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Authors
Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
Much scholarly discussion has been devoted to the impact of the 2009 Eurozone economic
Crisis on the functioning of European democracies. Especially for those countries that bailout
agreements had to be implemented in, the literature has focused on party systems realignment,
quality of democracy, voting patterns and on the quality of representation. Concerning the
latter, extant research is not in agreement, with some studies arguing that the crisis has had a
negative impact on representation, while others consider that the impact might have had a
positive angle as well. As it stands, however, we lack the empirical evidence to uncover the
underlying patterns linking the Eurozone crisis with changes in representation. Given the
importance of parliaments in the representation process in most European democracies, the
question remains as to the particular impact that the economic crisis had on parliamentary
representation.
This thesis attempts to answer this research question in two major ways. First, by putting
forward a novel way in which to compare pre- and post-electoral party documents which
enables us to track party discourse congruence before and after the elections in different
economic contexts. Second, by investigating how the Crisis impacted representation by
specifically looking at the parliamentary representative behaviour of parties and legislators. It
is structured around the conceptualisation and operationalisation of economic crisis as macro economic conditions of constraint which impinge on different dimensions of parliamentary
activity. The impact of these constraints is tested across a multitude of aspects of parliamentary
representative behaviour in several crisis-hit countries.
Each chapter examines the empirical impact of macro-economic conditions of constraint on
a specific type of parliamentary activity. Together, they provide a comprehensive picture of the
effects of economic crisis on parliamentary representation. In particular, the thesis places the
empirical focus on two important yet not well-researched aspects of parliamentary
representative behavior that (together with roll-call voting) constitute the bulk of a legislator’s
parliamentary activities. Those are speechmaking, which is analyzed in terms of discourse
congruence as well as access to the floor, and the use of scrutiny tools through parliamentary
questions.
To empirically tackle the research questions, the thesis undertakes a large data collection
endeavour. Namely, a large original dataset of around 730,000 unique speeches in Greece,
Ireland, Portugal and Spain, spanning 24 years of parliamentary plenary debates, 24 elections
and 30 political parties was created. Beyond this large corpus, the thesis further narrows its
focus on the crucial case of the Greek legislature, the Vouli, by constructing a dataset that
combines 200,000 plenary speeches and over 12,000 parliamentary current questions spanning
20 years of Greek parliamentary debates. These datasets track the evolution of parliamentary
representation before, during and after the Eurozone crisis in contexts of severe but
differentiating external economic conditionality.
Methodologically, the thesis relies heavily on text-analysis techniques. First, for the creation
of the datasets themselves; second, for the design and validation of a novel parliamentary
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mandate fulfillment or discourse congruence measure; and third, for the calculation of a
measure of access to the floor and constituency focus in parliamentary questions. Each chapter
attempts to determine the impact of economic crisis indicators on different dependent variables
measuring parliamentary activity, by employing various regression analysis techniques.
The thesis makes two types of contributions: methodologically, it proposes and validates a
novel measure of party discourse congruence, contributing with a tool which can help
researchers interested in comparing discursive texts produced by parties, with very large
applicability. Empirically, the thesis shows that during times of economic austerity and
conditions of constraint, a) both the country’s economic performance but also the ensuing
conditionality enforced by supranational actors reduce the congruence between pre and post
electoral discourse of parties heavily b) access to the floor is restricted with party leaders
guarding floor access and refraining from delegating speech time to backbenchers, and c) the
likelihood that MPs will table current questions about their constituency decreases. Together,
these findings suggest that parliamentary representation was in fact negatively affected by the
Crisis, as party’s discourse congruence declines, the inclusiveness of access to the floor
diminishes, and MPs become less “local” in their speeches.
Description
Keywords
Crise da zona euro Representação parlamentar Partidos políticos Legisladores Grécia Irlanda Portugal Espanha