particular.