Content matters. The Dynamic of Parliamentary Questioning in
Belgium and Denmark 1
Rens Vliegenthart
Stefaan Walgrave
Abstract
Why are MPs devoting attention to some issues while ignoring others? The question
of the issue-content of parliamentary activities has been neglected in previous
research that mostly focussed on the amount of questions MPs ask. We use
longitudinal data on parliamentary questioning in Belgium and Denmark, two similar
small European democracies. The analyses show that the questioning behavior of
MPs is structured according to clear patterns and cleavages. Opposition parties ask
more questions on all issues and they tend to focus on the issues the government
parties have put forward as being important. MPs ask more questions about issues
the media has paid attention to and about issues their party cares about and identifies
with. Government and opposition MPs devote attention to other issues because of
other reasons. Government parties and opposition parties ‘read’ the political and
societal environment differently and this leads to a dissimilar issue attention pattern.
The Belgian and Danish MPs follow largely the same pattern, but there are some
differences associated with the loyalty of government MPs to the cabinet.
Introduction
Parliaments are one of the key institutions in contemporary democracies. They
pass legislation and control the executive. Scholarly work on parliaments has mainly
concentrated on two topics: the changing role of parliament and its institutional
power vis-à-vis the government (for example, Döring 1995; Heller 2001) and the role
behavior of MPs (see for example: Müller and Saalfeld 1997). Much less attention has
been devoted to the substantive issues parliament deals with. In this paper, we focus
on and try to explain the content of MPs’ actions in parliament. From an agendasetting perspective, the resources of MPs and their parliamentary parties are
inevitably scarce — they have limited time, energy, effort and institutional
opportunity to devote attention to issues. In principle, the number of issues MPs may
deal with is infinite as the real world and society produce an endless array of worries,
concerns, problems that MPs are bombarded with and might devote attention to
(Jones and Baumgartner 2005). Due to the bottleneck of attention, only a limited
number of issues will get attention in parliament while others remain far outside the
scope of parliamentary attention. This raises the question: Why are MPs devoting
1
We would like to thank Peter Mortensen, Christoffer Green-Pedersen, and Rune Stubager for
their comments and help and for kindly putting the Danish dataset at our disposal.
1
attention to some issues while ignoring others?
MPs do many things. The most obvious function of parliaments is to pass
legislation. In many countries, though, government is now largely dominating the
legislative process. Government initiates most laws and makes sure these get
untainted approval of the government party troops in parliament (Ström, Müller and
Bergman 2003). Consequently, the role of parliament has gradually shifted and the
parliamentary control function, scrutinizing government’s actions, became the most
important aspect of parliamentary life (Green-Pedersen 2006). Probably the main
instance of parliamentary control, and the focus of this paper, is MPs asking (oral or
written) questions to specific ministers or to the cabinet as a whole. Most of the time
once a week, MPs get the occasion to monitor the government and pose it any
question they see fit and the government should respond immediately (oral
questions) or after a short delay (written questions).
The government-opposition dialectic is the engine of parliamentary
democracy. In this paper we explore to what extent government MPs and opposition
MPs behave differently in their questioning. In some countries, parliamentary
questioning is a typical opposition activity while in other countries also government
MPs use questions to keep their government under surveillance. But that is not the
point we want to make. Our key claim is that government and opposition MPs devote
attention to other issues because of other reasons. The government-opposition
conflict affects the dynamics of parliamentary agenda-setting and questioning.
Government parties and opposition parties ‘read’ the political and societal
environment differently and this leads to a dissimilar issue attention pattern. We
contend that the government-opposition game, and the partisan strategies entwined
with it, affect to what extent and how political actors adopt issues. Party features,
issue characteristics, issue ownership, the government agenda, mass media coverage
etc. are all related to the role parties play and all may impact which issues are
considered relevant for parliamentary action and which issues are discarded.
The study addresses the content of parliamentary questioning and shows that
issues structure parliamentary action. It examines to what extent parties, especially
opposition and government parties, focus on different issues and why they do so.
Added to that, we adopt a comparative perspective and test our ideas in Belgium and
Denmark, two small European parliamentary democracies. Both political systems are
in many aspects similar with proportional electoral rules, a fragmented party system
and coalition governments. The key difference is that Danish coalitions most of the
time are minority cabinets – Denmark is the world’s record holder when it comes to
minority cabinets (Damgaard 2003)- while Belgian cabinets always have a clear and
often even large majority in parliament. So, Belgium is a more classic case of
parliamentary democracy than Denmark; the peculiarity of minority cabinets is likely
to affect the agenda-setting dynamics in Danish parliament. The study focuses on the
similarities in the questioning institutions in both countries. Yet, we encounter some
2
noticeable differences that we try to account for.
The study draws on oral question and interpellation evidence in the Belgian
parliament (1993-2000) and written and some oral questions and interpellations in
Danish parliament (1986-2003). Apart from the dependent variable questioning, we
draw on a range of longitudinal data covering the same period as independent
variables. These other political agendas are analyzed using a similar issue codebook
and are examined for issue saliency: party manifestos, ministerial council minutes,
the government agreement, and mass media coverage.
Theory and hypotheses
Parliamentary questions are part of a strategic interaction in which the
questioner attempts to present information that is useful to himself (or to his party)
while, if possible, at the same time harmful to his opponent. Broadly speaking,
through questions MPs force ministers to state an opinion about issues the minister
would often prefer not to voice an opinion about or, in contrast, to address issues the
minister is very keen to address (Wiberg and Koura 1994: 23). Hence, questions are
used to set the parliamentary agenda (Green-Pedersen 2006). The literature holds
that government and opposition MPs embrace a dissimilar questioning behavior:
“Opposition MPs will always pose inconvenient questions… MPs from the parties in
government want to pose more convenient questions… His or her chief purpose is to
help the cabinet distribute information that is believed to be politically expedient for
the cabinet” (Wiberg and Koura 1994: 23). Questions are sometimes ‘arranged’
indicating that the origin of questions can lay within the government; a government
MP poses a question to give a cabinet minister the opportunity to show off and to
publicize his or his governments’ opinion on an issue. Government MPs also have
individual reasons to be active in tabling questions and interpellations: by being
active in these oversight activities they can gain personal publicity, serve their
constituency and get personal recognition (Rasch 1994). Government MPs may also
ask questions to ministers belonging to another government party (Mattson 1994:
309). This way, they try to sharpen their party’s profile and attempt to ‘reclaim’ part
of the portfolio of another government party’s minister and demonstrate their party’s
stance. They exhibit their differences with the other party in government. Analyses
have shown that parties’ questioning and interpellating behavior profoundly changes,
at least in quantitative terms, when they switch from government to the opposition,
and vice versa (see for the Danish Folketing: Damgaard 1994: 67-70). MPs become a
lot more active when they belong to an opposition party. Within this general
framework focused on the battle between government and opposition, MPs can ask
questions for a variety of concrete reasons: they may want to gain personal publicity,
to test ministers, to attack ministers, to show interests for issues important for his or
her constituency, to rally the troops etc. (Wiberg and Koura 1994: 30-31).
3
The above suggests that issues matter: MPs ask questions about a specific issue
as this particular issue is instrumental in reaching their goal. MPs do not engage
blindly in asking questions or tabling interpellations on just any topic but rather
choose the content of their intervention carefully to maximize its impact. Some issues
are advantageous to the questioner while others are not. In other words:
parliamentary control is deeply affected by party competition and by the issue
competition parties are engaged in (Green-Pedersen 2006). Remarkably, hardly any
previous empirical work deals with the issue content of parliamentary questions
(some exceptions are: Brouard 2009; Soroka, Erin and Blidook 2009; Soroka 2002a).
Most work has been focused on the institutional rules shaping control activities
(Green-Pedersen 2006) or on the legislative impact of parliaments (see for example:
Frears 1990; Norton 1990). There is not much theoretical work either that can lead to
concrete hypotheses about what issues MPs would prefer to address. Wiberg (1995:
183 and 1985) complains about: “… the almost total absence of the political
dynamics involved in (the literature on) questioning (…) We neither know nor
understand the incentive structure relating to the various actors involved in
parliamentary interactions”.
Focussing on the issue content of questions, we argue, can partly reveal these
‘political dynamics’ that underlie parliamentary action and can teach us something
about the ‘incentive structure’ of MPs that Wiberg spoke about. In previous work, the
only substantive information on what MPs are dealing with was to which ministers
and government departments questions were put (see for example Mattson 1994;
Wiberg 1994). This information hardly reveals the precise issue of the question nor
where the question came from. The other parliamentary control research focuses on
global quantitative trends in questions in particular countries and explains these
trends (see for example Damgaard 1994; Wiberg 1994). Comparative evidence
comparing the issue content of questions in several countries is lacking entirely.
Consequently, Damgaard (1994: 73) called for research that goes beyond dealing with
single questions but analyses questions “… as possible elements in a wider party
competition strategy.” This is exactly what all our hypotheses boil down to.
In order to fully focus on the content of questions, in our analyses, we will
control for general quantitative patterns in questioning. We consider party size and
party position as controls. Extant work has found, indeed, that small parties tend to
be more active in control activities than large parties (Damgaard 1994; Mattson 1994;
Rasch 1994). The reason probably is that small parties, on average, are further away
from government power than large parties. As large parties can more directly
influence government policies they do not have to resort to a typical outsider tactic
such as asking questions. For small parties asking questions is the only instrument at
their disposal (Damgaard 1994: 61). The second control variable is the difference
between opposition and government MPs in the amount of questions they ask (on
any topic). By asking questions in parliament especially opposition parties can raise
4
issues the government is forced to react on (Green-Pedersen and Stubager 2008).
The literature on parliamentary control presents a mixed picture. Damgaard (1994)
reports about the Danish Folketing where the vast majority of the questions are
tabled by the opposition. Rasch (1994: 266-268) examined the Norwegian Storting
and found that the opposition asks more questions but that also government MPs
frequently ask questions. The same applies to the Swedish Rikstag (Mattson 1994:
307). In the UK it is both government and opposition who ask a more or less equal
amount of questions (Borthwick 1993) and the same applies to Finland (Wiberg 1994:
155-161). In general, it seems that questioning ministers is more an opposition tool
and so we expect that opposition parties would be more active questioners on any
topic. What issues do we expect MPs to ask questions about?
In a coalition system with several parties forming a cabinet together, as is the
case both in Belgium and in Denmark, a formal government agreement is struck
before the start of the government. The government agreement contains the main
policy pledges the cabinet promises to carry out during the legislature. It is a kind of
‘bible’ that government parties refer to when enacting policy and when monitoring
shirking by other parties (De Winter, Timmermans and Dumont 2000). Government
parties’ MPs cannot openly criticize or defect the government agreement but when
other government parties do not respect the agreement they react and may subject
ministers from other parties to questions. Moreover, opposition parties know they
can hurt the government amidships when they are able to challenge it on issues that
it has solemnly announced in the government agreement. Thus both opposition
parties as well as government parties have incentives to focus their parliamentary
action on the topics addressed by the government agreement: Parliamentary control
focuses on issues that, compared to other issues, have received more attention in the
government agreement (H1).
Similarly, MPs’ control activities are linked to the current political debates and
the issues of the day. If they are able to grasp and tap into topical issues, chances are
higher that their question will get media attention and lead to publicity. Both in
Belgium and Denmark, the cabinet meets in weekly ministerial councils presided by
the Prime Minister. So, government sets the political agenda on a weekly basis and
this generates a list of topical issues that are currently under debate. We expect
questions to be concentrated on these precise topics that have received attention by
the government in the week before: Parliamentary control is focused on issues that,
compared to other issues, have recently been dealt with by the ministerial council
(H2).
Some parties are considered by the public at large to be more capable of
dealing with some issues than others. Parties are the ‘owners’ of issues when they are
identified with them and when they are widely considered to have the best stance and
offer the best solutions for related problems (Budge and Farlie 1983; Petrocik 1996).
Parties’ track record of showing attention to and dealing with issues yields them issue
5
ownership. One of the ways in which parties claim ownership over issues is by
devoting a lot of attention to these issues in their party manifestos (Walgrave and De
Swert 2007; Walgrave and Deswert 2004). We expect parties to focus on ‘their’ issues
in parliament and to put questions on issues they identify and are identified with as
this yields them a competitive advantage (Green-Pedersen 2008; Green-Pedersen
and Stubager 2008). Parties’ parliamentary control is focused on issues to which,
compared to other issues, they devoted a lot of attention in their party manifesto
(H3).
Since a few years, a small but steadily growing stream of studies has started to
explore the impact of the mass media on the political agenda. Many students found
that mass media coverage, to varying extents, affects the political agenda and more
especially control activities in parliament (Soroka 2002a; Soroka 2002b; Trumbo
1995; van Noije 2007; van Noije, Kleinnijenhuis and Oegema 2008; Vliegenthart and
Roggeband 2007; Walgrave, Soroka and Nuytemans 2008). We derive the following
hypothesis from that literature: Parliamentary control is focused on issues that have
received preceding media attention (H4).
A second series of hypotheses deals with the interaction between a party’s
government or opposition position and the issue content of its questions. As
government and opposition MPs play a different role in parliament and as their
questions have a diverging logic — attacking versus promoting government — we
expect the issue content of government MPs’ and opposition MPs’ questions to be
different. Firstly, opposition parties do not carry out the government agreement.
Their MPs are less constraint by topics they can or cannot cover in their questions
and interpellations. The only binding document for an opposition party is its party
manifesto: this is what the party promised to fight for, there is no other guideline or
standard, there is no confusing, compromising or accommodating adherence to the
governmental project as a whole. More than government MPs, thus, we expect
opposition MPs to remain loyal to their party manifesto and to table questions in line
with their manifesto. Moreover, as opposition parties are on average smaller parties
— the largest parties are part of the government — they are more likely to be singleissue parties, to be owners of issues and to display a clear issue-profile in their
manifesto. When asking questions, opposition parties, more than government
parties, raise issues that were prominent in their election program (H5).
We expect opposition parties to react more directly to media coverage than
government parties. By asking questions in parliament opposition parties can raise
issues the government is forced to react on (Green-Pedersen and Stubager 2008). In
a coalition system as in Belgium and Denmark, government MPs have to act
cautiously as they might destabilize government while opposition MPs use whatever
ammunition at hand to attack government. Continuously reporting about the political
and societal state of affairs media coverage generates a lot of potential ammunition
for the opposition while government MPs cannot simply respond to the media as they
6
have to await government’s reaction (see also: Walgrave and Van Aelst 2006). In
sum, opposition MPs are less constrained in reacting to media coverage than
government MPs are. On top of this, government parties cannot pick and choose
issues as they see fit; they have to offer credible solutions to problems and they can
not back away from an issue if it would turn out to become disadvantageous (GreenPedersen and Mortensen 2007). So our final hypothesis maintains: Opposition
parties’ parliamentary control is more affected by media coverage than government
parties’ actions (H6).
Data and methods
We draw on two dataset: one of all oral questions and interpellations in the
Belgian Chamber (lower house) in the 1993-2000 period and the other one of mainly
written, some oral questions and interpellations tabled in Danish Parliament
(Folketing) during the period 1984-2003. For Belgium, we do not distinguish
between oral questions and interpellations - they have a similar function - although
there are formal differences between questions and interpellations 2. In Denmark, we
do not distinguish oral and written questions as they serve the same function in the
political system and we also include interpellations that, just as in Belgium, are a
somewhat stronger control mechanism with slightly different procedures. We
conduct separate analyses for Belgium and Denmark. In both analyses, our
dependent variable is the weekly number of questions made in parliament by each of
the political parties that were represented during the whole research period on any of
twenty-five issues as the percentage of all questions on all twenty-five issues that
were asked by all parties during that week.
To obtain those data, for Belgium we coded all parliamentary records for the
period 1993-2000, which contained 10,556 oral questions and interpellations. Issue
codes are based on the internationally-employed hierarchical EUROVOC thesaurus,
designed for coding all EU-documents (http://eurovoc.europa.eu). This thesaurus
contains 6,075 different hierarchically-structured ‘descriptors’. Mainly relying on
aggregate categories we reduced the total number of codes to 110. But, using all 110
issue categories for analyses would mean that many categories are very small, and
equal to zero much of the time. Therefore, the 110 issues are further combined, and
our analyses consequently rely on a collapsed form of the dataset, where the 110
issues are collapsed into twenty-five major issue categories. For Denmark, we use the
data available through the Danish agenda-setting project (www.agendasetting.dk).
The Danish data comprise 43,638 parliamentary questions, oral and written, and
2
Interpellations are in principle devoted to matters of general interest, they lead to a debate, and
they can be followed by a vote of non-confidence in the government. All these features do not
apply to oral questions.
7
interpellations tabled between 1984 and 2003 3. The coding scheme differs somewhat
from the Belgian one and is derived from the one being used in the U.S. agendasetting project initiated by Baumgartner and Jones (1993). In the Danish case, 236
detailed codes are also collapsed in twenty-five issue categories that are very
comparable to the Belgian ones.
We use a weekly aggregation level, for two reasons. First it encompasses what
one can call the shortest ‘political cycle’ with one question session per week. Second,
as Walgrave and Van Aelst (2006) and Vliegenthart and Walgrave (forthcoming) have
demonstrated, effects (of the media) on the parliamentary questioning agenda are
mainly short-term and a weekly-time span seems to be appropriate. Belgian
parliament does not meet every week and those weeks in which no parliamentary
activity took place are excluded, leaving 237 weeks for the eight years that are used in
our analyses in Belgium. A total of ten political parties were represented in the
Belgian parliament during (part of) this period, resulting in a total of 57,675 units of
analysis. For the Belgian analyses we use one-week lags between the independent and
the dependent variable. For Denmark, we have a longer research period at our
disposal. Furthermore, the Danish parliament meets more regularly. This results in a
total of 993 weeks for the twenty years we used in our analyses. Eleven parties were
represented during (parts of) this twenty year time-span, resulting in a total of
205,700 Danish cases. By far most Danish parliamentary questions are written
questions, or at least are answered in writing, (Damgaard 1994: 53) and we only have
the exact date of the answer to those questions at our disposal – written answers
should be produced by the government within 1-2 weeks after the question. Hence,
for the Danish analyses we use longer lags, adding up the effects of one-three weeks
lagged independent variables.
The independent variables are operationalized as follows:
Opposition party – A dummy variable was created indicating for each political party
whether it was in a certain week member of the government (value 0) or an
opposition party (value 1). In the Danish case, parties move in and out of government
without elections and parties more regularly switch position.
Size party – The size of the party was measured by the number of parliamentary
seats it held in a certain week as a percentage of the total number of seats in
Parliament.
Government agreement – To assess the influence of typical government issues we
coded the three agreements in Belgium that were relevant for the research period
(drawn up after the elections in 1991, 1995, and 1999) in a similar way as the
parliamentary questions and used the values of the codings for the twenty-five issues
for all the weeks preceding a next government agreement. For Denmark, we do not
have similar government agreement data at our disposal.
3
The Danish question dataset encompasses a longer period but there are no media data available
before 1984.
8
Ministerial meetings – The communication about the ministerial meetings, taking
place on Fridays in Belgium, are coded in a similar way as the parliamentary
interpellations and questions and lagged one week in order to ensure causality.
Again, we have no equivalent in Denmark.
Issue ownership – To assess issue ownership we coded party manifestoes drawn up
before the elections of 1991, 1995 and 1999 for each party that gained parliamentary
seats using the same coding scheme as for the parliamentary agenda and thus
assessed the importance each party attributed to each of the twenty-five issues and
used those values until the publication of the next party manifesto. Two parties did
not issue party manifestoes and were therefore excluded from the analyses. For
Denmark, we also use similar date based on party manifestoes that were issued
before the elections in 1981, 1984, 1987, 1988, 1990, 1994, 1998 and 2001.
Media — For Belgium. the media database comprises the main evening news of the
four major TV-stations, two Dutch-speaking (TV1 and VTM) and two Frenchspeaking (RTBF and RTL), and five major newspapers (Dutch-speaking: De
Standaard, De Morgen and Het Laatste Nieuws; French-speaking: La Libre Belgique
and Le Soir). We coded all front-page newspaper stories, with exception of the
newspapers that appeared on Tuesdays and Thursdays, on a daily basis. The prime
time TV news (7.00 p.m.) is coded in its entirety on a daily basis. The media are
coded according to the same procedure as the parliamentary questions and
interpellations. Although the French and Dutch media markets in Belgium are
separated and hardly any Flemings read French newspapers or watch French TV and
vice versa, we decided to lump together all media outlets in one single collapsed
media variable: the attention for issues as aggregated across four TV stations and five
newspapers. To ensure causality, the media variable is lagged one week. For
Denmark, we use codings of the radio news of 12 am and 6.30 pm at the national
news station produced by the Danish Broadcasting Corporation DR. These are long
versions of the hourly broadcasted news broadcasts. They can be argued to be an
adequate reflection of the Danish news environment (Green-Pedersen and Stubager
2008). For Denmark, the media variable will be the average score for lags 1 to 3, as
we want to know what generated the question and not the answer that usually follows
1-2 week later.
To test hypotheses H5 and H6, for the government-opposition variable and for
both the issue ownership and media variables, interaction terms are created by
multiplying the value of the government-opposition variable and the value of the
other independent variable.
Our dataset’s structure is very complex as it includes three ‘layers’: parties,
issues, and weeks. The overtime dependency is usually dealt with using time-series
analysis, such as Granger causality and Vector Autoregression (Soroka 2002b; van
Noije, Kleinnijenhuis and Oegema 2008; Vliegenthart and Roggeband 2007). When
multiple issues are considered in one analysis, a form of pooled time-series analysis is
9
used, for example Ordinary Least Squares Regression with panel corrected standard
errors (Walgrave, Soroka and Nuytemans 2008). When clustering takes places on
more than two dimensions, (pooled) time series are no viable option anymore.
Therefore, we decided to apply a multilevel analysis. This type of analysis accounts
for the hierarchical dependency of observations. When one of the clustering
dimensions is time, its application does not differ substantially from those in many
pooled time-series (Gelman and Hill 2007), but it allows for more than one other
dimension on which the observations cluster. Our dataset has a multilevel structure
with three levels: time (weeks) is nested in issues that are nested in political parties.
Therefore, multilevel modelling is appropriate. Next to a multilevel structure, also the
time-series character of the dataset has to be taken into account. After all, the value of
a certain party-issue combination in a certain week is likely to be highly dependent
upon its value in the previous week. Therefore, we include a lagged dependent
variable as independent variable in our analyses.
The variables (and related hypotheses) we draw upon in the following analyses
are all situated on one of these three different levels. First, on the first and lowest
level that varies across weeks, issues and parties, we have the lagged dependent
variable (parliamentary attention in the week before), media coverage, and
ministerial meetings. Second, on the issue level, we have variation in government
agreement and issue ownership. Though both change several times during our
research period, they are largely stable throughout the period and we consider them
statistically as an issue characteristic. On the party level, we position the key
opposition party and party size variables, which also fluctuate somewhat over time,
but are again largely stable on the party level.
We do our analyses in various steps. For all analyses we conduct multilevel
models using STATA (xtmixed command) with restricted maximum likelihood
(REML) estimations and (if necessary) unstructured covariance matrices. We start
with a model that includes our main effects (fixed effects) and that tests the first four
hypotheses To model the final two hypotheses about the interaction between
government-opposition and issue ownership and media we add interaction terms to a
random slope model, where we allow the slope of the media variable to vary across
issues and parties and the issue ownership variable to vary across parties. This offers
the opportunity to test whether media and issue ownership effects differ for
government and opposition parties in both countries.
Results
Before we present the results of the multivariate analyses, we first examine to
what extent questions are being used differently by opposition and government
parties in Belgium and Denmark. Table 1 contains the mean number of questions put
by the MPs of government or opposition parties. The table makes it clear that
10
questioning is more of an opposition tactic than it is a government tactic. In Belgium,
opposition parties do it more than government parties but the difference is rather
small (factor 1.2). In Denmark asking questions to ministers is largely the turf of
opposition MPs. Opposition parties, on average, ask almost nineteen times more
questions than government parties. Government MPs do sometimes ask questions,
but much less. An interesting question is why and when government MPs in
Denmark do take part in the questioning game.
Table 1 about here
The results of the multivariate multi-level time-series analyses are presented in
Table 2. We ran two analyses separately for the two countries. The first column for
each country contains the main effects and allows us to test hypotheses H1-H4; the
second column adds the interaction effects of hypotheses H5-H6. Note that all
analyses have been carried out by consecutively introducing the different levels.
Although the table has been organized according to the two kinds of hypotheses, the
underlying data structure consists of three levels of analysis (party, issue, week) that
do not fit the structure of the hypotheses.
Table 2 about here
To start with the control variables, there is quite some path dependency in
parliament. If one knows what issues MPs have asked questions about in week t-1 it
can be predicted what they will discuss in week t. All effects discussed below, come on
top of the effect of the lagged questions. Interestingly, Danish MPs questioning
behavior is more determined by last week’s activities than Belgian MPs’. Danish MPs
more routinely ask questions about the same issues all the time while Belgian MPs’
questions are more changeable and address varying topics. In both countries,
opposition parties ask significantly more questions than government parties; the
difference between both party types is much larger in Denmark than it is in Belgium.
The size of the party affects the amount of questions a parliamentary party asks to a
significant extent in both Belgium and Denmark. Yet, the direction of the effect is
different: in Belgium, especially small parties are keen on asking a lot of questions
while in Denmark it are the larger (opposition) parties who ask most questions.
Though the coefficients in the table seem small, they matter substantially. Take for
example the opposition coefficient in Belgium: it indicates that opposition parties
score on average .157 higher on the dependent variable than coalition parties. If one
considers the construction of the dependent variable – the attention a party devotes
to an issue as the percentage of the attention all parties devote to all issues – it is
substantial. In the situation of ten parties being present in parliament, the average
score on the dependent variable is .4%, a difference of .157% is considerable.
11
Our first hypothesis held that parties would more frequently address issues
that have received ample attention in the government agreement. We have only
Belgian evidence regarding this hypothesis and it seems to corroborate the
hypothesis. The Belgian government agreement lays out the arena where government
and opposition cross swords. The government makes a number of pledges in the
government agreement and parliamentary parties do monitor the government in
particular on those issues the government made promises about. We indeed find that
those issues addressed in the government agreement: a one-percentage increase in
attention in the government agreement results for each party in .04% increase, which
boils down to an overall increase in .4% on the parliamentary agenda when ten
parties are present in parliament. Thus we maintain H1.
The second hypothesis contended that a similar effect would be observed with
the ministerial meetings. While the government agreement lays out the long-term
agenda of the cabinet the ministerial council documents the government’s current
and short-term agenda. We do not have Danish data. Our hypothesis does not receive
confirmation from the Belgian data. In their oversight activities, Belgian MPs do not
follow up on the issues the government has decided about the week beforehand. We
refute H2. We believe there may be several causes for this finding. Government MPs
may be particularly prohibited to talk about issues their government just decided
about as this may threaten the stability of the government; it may be easier to address
issues the government has not yet officially dealt with. Opposition MPs may reckon
that it does not make much sense to challenge government once it has just taken a
decision as it is highly unlikely that government would change opinion and reverse its
decision so quickly.
We argued that MPs would ask more questions on issues encapsulated in their
party’s program. Parties make promises to address certain issues and they keep their
promises by devoting more attention particularly to those issues in their questions.
The Belgian and Danish data do confirm the hypothesis. Party manifestos serve a
clear function as they allow parties to sharpen their ideological profile by claiming
some issues over others (Walgrave and De Swert 2007). This seems to be roughly the
same in the Danish case but the effect of party manifestos on questions is much
smaller. Manifestos in Denmark appear to be electoral documents that address the
issues of the day and focus less on the party’s own issues. There does not exist a firm
party manifesto tradition in Denmark and there is some debate about the precise
status about Danish party manifestos (Green-Pedersen and Mortensen 2008; Hansen
2008). This may explain why Danish MPs tend to follow their manifesto in their
questions to a lesser extent than the Belgian MPs. In any case, overall, we can confirm
H3.
The results on the impact of the mass media on the questioning institution
unambiguously back up previous research in both countries (for Denmark see:
Green-Pedersen and Stubager 2010 (forthcoming); for Belgium see: Walgrave,
12
Soroka and Nuytemans 2008). Both in Belgium and Denmark, MPs take cues from
mass media coverage. Media generate issues that the public currently cares about and
devote attention to. MPs are sensitive to these cues as they want to ride the current
wave of attention. This upholds H4. Substantially, the Belgian media effects are larger
than in Denmark. Belgian MPs react more strongly to media coverage than their
Danish counterparts: a one percentage increase results in .15% increase per party,
while in Denmark this effect is only .05%. With roughly an equal number of parties
being present in both parliaments, this difference is considerable. This suggests that
Danish MPs are less reactive to events and new incoming information than their
Belgian colleagues. We already mentioned that Danish oversight activities are more
routine and path-dependent (see large effect from lagged dependent variable) and
this also implies that they take the changing media coverage less into account.
Opposition MPs invariable attack the government on the same issues week after week
and whether issues are highlighted by the media only makes a small large difference.
Green-Pedersen and Stubager (2010 (forthcoming)) found that the media do matter
for questioning in parliament but that this effect is modulated by issue ownership.
Different than in the present study, however, they measured issue ownership based
on electoral surveys and not on party manifestos. Here we control for issue ownership
based on manifestos and this may account for part of the difference we find between
the two countries.
For the hypotheses regarding the interactions with party position the
interaction effects models in the second country column in Table 2 offer the evidence.
The main effect of issue-ownership in Denmark becomes significant and negative
which sheds another light on H3. Together with the interaction effect (see below) this
basically means that Danish government parties – that score ‘0’ on the opposition
variable - avoid asking questions about issues they put forward in their manifestos.
They systematically refrain from addressing matters their party manifesto spoke
about. In the Belgian case, introducing the interaction effect of party position and
issue ownership has a similar but much weaker effect on the main effect of issue
ownership: government party MPs do not devote more but also no less attention to
their party’s typical manifesto issues. Figure 1 and 2 (upper graphs) graphically
display the differences between coalition and opposition parties in the effects of
attention for issues in party manifestoes on attention in parliamentary questioning.
While the difference in Denmark between those types of parties is larger from the
outset, it increases when considerable attention is devoted to an issue in party
manifestoes. In the Belgian case, we see hardly a difference between coalition and
opposition when no attention is devoted to the issue in party manifestoes, but it
increases considerable when the issue receives ample attention.
Apart from the different role party manifestos play in general in the countries
under study - an instrument for claiming issue ownership versus a platform to
address all current political issues - this suggests that government parties do behave
13
differently in the two countries. In Denmark, parliamentary parties that support the
government are extremely hesitant to challenge their government on ideological
grounds; on the contrary, when they ask questions they avoid talking about the issues
their party cares about but rather address other issues that are unrelated to their
party’s ideology (for example local issues catering to their local constituencies). So,
government MPs are very loyal to the government and party discipline – not only in
voting but also in terms of the content of their interventions - is extremely high in
Denmark (Depauw 2000; Jensen 2000). We suspect this strong integration of
government and parliamentary party is linked to the minority cabinet system which
makes governments inherently more fragile and thus requires more loyalty from its
MPs (for a similar argument see: Damgaard 1994: 56). Belgian government MPs have
been described as being bound by strong party discipline too and with cohesive voting
patterns (Depauw 1999). But apparently, in terms of the content of the issues they are
allowed to take up in parliament, Belgian government MPs are more free and they
can take up issues in parliament that are ideologically challenging.
The fifth hypothesis stated that, more than government MPs, opposition MPs
would draw on their party manifesto and the issues their party claims when
formulating questions. As could already be derived from the discussion about
government parties above, this is indeed the case. The evidence in Table 2 and
Figures 1 and 2 suggests that, in both countries, opposition MPs use their manifesto
more than government MPs as a beacon when grilling government.
Figure 1 and 2 about here
Finally, the sixth hypothesis held that opposition parties, more than
government parties, would take their cues from the mass media. The hypothesis is
backed by the evidence from Belgium. Belgian opposition MPs use the mass media as
a searching device that brings issues to the fore that nurture their attacks on the
government. The interaction effect in Figure 1 (second part) shows that Belgian
majority MPs too increase their questions on issues after media coverage but the
slope of the opposition MPs is steeper, leading to moderate differences at high levels
of media attention.
The Danish evidence, in contrast, goes against the hypothesis. The coefficient
in the model in Table 2 is significant but negative (-.0122). This means that
compared to government MPs, opposition MPs react less strong to media coverage in
Denmark. This directly contradicts our expectation. In Figure 2 (second part) this
effect is further dissected. First, the graph shows that in both countries all types of
MPs are positively affected by media coverage. But while, in Belgium, opposition
parties are stronger affected, in Denmark, it are the coalition parties that are more
closely following media coverage. In all instance, differences are not very big. As
mentioned earlier, Danish opposition questioning seems to be a rather routinized
14
activity with large path dependency – opposition MPs always hit the same nail and
their issue attention does not vary with events that are being reported in the media.
Second, and more interesting, when media attention is low government MPs tend to
devote on average less attention to any issue. However, government MPs do wake up
when there is ample media attention. When media attention for an issue is really
overwhelming, see the right side of the graph with media attention shares of +40%,
they tend to devote even more attention to this issue than opposition parties. So,
government parties react more to media coverage than opposition parties but only in
those exceptional and rare cases when media attention for an issue is ubiquitous.
Normally, Danish government parties to a considerable extent ignore media
coverage. Again, this highlights the same feature of the Danish system with extremely
loyal government MPs normally ignoring incoming signals from the media; only
when things get really out of hand and the mass media devote a vast amount of
attention to a topic do government MPs react. H6 cannot be rejected, nor can it be
confirmed. Depending on the political system and on the loyalty of government MPs
towards their government, and depending on the amount of media coverage, MPs in
different positions react differently on media coverage.
Wrapping up, four hypotheses are confirmed, one is rejected, and one is put on
hold as it holds in Belgium but not in Denmark. The analyses revealed that the
questioning behavior of MPs is not random. It is structured according to clear
patterns and cleavages. MPs are rational actors and act following predictable
patterns; they address specific issues and not others in a deliberate and logical way.
The idea that the monitoring behavior of elected representatives differs according to
whether they belong to the government or the opposition warranted by the facts.
Government and opposition parties behave differently and address systematically
other issues in their oversight activities. Though, the patterns differ to some extent
depending on the political system even between political systems that are largely
similar. The key difference is the loyalty of the government MPs to the government.
Conclusion and discussion
The goal of the study was to explore whether issue content contributes to
explaining questioning activities in parliament. The evidence suggests that it does.
Extant research only dealt with the amount of parliamentary activities and did not
systematically analyze its content. Our study showed that issue content matters. We
managed to partially explain what type of questions MPs put in parliament and why
they did so. Just focusing on the number of questions MPs table only scratches the
surface; under that surface, a lot of interesting structures appear and they are all
associated with the substance MPs deal with.
Relying on an agenda-perspective helps us to explain why MPs address which
issues at what time. As their time and energy is scarce and as the institutional slot
15
provided by questioning opportunities imposes strong constraints, MPs (or their
parties) have to carefully select the issues they want to address and confront the
government with. The choice they make is conditioned by the surrounding political
context and the issues that are discussed elsewhere. Other agendas of other
institutions—government, parties, media etc.—affect the topics MPs table questions
about. Issues jump from one agenda to the other and the political system as a whole
deals with issues in an integrated way. Institutions react to each other and imitate
each others’ issue attention. We would not have been able to lay bare these
interactions and mechanisms, we would not have gained a better understanding of
the dynamics of parliamentary control if we would not have analyzed the issue
content of the questions. Only by focusing on issues it was possible to link agendas
and institutional actors and to examine systematically and across an exhaustive range
of issues how they interact. The agenda-setting perspective, hence, may not only help
us forward to examine how policy change comes about and why periods of
incrementalism and periods of frenetic activities alternate (Jones and Baumgartner
2005). It essentially helps us to understand how institutions work. Focusing on
content is not only useful for scholars who are interested in specific policies but also
for students of institutions. Through analyzing content they may better understand
what goes on in the institutions under scrutiny. Content and institutions are
inextricably connected; all our hypotheses interacting party position and issue
features pointed in that direction. For example, our evidence that opposition and
government parties, both in an institutionally fundamentally different position use
the same institutional tool to put forward different issues with a different intent
shows that studying institutions without taking into account the issues is only part of
the story. We understand better what goes on in institutions when we study how they
process concrete policy issues.
The study also shows that focussing on issue content and agenda-setting is
useful from a comparative politics perspective. Institutions, in this case
parliamentary questioning, work differently in different countries. Focussing on the
content of the issues that are being processed in these institutions helps us to lay bare
differences and similarities between those institutions. The present case showed that,
although Belgian and Danish politics seem rather similar seen from a distance,
oversight activities in their parliaments follow a largely similar but also partially
dissimilar logic. Instable Danish minority governments require extremely loyal
parliamentary parties. This makes that Danish government MPs constrain
themselves when asking questions. They ask very few questions and when they do
they avoid to address ideological issues. Only when strong focussing events draw
media and public attention they do adapt their strategy and engage in questioning
their government.
16
Tables and Figures
Table 1. Mean number of parliamentary questions per week per party in Belgium (1993-2000)
and Denmark (1986-2003)
Coalition parties
Opposition parties
Belgium
3.959
4.635
Denmark
.420
7.825
17
Table 2. Explaining attention for different issues in parliamentary questioning
Belgium
Denmark
Hypothesis
Main
Interaction
Main
Interaction
effects (FE
effects
effects (FE
effects
model)
(RE model)
model)
(RE model)
Controls
Lagged questions
.01413**
.01071*
.093284***
.08809***
(.00416)
(.00416)
(.00218)
(.00219)
Opposition party
.15691***
.01977
.46092***
.44253***
(.02050)
(.02517)
(.01113)
(.01443)
Size party
-.01964***
-.01702***
.04095***
. 03920***
(.00489)
(.00369)
(.00134)
(.00138)
Issue content
Government agreement
H1
.04230***
.04413***
(.00323)
(.00311)
Ministerial meetings
H2
-.00016
-.00010
(.00100)
(.00100)
Issue ownership (manifesto)
H3
.02163***
.00718
.00433***
-.00962***
(.00290)
(.01147)
(.00091)
(.00354)
Media
H4
.01486***
.01157**
. 00538**
. 10509***
(.00220)
(.0036)
(.00242)
(.02148)
Issue content + position
Opposition*Issue ownership
H5
.02757***
. 01658***
(.00330)
(.00161)
Opposition*Media
H6
.00804*
-.01222***
(.00344)
(.00147)
Constant
.18176*
.21737
-.32232***
-.35324***
(.08411)
(.05105)
(.10788)
(.10096)
Level 3 N (party)
10
10
11
11
Level 2 N (issue)
250
250
275
275
Level 1 N (week)
57674
57674
205,497
205,700
Variance Level 3
.03531
.00267
.11607
.09751
Variance Level 2
.07664
.05777
.18459
.21681
Variance Level 1
.
2.23515
2.22758
4.23412
4.19981
Deviance
210691.06
210472.66
880729.80
879648.76
N0te. Coefficients are unstandardized results from an REML multi-level model. Standard errors in
parentheses
* p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01, *** p < 0.001
18
Figure 1. Interaction effects for Belgium
2,5
2
d
e
t 1,5
ic
d
e
r
p 1
0,5
0
0
20
10
30
issue ownership (party manifestos)
1.8
1.6
predicted y
1.4
1.2
1
0.8
0.6
0.4
0.2
0
0
10
20
30
40
50
media attention
opposition
coalition
Note. Estimations are based on fixed part of results – lines for opposition and coalition parties with
+1SE and –1SE confidence intervals, all other variables held at their mean)
19
Figure 2. Interaction effects for Denmark
1,4
1,2
1
0,8
0,6
0,4
0,2
0
0
10
20
30
party manifestoes
opposition
coalition
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
0
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
media attention
opposition
coalition
Note. Estimations are based on fixed part of results – lines for opposition and coalition parties with
+1SE and –1SE confidence intervals, all other variables held at their mean
20
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