Lobo, Marina CostaKartalis, Efstratios-Ioannis2022-11-172022-11-172022http://hdl.handle.net/10451/55162Much 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 8 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.engCrise da zona euroRepresentação parlamentarPartidos políticosLegisladoresGréciaIrlandaPortugalEspanhadoctoral thesis101562233