Although there has been a noticeable increase in recent years in the scholarly study of parliamentary diplomacy, this research has largely dealt with the “parliamentarization of international relations”, the development of bilateral parliament-to-parliament relations, or the growth of multilateral organizations that bring together various national parliaments in a coordinated institutional arena. Except for a small number of papers (Lipps 2021; Malang 2019; Mochtak and Diviak 2019), scholars have not addressed the issue of parliamentary diplomacy at the level of the individual political actors, the elected legislators qua parliamentary diplomats, who devote some part of their legislative career and political resources to the pursuit of international relations. As such the study of parliamentary diplomacy has been also absent in the scholarly literatures on legislative careers and legislative activity which tend to focus on parliamentarians’ activity in the areas of legislation, executive oversight, and constituency service while leaving the study of their diplomatic role on the margins.
This paper seeks to contribute to closing this gap through a comparative study of the compositional patterns of bilateral parliamentary friendship groups in two vastly different legislative settings: the unicameral parliaments of Hungary and Israel. The status of both Hungary and Israel in the international arena as “small states” (Sabic, Fenko and Roter 2016; Sabic and Huang 2021) might suggest convergence in their attitudes towards and practises of parliamentary diplomacy. At the same time, their vast differences in executive-legislative relations, type of coalition government, legislative party systems and the electoral system (Nikolenyi and Friedberg 2019) provide important institutional grounds to expect divergent patterns in the appointment of elected parliamentarians to the bilateral friendship groups of their national parliaments.
References
Lipps, Jana. 2021. “Intertwined Parliamentary Arenas: Why Parliamentarians Attend International Parliamentary Institutions.” European Journal of International Relations 27 (2): 501–20.
Malang, Thomas. 2019. “Why National Parliamentarians Join International Organizations.” The Review of International Organizations 14 (3): 407–30.
Mochtak, Michal, and Tomas Diviak. 2019. “Looking Eastward: Network Analysis of Czech Deputies and Their Foreign Policy Groups.” Problems of Post-Communism 66 (6): 418–33.
Nikolenyi, Csaba, and Chen Friedberg. 2019. “Vehicles of Opposition Influence or Agents of the Governing Majority? Legislative Committees and Private Members’ Bills in the Hungarian Országgyűlés and the Israeli Knesset.” The Journal of Legislative Studies 25 (3): 358–74.
Šabič, Zlatko, and David W. F. Huang. 2021. Parliamentary Diplomacy of Taiwan in Comparative Perspective : Against Isolation and Under-Representation. Bristol: Bristol University Press.
Šabič, Zlatko, Ana Bojinović Fenko, and Petra Roter. 2016. “Small States and Parliamentary Diplomacy: Slovenia and the Mediterranean.” Mediterranean Quarterly 27 (4): 42–60.
