Friday, March 14, 2014
Empire (Omni Shoreham)
Recently, in particular during the Euro-crisis, a phenomenon which many believed to be part of the past reappeared on the political stage: the notion of parliamentary freedom of debate. As governments aimed to pass legislation in order to save the Euro as fast as possible, opposition parties and the public at large called for more time for parliamentary discussion. This paper aims to investigate the consequences of government control over parliamentary time. Time obviously is a scarce resource in parliaments, but what consequences does this have? Do governments allocate time exclusively to important topics or do they strategically try to avoid criticism by rather allocating time to legislative projects of secondary importance? The paper focuses on two countries with different agenda-setting regimes operating in parliaments: the United Kingdom, where the government almost exclusively controls the parliamentary agenda, and Germany, where all parliamentary parties allocate time consensually. For two similar parliamentary sessions, the share of plenary time major pieces of government legislation account for is ascertained. The results suggest that, rather than devoting parliamentary time to important – and often contested – pieces of legislation, governments which can control the agenda prefer to allocate time to legislation of secondary importance, most likely in order to minimize opportunities for criticism (and amendments) of their major pieces of legislation. The paper concludes by discussing what this implies for the resurrection of ‘freedom of debate’ in European legislatures.
