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The Politics of Parliamentary Debate: Parties, Rebels and Representation

Why do backbenchers in parliament, particularly party rebels, speak more often during floor debates in some countries than they do in others? Sven-Oliver Proksch and Jonathan Slapin employ a comparative institutional approach to explain the link between electoral rules and debate participation, arguing that parliamentary debate is a forum that parties and their MPs exploit for electoral purposes—not to persuade other MPs to vote their way, but instead to communicate policy positions to other MPs and, most importantly, to communicate with voters. Testing their theory and the implications of a formal model, Proksch and Slapin make a compelling theoretical and empirical case that electoral rules shape who, and what, we hear on the floor of parliaments in advanced industrial democracies. Parties use speeches to signal information about MPs’ policy positions to voters, directly and through the media. Proksch and Slapin theorize that in countries with electoral systems that incentivize parties to protect their brand name, party leaders will monitor and control their MPs’ floor speeches to ensure they send a unified message to the public. By contrast, in systems that incentivize MPs to cultivate a personal vote by creating a name for themselves, party leaders exercise less control over speaking time and speech content. Proksch and Slapin present a formal model where floor speeches are the result of a delegation game played between party leaders and backbenchers. They collect an impressive array of data to test their hypotheses, including their own survey of parliamentary parties, a catalogue of parliamentary rules for lower chambers in 22 advanced industrial democracies, decades of memberlevel speeches in Germany and the United Kingdom, speeches during debates over fiscal stimuli in Germany and the United Kingdom, rules over the allocation of speaking time in the European Parliament, and MP speeches in New Zealand before and after changes in their electoral rules. The immense amount of data, and its variety, and the empirical rigor of their analysis go a long way toward reassuring any potential skeptic. Some of Proksch and Slapin’s best evidence comes from their analysis of the relationship between electoral systems and parliamentary rules of procedure for lower chambers in 22 advanced industrialized democracies. They create three categories of parliamentary rules around speaking on the floor: rules that give members floor access and parties little control, rules that favor party leaders but still provide members with some speaking opportunities without leaders’ consent, and rules that give party leaders control over who speaks. They also classify countries’ electoral systems into three categories according to how much they incentivize personal vote seeking. They find a significant relationship; electoral systems that give members strong incentives to seek a personal vote are more likely to have rules limit that leaders’ control over members’ access. Relying on data from their own survey of parliamentary group administrators and party leaders in 25 advanced democracies, Proksch and Slapin also demonstrate that as parties become more heterogeneous and divisive, leadership monitoring in party-centered systems increases, while it decreases in systems with personal vote incentives. Strikingly, in most of the parties surveyed (92%), leaders require MPs to provide advance notice of a speech deviating from the party line and will monitor such speeches. How do electoral systems and debate rules affect individual-level member behavior? Proksch and Slapin compare how often MPs speak on the floor in the German Bundestag between 1976 and 1998 and the United Kingdom House of Commons between 1979 and 2004. MPs have little reason to cultivate a personal vote in Germany’s mixed-member proportional closedlist electoral system compared with the UK’s singlemember district plurality system, whereas party leaders in Germany have a much greater incentive to control the party message. They find that, as hypothesized, party leaders in Germany gave more speeches than backbenchers (especially those elected from districts rather than lists), whereas party leaders in the UK gave fewer speeches. Importantly, MPs who are ideologically distant from their party are more likely to deliver floor speeches in the United Kingdom and less likely to deliver floor speeches in Germany. The differences between Germany and the United Kingdom are consistent in analyses of members’