How Do Parliamentary Party Groups Assign Spokespersonships?

This study examines how political party groups decides who speaks for them on specific issues. The key concept in our paper is specialization. In many parliamentary systems MPs are spokesperson of a specific policy portfolio and speak only on that issue. This brings in an element of issue competition to the assignment of portfolios. Our question is on what criteria do political parties decide which MPs serve as spokesperson on a specific issue? For the analysis we build on the literature on committee assignments in parliamentary systems which points to the informational, distributional and partisan rationales behind parliamentary specialization. The informational rationale leads MPs to speak on the issues that they have specialist knowledge of (e.g. via a background through their education or occupation). The distributional rationale predicts MPs to speak on those issues for which they have ties to relevant groups outside parliament such as voters and interest groups. Finally, according to the partisan rationale, parties will assign issue portfolios that the party leadership prioritizes to MPs with more power within the group, also taking into consideration MPs with specialist knowledge about the issue. We analyse a database of all speeches in the Dutch Parliament between 1998 and 2017. Our first analyses point to the importance of party priorities in the assignment of portfolios: powerful MPs and MPs with specialist knowledge speak on issues parties prioritize. Our analyses shed an important light on how parliamentary party groups function, specifically how they divide labour within their ranks