What are the answers to parliamentary questions worth? Executive’s willingness and capacity to be responsive

Parliamentary questioning is essential to ensure the democratic accountability of the executive. Since inadequate responses can severely damage the executive’s reputation, many governments invest enormous human and financial resources in responding to parliamentary questions. Although government responsiveness is vital to democracy, scholars have paid little attention to the answers to parliamentary questions. As legislators also use parliamentary questions to signal to their stakeholders rather than to scrutinise the executive, they can achieve their intentions by submitting the question. According to some scholars, this renders government replies irrelevant. However, most executives must respond to parliamentary questions regardless of an underlying signalling logic. This obligation warrants a closer examination of executives’ answers to parliamentary questions to determine whether they enable legislators to control the executive successfully and efficiently. The executive’s responsiveness to parliamentary questions is directly related to two factors. First, its capacity to be responsive and second, its willingness to be responsive. The executive’s capacity depends on the available personnel and current workload, making it independent of the question. The executive’s willingness, however, depends on whether the executive wants to disclose the information asked. It thus varies by who is asking the question and the issue’s sensitivity. While a heavier workload should dampen the executive’s responsiveness to all questions, the executive’s willingness to respond to legislators’ questions should increase if they share partisan, portfolio or constituency ties. These ties incentivise executive members to give preferential treatment to some legislators, causing selective responsiveness that would severely undermine democratic accountability. To conserve its limited resources, the executive is less willing to be responsive to questions that legislators use only to signal to their constituency if they do not share partisan or constituency ties with them. Empirically, I examine the European Commission’s response behaviour to the European Parliament’s written parliamentary questions. I expect a Commissioner’s ideological, national and portfolio ties to determine his or her willingness and the workload and experience of the Directorate-General to determine the capacity to answer a question adequately. An adequate answer should be accessible and comprehensive, have a neutral to positive tone and announce an intention to act on the matter. I test the theoretical expectations using an original dataset comprising over 125,000 questions from the European Parliament over a 15-year period and the corresponding answers from the European Commission. I use state-of-the-art natural language processing to measure the answer’s accessibility, comprehensiveness, sentiment and action orientation. I then analyse how the characteristics of the question and the questioner in relation to the Commissioner (willingness) and the characteristics of the responsible Directorate General (capacity) affect the Commissioner’s responsiveness.