As part of our one-day conference, there will also be two posters on exhibition:
Does Experience matter? The effect of pre-parliamentary careers on MPs’ participation in parliamentary debates
By Wang Leung Ting (LSE)
This paper seeks to explore how MPs pre-parliamentary career affect their performance in parliament. Utilizing theories from both occupational psychology and legislative studies, it is hypothesized that the utilities of legislative activities may varies among legislators depended on the experiences, skills and knowledge they earned during their pre-parliamentary career. MPs who are better equipped to carry certain aspects of their responsibilities are going to focus their attention in those areas while less attention is given to their other tasks. This hypothesis is then tested on a dataset of biographical information of all British MPs who are elected for the first time in the 2010 general election. Using MPs’ participation in parliamentary debate as a case, the results indicate that variations in pre-parliamentary career do influence the number of speeches they made during debates. It is found that experience in legal profession encourage MPs to speak more often while experience in media, national party politics and in-constituency local government reduce the number of occasions that they speak. These results suggest MPs’ professional and political pre-parliamentary experiences do have implication on their performance in Westminster, and the occupational composition of the parliament as a whole may have consequences on its’ functioning and effectiveness.
Comparing Legislative Speed: Event History Analysis on Hong Kong Legislations
By Nick Hin-Kin Or (Southampton)
This poster discusses and explains how the application of event history analysis – time-to-an-event – provide insights in measuring and analyzing legislative speed. Instead of counting whether and how many legislation passed, this poster stresses on the importance of timing and duration in legislation that is rarely addressed in the legislative studies. Censoring data in event history analysis provides a useful measurement concept to deal with bills that failed to pass within the time frame of a certain government or legislature. The plots of Kaplan-Meier Curves also provide visually clear and vivid diagram for comparing the legislative speed of different governments or legislatures. I will demonstrate the application of event history analysis with the legislative data from Hong Kong and discuss the implication of the method.