Topics and Strategies. Role of Prime Minister's Policy Priorities in Shaping the Parliamentary Work in Hungary

The purpose of this paper is to extend the research agenda set about the role of Prime Minister's policy priorities in shaping the parliamentary work in Hungary. How Prime Minister can influence the focus of parliamentary debates and legislative processes? What tools are available for the Head of the government to shape the legislation? In current research I investigate the impacts of Prime Minister’s speeches on laws (legislative agenda) and on interpellations (agenda of parliamentary opposition) for the period 2010-2018. According to my thesis, changes of the policy focus in speeches have significant effects on the parliamentary work as well. I test my thesis in a comparative way by investigating two types of executive speeches: parliamentary statements and non-parliamentary speeches (such as year assessments). I hypothesize that these speeches have different impacts on legislation. As parliamentary statements serve mainly to declare the main executive purposes, policy content of these speeches can significantly influence the composition of legislative agenda. In contract, non-parliamentary speeches may have the function to identify the most important topics for public opinion and to influence voters’ attention. I investigate my thesis using four datasets built by the hungarian team of Comparative Agendas Project: „Parliamentary Speeches (2010-2018)”, „Non-Parliamentary Speeches (2010-2018)”, „Laws (2010-2018)” and "Interpellations (2010-2018)". Hungary provides an ideal testing ground for such an analysis. During the second and the third Fidesz government, by highlighting them in his non-parliamentary speeches, some policy priorities (eg. immigration) of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán dominated the significant part of hungarian political arena. Despite these changes, the focus of parliamentary work and legislative processes still remained on previous years’ dominant policy topics (especially on macroeconomic issues).