This article investigates whether linkages between members of parliament (MPs) and interest groups matter for MPs' activities of co-sponsoring legislative proposals. Based on statistical models for network data, the study builds on classical explanations of cosponsorships highlighting the role of similar ties between MPs, such as party membership, legislative committee assignments, electoral district or gender. It shows that, on top of these traditional forms of homophily, MPs' ties to interest groups also make a difference. MPs with ties to a similar type of interest groups are more likely to co-sponsor their respective proposals. The same holds for MPs with ties to groups active in the same policy domain. These findings have implications for the study of groups' lobbying, legislative behaviour and representative democracy.

This research note presents an innovative dataset

T he study investigates the impact of media coverage of protest on issue attention in parliament (questions) in six Western European countries. Integrating several data sets on protest, media, and political agendas, we demonstrate that media coverage of protest affects parliamentary agendas: the more media attention protest on an issue receives, the more parliamentary questions on that issue are asked. The relationship, however, is mediated by the issue agenda of mass media more generally, attesting to an indirect rather than a direct effect. Additionally, the effect of media-covered protests on the general media agenda is moderated by the political system and is larger in majoritarian countries than in countries with a consensus democracy. This shows the importance of political opportunity structures for the agenda-setting impact of protest.

This article discusses the methodological challenges of legislative surveys. Following an overview of different types of survey biases, the article argues that self-selection and misreporting are the most critical problems for legislative surveys. In order to identify the self-selection and misreporting biases, we compare the answers to a survey from Swiss members of parliament with their observed behavior in the parliament. The empirical analysis shows that the survey sample has a substantial misreporting bias. We conclude that the parliamentarian's attitude towards the survey object is strongly linked to their response. These issues should be addressed to improve the design and quality of legislative surveys. †

Law‐making is a core function of parliaments in democratic systems. Yet, we still know little about the extent to which parliaments influence legislation and the reasons why MPs modify some bills more than others. We analyse the degree of bill amendments operated by parliament, by comparing bills before and after parliamentary deliberations with a text reuse approach. We postulate that MPs attempt to overcome the problem of limited processing capacity by prioritising certain bills over others. To this end, they use considerations related to institutional rules, attention dynamics and partisan politics. Empirically, we apply zero‐inflated beta regressions on a dataset covering about 1,700 bills adopted from 1995 to 2015 in the Swiss Parliament. Moreover, we address the problem of observational equivalence affecting analyses of parliament's impact on law‐making, by taking into account the government's anticipation strategy. Results highlight a reasonably high amendment activity, but with strong variations across bills. MPs change bills more if they are subject to direct democracy, rank high on the parliamentary agenda or if they attract media attention. The influence of the electoral cycle and coalition politics is not confirmed.