Legislative Debates and Interaction between Parties

The literature on parliamentary debates is expanding (Fernandes et al., 2021). Theoretically, Proksch and Slapin (2012, 2015) has proposed a model for parliamentary debates in modern democracies, suggesting that parliamentary debates serve electoral purposes as branding of political parties rather than deliberative or convincing purposes. Furthermore, debates makes it possible for individual politicians, and party mavericks, to promote themselves, without actually breaking the party discipline in words. Closed or open electoral lists impact on this. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it seeks to qualify the model of Proksch and Slapin, and it wants to test it on the case of Denmark where parties themselves can choose between open and closed lists. Theoretically, it wants to emphasis on the impact of ‘interparty cooperation’ for legislative debates. This may either come in the form of coalition governments, or in the form of pre-negotiated policy agreements before a government bill is presented to parliament. The legislative debate is then meant to brand this piece of legislation and dominated by party representatives. Allowing dissent in parliament will on the other hand show dissent in public, which is electorally costly. (So, 2021). Hence, we agree with Proksch and Slapin the electoral branding purposes are important but that interparty relations also affect the content of electoral debates whereas public dissent is more related to the size of the political parties, and hence to the electoral threshold. We will use computer-based reading of debates for testing of our argument, using new methods. We will use the case of Denmark due to its minority government, and features of its electoral system allowing for variation with open and closed listst. References: Bäck, H., Debus, M., & Müller, J. (2014). Who Takes the Parliamentary Floor? The Role of Gender in Speech-making in the Swedish Riksdag. Political Research Quarterly, 67(3), 504–518. https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912914525861 Fernandes, J. M., Debus, M., & Bäck, H. (2021). Unpacking the politics of legislative debates. European Journal of Political Research, 60(4), 1032–1045. https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-6765.12454 Proksch, S.-O., & Slapin, J. B. (2012). Institutional Foundations of Legislative Speech. American Journal of Political Science, 56(3), 520–537. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-5907.2011.00565.x Proksch, S.-O., & Slapin, J. B. (2015). The Politics of Parliamentary Debate: Parties, Rebels and Representation. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139680752 So, F. (2021). Don’t air your dirty laundry: Party leadership contests and parliamentary election outcomes. European Journal of Political Research, 60(1), 3–24. https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-6765.12383