Tag: parliaments

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Multilevel blame and credit games: How is the European Union held responsible for economic crises?

Agni Poullikka* examines the factors affecting how Members of Parliament (MPs) in Member States (MS) of the European Union (EU) engage in responsibility management for recent economic crises, focusing on the Eurozone crisis and the economic consequences of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Drawing on the theoretical framework of blame and credit strategies, the author combines quantitative text analysis tools with hand coding to derive insights about attribution of responsibility to the EU.

Why should we care about this?

As a result of policy responses to recent crises, the scope and depth of policymaking at the EU level is increasing. Given the EU’s multilevel governance structure, responsibility for significant policy areas is fractured across different levels of governance and multiple institutions, with some of them being unelected. For instance, both national governments and the European Central Bank (ECB) are responsible for economic policymaking for Eurozone member countries. This can be problematic for the representative model of democracy, which posits that voters should be able to discern who are the decision-makers and then hold them accountable at the ballot box. Instead, the EU’s institutional complexity blurs the clarity of responsibility and creates incentives for elected actors, such as MPs, to obfuscate responsibility in relation to adverse situations. This is the research focus of this paper, which explores the factors affecting how MPs attribute responsibility to the EU for two recent economic crises; the Eurozone crisis (2008-2016) and the COVID-19 pandemic (2020-2022). 

What is responsibility management?

To address this question, this paper focuses on a specific type of political communication, namely strategic communication to engage in responsibility management. The umbrella term ‘responsibility management’ captures presentational behaviours that correspond to either a blame or a credit strategy. A blame strategy is the act of attributing responsibility for something considered bad to some person or entity, whilst a credit strategy is the act of accepting responsibility for something bad and attempting to present it in a positive light by turning blame into credit (Hood, 2011). 

I use this framework to inform my theoretical model, with the aim of deriving hypotheses about how institutional and preference-based factors affect the responsibility management of MPs and I aggregate the analysis to the party level. The underlying assumption is that when communicating about a negative situation, such as an economic crisis, MPs have a strategic motivation to maximise their gains at the next election. In other words, the way in which they attribute responsibility for the crisis is fuelled by their electoral incentives. These incentives can vary depending on a number of factors. This paper focuses on two. On the one hand, there are institutional factors such as Eurozone membership and whether there is a coalition or single-party government. 

On the other hand, preference-based factors include a party’s political ideology, its predisposition towards the EU and whether it is in government or in opposition. Considering a preference-based factor, the paper expects that government parties engage in more credit strategies compared to opposition parties, regardless of their predisposition towards the EU. One explanation for this could be that even if a government party were Eurosceptic, it would still be interested in portraying the EU in a positive light because the government is involved in decision-making at the EU level through its role at the European Council. 

How can we analyse responsibility management?

Given the theoretical focus on the political communication of MPs, the paper analyses textual data. The textual data consist of plenary session minutes of national parliaments in EU MS. For the Eurozone crisis, the countries covered are the following: Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden, Spain and the United Kingdom (UK). Given that the UK was an EU MS during the Eurozone crisis, it is included in the analysis. For the COVID-19 crisis, the countries are Belgium, Czech Republic, Spain, Denmark and Netherlands. This country selection allows for cross-national as well as cross-temporal comparisons between the two crises.

The methodological approach combines quantitative text analysis tools with hand coding. First, a subset of the data is created for one country, which includes only the time period of each crisis. Second, a dictionary of crisis-related terms is created and applied in order to select only the speeches that discuss the economic crisis. Third, the application of a regular expression dictionary of EU related terms selects sentences that refer to the EU (Rauh, 2015; Rauh and de Wilde, 2014; Hunter 2021). These sentences are more likely to include a responsibility attribution towards the EU. Fourth, a sentiment analysis is run, which can identify whether a sentence includes a blame (negative sentiment), or a credit strategy (positive sentiment). Fifth, hand coding is deployed to understand towards whom the negative or positive sentiment is directed. If that actor is EU-related, then the sentence is coded as an instance of blame or credit depending on the sentiment. This analysis is completed for all the countries in the dataset. Considered in tandem, the findings will explain how MPs assign responsibility to the EU and how institutional and preference-based factors affect this.

What are some findings about responsibility management?

To bring the discussion to life, Figures 1-3 present descriptive analyses about the responsibility management of the three main UK parties. The proportions correspond to the proportion of statements that were either a blame or a credit strategy directed towards the EU or towards the EU and other actors, out of the total statements that correspond to responsibility management. Whilst Labour was in government before 2010, the Conservatives were elected in power in 2010 and formed a coalition with the Liberal Democrats until 2015. After winning the 2015 elections, the Conservatives formed a single-party government.

Figure1 reveals the findings for Labour, a left-wing party with favourable predisposition towards the EU. When the Labour party was in government, their communication strategies were characterised by credit, whereas when they were in opposition they switched to more blame strategies. This could indicate that the government-opposition dynamic supersedes their affinity towards the EU. In other words, parties that support the EU might still opt for blame strategies in an attempt to scapegoat the EU and the incumbent government, thereby increasing their chances at the ballot box in the next election. 

Figure 1: Labour responsibility management (2008-2016)

Figure 2 demonstrates that overall the Conservatives, a right-wing party with Eurosceptic tendencies gave more blame rather than credit to the EU. Nevertheless, after coming to power in 2010, they increased their credit towards the EU compared to earlier years. This could confirm the expectation that when parties are in government they are more likely to credit the EU, regardless of their predisposition towards it. Lastly, Figure 3 looks at the Liberal Democrats, a liberal Europhile party. After becoming part of the governing coalition in 2010, they adopted an approach of neither blaming nor crediting the EU, as evidenced by the low values in Figure 3. This could be interpreted as an attempt of blame avoidance as they distance themselves from the topic and avoid discussing it in an emotive way. This strategy would enable them to neither compromise their preference towards the EU nor disappoint their coalition partners. 

Figure 2: Conservatives responsibility management (2008-2016)
Figure 3: Liberal Democrats responsibility management (2008-2016)

Concluding remarks 

This paper seeks to examine responsibility management for economic crises in the EU. The preliminary findings from the UK lend some support to the argument that parties blame and credit the EU with strategic considerations derived from institutional and preference-based factors in mind. The paper will proceed to explore these trends for other EU MS, with the aim of forming a comprehensive understanding of how MPs attribute responsibility to the EU for economic crises. In so doing, it can contribute to debates on the EU’s democratic accountability in policymaking and academic circles.

*Agni is a PhD Researcher at the Department of International Politics at City, University of London. Her research spans several topics in European political economy, focusing on economic crises and political communication. This blog post is based on a paper delivered at the PSA Parliaments Conference 2022.

References

Hood, C. (2011). The Blame Game: Spin, Bureaucracy and Self-preservation in Government. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Hunter, T. (2021). Home Style: Governments, Parties, and the Domestic Presentation of European Integration. PhD Dissertation for the London School of Economics European Institute.

Rauh, C. and De Wilde, P. (2018). The Opposition Deficit in EU Accountability: Evidence from over 20 Years of Plenary Debate in Four Member States. European Journal of Political Research, 57(01), 194-216.

Rauh, C. (2015). Communicating Supranational Governance? The Salience of EU Affairs in the German Bundestag, 1991–2013. European Union Politics, 16(01), 116–138.

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Keeping an eye on the money we don’t have. Parliament’s oversight role on public debt 

Always be prepared for the next crisis. It seems that public debt spiraling out of control is on track to becoming the next global crisis.

Did you know that twenty-five of the poorest countries currently spend more on debt repayments than on education, health and social policy combined? Sixty percent of low- and middle-income developing countries are highly debt vulnerable. Public debt is currently at the highest level globally in over fifty years and triple its 2008 level. National economies might collapse, as we have seen recently in Sri Lanka. 

The origins of this situation are, among others, the COVID-19 crisis and its economic and financial impact, and debt management practices which might not have been very prudent.

But it is not all doom and gloom. There are ways to conduct public debt management in a responsible and accountable way. While public debt has traditionally been managed by the Ministry of Finance and executive agencies, there is increasing recognition of the unique roles for parliament in the governance of public debt. The role of parliaments is to ask questions, to scrutinize, to provide quality assurance of the process, and to ask what the priorities are. Parliaments are increasingly taking on this challenge, as we have seen in – for instance – Kenya, Zambia, Georgia, the Maldives, and the Caribbean.

In its submission to the UK House of Common’s International Development Committee’s inquiry, Westminster Foundation for Democracy (WFD) suggested that the UK’s international development policies can be strengthened by including a public debt accountability lens through an enhanced role for parliaments in oversight of public debt. There are six incentives as to why national parliaments in partner countries can play a more active legislative and oversight role with regards to public debt:

  1. It serves as a catalyst for greater debt transparency.
  2. It helps to establish and implement a stronger legal framework on public debt management.
  3. It strengthens oversight over government policies and spending.
  4. It protects the national interest in emergency contexts and highlights the gendered effects of public debt.
  5. It unearths the risks of State-Owned Enterprises becoming a major cause of debt accumulation and debt crises.
  6. It contributes to deliver the requirements of successful Nature-for-Debt swaps, hence contributing to action on climate change mitigation and adaptation, for which these countries are otherwise receiving insufficient multilateral support, and to climate change finance accountability.

These six arguments for parliamentary involvement in public debt management should incentivise the UK and others making parliamentary oversight on public debt management one of the criteria for their debt relief schemes. Strengthening the governance and domestic accountability in debt relief schemes will contribute to prudent debt management and more sustainable economies.

However, based on our interaction with a range of parliaments globally, there are three main challenges. Firstly, parliaments might struggle with the technical nature of public debt questions. MPs and parliamentary staff might feel weary and intimidated about the complexity of the subject matter. Secondly, parliaments often do not have access to the relevant data to exercise oversight on public debt as the documentation is not shared by the executive. Fortypercent of low-income developing countries have never published public debt data or have not updated information in the past couple of years, and lenders such as China apply strict nondisclosure clauses. So, there is a need to bridge the information disconnect between the executive and the legislature. Thirdly, private sector lending has increased sharply in recent years, accounting for nearly 20% of loans to east and southern Africa. Often sold on to other private companies, including hedge funds and vulture funds, private lending is notoriously opaque as revealed by scandals in countries ranging from Mozambique to Malaysia.

To assist parliaments in facing these challenges, WFD is rolling out targeted support to parliaments through pilot assessments in public debt oversight, tailor-made learning and knowledge building, and parliamentary assistance programmes. Together with the National Democratic Institute (NDI), WFD recently published four new policy briefs. The briefs explain that, while most countries do have a financial administration act, far fewer countries have specific public debt legislation in place. Setting a legal framework for public debt management is one of parliament’s key tasks. The briefs outline best practices in the implementation and monitoring of a legal debt framework and the ratification of loan agreements. Beyond parliament’s legislative role, the briefs also cover parliament’s oversight role of public debt, and oversight over public debt in emergency contexts. The way how public debt was managed during the COVID-19 crisis has informed the brief on emergency context, though it is applicable to other potential future emergencies as well.

In addition, WFD developed a baseline assessment methodology on parliaments and public debt oversight and an e-course for parliamentarians, parliamentary staff, civil society and those engaged in public financial management. The e-course explores the concepts, mechanisms and risks which impact public debt management, and brings together expert contributors, country examples and interactive exercises.

In conclusion, it is worth mentioning that parliament’s capacity to oversee public debt management is very much linked to the depth of parliamentary scrutiny throughout the budget cycle, the resources available to committees, parliament’s oversight practices in general, and its ability to work collaboratively with civil society to enhance the political space to upscale transparency. 

Solid and accountable public debt management is not only the task of the government borrowing money. It is also a responsibility of the lenders — lending countries and lending international institutions — to ensure due diligence of the viability of the economic projects and of the rationale underpinning borrowing requests. Hence, the current initiative of revitalizing the UNCTAD principles on the promotion of sovereign lending and borrowing cannot be timelier and will hopefully contribute to avoiding a next global crisis of public debt spiraling out of control.

Franklin De Vrieze,
Head of Practice Accountability, Westminster Foundation for Democracy.

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Parliaments or Legislatures, or perhaps Assemblies? Names, origins and meanings

Cristina Leston-Bandeira, University of Leeds

@estrangeirada

For parliamentary geeks out there, this is a recurrent discussion: parliament or legislature? Which term is the ‘right’ term to use? Which one reflects the true nature of the institution that embodies the representative and legislative branch in a political system. I suggest we should relax more about the exact term and instead acknowledge their differing origins and meanings, whilst recognising the diversity of terms out there – assemblies, councils etc. After all, words are imbued with our own culture and history – why should it be any different with the word used to refer to this institution?

A while ago I started working on a textbook about comparative legislatures – unfortunately, life was a bit too mad at the time and I couldn’t bring it to fruition (maybe a retirement project?). But, as part of Chapter 1, I actually completed some research on the names and history of development of legislatures (or is it parliaments?). Here are some notes from that research. 

The institution supporting the representative and legislative branch of governance has been known by different names across the world and over time. This is often associated with local culture and language, but can also indicate a focus on a particular function to the detriment of others. The terms ‘legislature’ and ‘parliament’ are the most commonly used generic terms and are regularly used inter-changeably – they have, however, different origins and refer to different functions. In short, legislature is North American originally and refers to the function of making law. Parliament has European origin and refers to the function of debating.

The term ‘legislature’ tends to be more ordinarily used in Anglo-Saxon environments and/or countries with a strong American influence. The development of this term is closely associated with the expansion of the nascent American colonial legislatures. As their expansion in a context of independence was closely associated to the right of making law, the label of “legislature” – to legislate, to make ‘legis’(law) – became the natural appellation of these institutions. It is therefore a term linked to American influence, but also to an understanding of this institution as a legislation-making body. 

The term ‘parliament’ however is more common in Europe and in environments with a strong European influence. The term comes from the French verb ‘parler’ – to speak, to discuss. It refers therefore to a different dimension of this institution: as an arena for debate. As we see below, the medieval parliaments were mainly gatherings for discussion, and the term parliament is associated with these. This term can be dated back to medieval times in Europe, being therefore the most well-established nomenclature for this institution.

Other common names include Assembly (often National Assembly and associated with the need to reaffirm the national sovereignty of the people), Congress (usually encompassing a lower and an upper chamber), Chamber (Chamber of Representatives, Chamber of Deputies, etc, encompassing an explicit reference to the primacy of the role played by the Plenum chamber), Council, House and Senate (a popular name for upper chambers). But many parliaments also have their own country specific names, such as Althingi (Iceland), Bundestag (Germany), Diet (Japan), Majlis (Saudi Arabia and other Islamic countries), Sabha (India) and Sejm (Poland). And some of these names refer instead to the idea of ‘gatherings’, ‘coming together’, or even ‘events’, which speak to other types of functions performed by these institutions but are also a nod to the way they developed from ad-hoc gatherings to permanent institutions.

Legislatures are not a new feature of our societies, they have existed for many centuries. What is specific to the modern parliament is its complexity of membership and of roles performed, and the way it is integrated nationally in the governance fabric of our societies. It is difficult to date exactly when the first parliaments existed, as this is closely related to how one defines a legislature plus the linkage of the institution with its place (are legislatures that have changed location and/or building, the same legislature, for example?). Besides this, the development of legislatures is often conflated with the development of democracy and/or representative government. Although related, they are not necessarily the same. There are plenty of examples of legislatures, still today, that have little resemblance to democracy or representative government. 

The definition of a parliament, in its basic form, can be summed up as a group of people meeting together at the same time and location (even if digital) to discuss matters that affect the collective of a community. This may simply constitute a discussion and not lead to an effective decision or a vote. Some identify the medieval legislatures as the first ones, other point to the Greek assemblies (with associated myths: the Icelandic Althingi, the Isle of Man Tynwald, England for Westminster, etc.). The first legislatures were mainly forums for discussion, whereby people would meet to discuss key issues of the day. The abiding power of these forums to make decisions or to simply consult and discuss varied considerably, across the ages and contexts. 

Whilst the ancient Athenian Agora is the most well-known early assembly-like institution, this was by no means an exceptional institution. Other assemblies existed already at the time across ancient Greece. Most operated as public spaces for discussion, open to whoever wish to join the debate. Some assemblies had deliberative powers and decisions would be voted upon, though the power to vote would be limited to male citizens who attended the respective meeting. There is also evidence of much earlier presence of assemblies in the Indian sub-continent, in the Vedic age, meaning circa 3000-1000 BC, which exercised considerable influence. The Roman era also includes many types of early institutional expressions of a legislature in the form of councils, assemblies and, of course, the well-known Senate, which was particularly powerful during the Roman Republic. These legislatures varied very considerably in composition, participation, role and powers across the different Roman regimes. Some involved direct democracy participation, some had legislative powers, some were simple forums for discussion of local issues. A common characteristic of all of these different types of legislatures is their transient nature and, in most cases, lack of national remit.

It is from the medieval legislatures, though, that we can identify a clearer path of development towards the institution of the modern parliament. Many authors date the creation of the first parliaments in the 13 century and place it in England, with the De Monfort Parliament in 1265, seen as the first expression of a national legislature. But this development is progressive, representing the culmination of the expansion of smaller scale assemblies. It is also a process present elsewhere in Europe. The first parliaments were born out of a need of Monarchs to negotiate with the members of their aristocracy, and of increasingly larger territories under their ruling. As territories under one Monarch became larger and the need for taxation became a more complex task, the need to negotiate terms with local Barons and other aristocracy representatives became all the more pressing. As the context and environment of those negotiations became more formal and regular, the beginnings of the notion of a parliament started to materialise.

In his detailed comparative analysis of medieval parliaments in Europe, Marongiu shows that the predecessors of the modern parliament – curia, courts, concilia, estates – were developed firstly as occasional public relations reunions, which were “summoned by sovereigns whenever it seemed opportune to ask [secular and ecclesiastical dignitaries] counsel or opinion” (Marongiu, 1968: 45). As these reunions became more regular and larger, their relevance and formality expanded eventually leading to the new parlamentums. The first parliaments were therefore about communication and public relations. But as parliaments became institutionalised and part of a national governance chain, their focus shifted to the relationship with the executive and to the function of legislating.

I’m European, so parliament feels like the most natural word to use. My first language was French (parlement), my second language Portuguese (parlamento) and my third one is English (parliament). So parliament it is; that doesn’t mean I don’t use the term legislatures and I’m perfectly relaxed about using the term, as my recent article with David Judge shows; I’d probably rarely use the term ‘legislators’, but understand where North American colleagues come from when they do. So rather than worrying about what is the right term (whilst ignoring the many other terms that exist, such as Assemblies), it may simply be best to accept both. Or indeed adapt and create new words, as Brazilians have done: by adapting the American legislature word and meaning, they created ‘the legislative’ as a noun – o legislativo – which does not exist in European Portuguese as a noun. Ultimately words simply reflect their history and culture, there is no right or wrong, it’s about what each means, the same with parliament (or is it legislature?).

If you want to find out more about it all, I really recommend the following:

Loewenberg, G. and Patterson, S. (1979), Comparing Legislatures, University Press of America.

Marongiu, A. (1968), Medieval Parliaments – a comparative study, Eyre and Spottiswoode.

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Trust, parliaments, and stability

In a new post based on a paper from our Making Sense of Parliaments conference, Aileen Walker, Associate at Global Partners Governance, discusses how to build public trust in parliaments.

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Presidential proxies: Cloaked law-making in contemporary Russia

Why is the Russian President using senators to introduce bills into the federal legislature? PSA Parliaments Group member Ben Noble discusses the relationship between the Kremlin and the Federal Assembly in a blog originally posted on Presidential Power.

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What Makes Parliaments Effective? The case of the States of Jersey

By Mark Egan

What makes a parliament effective? What are the factors which make parliaments better at making laws or representing the people? These issues were discussed during the PSA Parliaments and Legislatures annual conference in October 2016. I spoke from the perspective of a parliamentary practitioner with experience of the UK and Jersey about the additional challenges faced by small parliamentary bodies in achieving the Holy Grail of effectiveness.

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One-Day Conference: “Making Parliaments Work: What Makes For an Effective Parliament?”

Politicians, the public, think-tanks, journalists and academics alike have increasingly focused in recent times on how parliaments and legislatures work and how to make them work better in terms of policy-making, representation, scrutiny and accountability. Yet, despite this focus, the evidence base for making judgments about the effectiveness of parliaments and legislatures is arguably not as extensive as it could be, perhaps partly because of methodological difficulties in assessing the influence, impact and power of these institutions.

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