While many observers emphasize divisiveness, conflict and competition within the Lithuanian parliament, the video recordings of the meetings of the parliamentary committees (publicly available since 2019) show the commitment of the MPs to find a compromise, sustained by the formalized standing rules. Just as committees in many parliaments, Lithuanian parliamentary committees appear to function as a consensus-building arena. However, the observation of the recordings shows that committees operate under different informal rules. This paper aims to answer (a) whether and (b) under what conditions the parliamentary committees serve as a vehicle of policy compromise in Lithuanian parliament.
The data for the measurement of the ‘compromise capacity’ of committees is the roll-call votes at both the first stage and the final stage of the bill, reported by a particular committee, November 2020 - January 2022 (appr. 500 bills). Several indicators of the party government – Rice’s index of agreement and coalition-opposition voting measure, proposed by Otjes and Louwers (2013) – are used to validly capture the level of (dis)agreement over policy. The paper tests whether differences of compromise capacity can be attributed to the differences in committee composition (parliamentary experience of committee members, position within the PPG, professional background etc).
