Who Europeanises parliamentary attention, on which issues and how? A policy agenda perspective

Abstract

This paper contributes to the literature on the Europeanization of national parliaments by looking at the behavioral dimension of Europeanization in the Swiss Parliament. We examine the differences in parliamentary interventions on EU-related issues over time, between types of instruments (agendasetting versus control) and across parties. Moreover, we measure the attention devoted to various policy issues and the tone of parliamentary interventions. Empirically, we analyze with descriptive statistical tools EU-related parliamentary interventions introduced in the Swiss parliament over 30 years . Results show that parliamentary attention to the EU is strongly influenced by the activism of the Swiss People's Party, a Eurosceptic party member of the Swiss governing "coalition".

Energy agendas: A longitudinal analysis of Finnish parliamentary debates

“…Considering this, we would encourage researchers to combine various methodologies in the future—for example, topic modelling of large sets of textual data together with a more nuanced contextual analysis. However, as mentioned above, the advantage of topic modelling compared to interviews or manual coding and/or the use of predefined categories (cf., Gava et al, 2017; Little, 2023) is its comprehensiveness. No relevant part of the parliamentary speech escapes the researcher's attention while the method provides a richer account of policy debates, revealing agendas that might otherwise remain uncovered.…”

“…We argue that existing research on parliamentary agenda formation, even when carefully coding debate transcripts from long periods of time (e.g., Little, 2023) or when systematically analysing members' formal interventions (Gava et al, 2017), is somewhat limited in grasping the full spectrum of parliamentary speeches. In other words, by limiting research to institutionally or otherwise predefined debate categories, these studies leave out a potentially large amount of parliamentary talk.…”

Shirking and Slacking in Parliament

“…At the national level, we also take into account the number of activities (motions, postulates, etc.) by each MP (see data from Gava, Sciarini, and Varone 2017) to assess whether slacking occurs. For the two cantonal parliaments, we have similar data as well as information on abstention rates and absenteeism.…”

“…15 15 These different interventions by MPs differ by the extent to which they bind the government when responding to these parliamentary activities (see Gava, Sciarini, and Varone 2017). We thank Roy Gava for having given us access to this database. …”

The Swiss Policy Agendas Project

“…Beyond comparative endeavors, the tracing of issues across time and arenas provides insights into the changing nature of Swiss politics. For instance, such an approach has proven useful to investigate the transformation of the Swiss People's Party into a right-wing populist party (Varone et al, 2014), the impact of Europeanization on domestic politics and legislative production Varone, 2012, 2014;Gava et al, 2017), the interaction between media and political agendas (Tresch et al, 2012(Tresch et al, , 2013Vliegenthart et al, 2016a), and the interaction between protests, media, and political agendas (Vliegenthart et al, 2016b).…”