Visual Parliaments: A Framework for Mapping Parliament as ‘Videospheres’

Normative approaches in legislative studies support the democratic need for parliamentary broadcast, both in the Global North (van Waarden and Johansson 2023) as well as in parliaments of the Global South (Managa 2020). Largely, however, this remains an under-researched area within the field. Using India as a case study, and with comparative examples from other parliaments particularly from the Global South, this paper maps a critical approach to legislative broadcast. As parliamentary proceedings are transmitted and consumed, on television and online, not just via official governmental channels but as material for proliferating news media, how do these performances shape everyday political discourse? Can mapping them help us locate pulse-points of shifting discourse in contested democracies? The Indian Parliament has been in crisis for a while now; scholars have noted India's ostensible democratic backslide (Varshney 2022), and the institutional decline of the Indian Parliament (Rubinoff 2013, Shankar and Rodrigues 2014). The last two Lok Sabha (Lower House) terms have witnessed record disruptions, protests within the parliament by Opposition Members, and unprecedented suspension of MPs. Using an interdisciplinary 'politics and performance' framework, I formulate the parliament as a constitutive ‘videosphere’ (Goodrich Cf. Peters 2014), where this democratic decline is not just being televised but also consumed. Drawing on my analysis of official parliamentary broadcast in the last two Lok Sabha Terms, supplemented with channels of selected news media, and narrative interviews conducted with current and former MPs, I map how not just party identities, but also gender, class, caste, and religious identities of MPs are mapped onto these performances and their transmissions. The paper thus suggest that such a mapping can provide new frames to understand the politics of digital transmission of parliaments, and the political currency of such 'content', and the potent use of the parliamentary stage for democracies.