Bjørn Høyland’s research while affiliated with University of Oslo and other places

In this chapter, we describe the institutional setting of parliamentary debate in Stortinget and identify correlates of speech participation, drawing on a dataset of more than a quarter of a million speeches from 1998 to 2016. The key correlate of speech participation is committee membership in the committee responsible for preparing the report for the topic under discussion. However, that is not the whole story. Party elites speak more than backbenchers. As speaking time is allocated proportional to party size, MPs from the smaller parties speak more often than their counterparts in the larger parties. While we uncover a gender difference in the overall allocation of speeches, this is only present amongst parties on the right of the political spectrum. We do not find a similar difference in length of speech or allocation of speeches amongst members within the same committee. Hence, we ascribe the gender difference in speeches to gender differences in committee composition.

Most countries struggle to implement CO2 reducing policies. Implementation is politically difficult since it typically forces politicians to trade‐off different concerns. The literature on how parties and MPs handle these trade‐offs is sparse. We use structural topic models to study how MPs in an oil dependent environment responded to a shock in the oil price that created spatially concentrated costs of climate policies. We leverage the rapid oil‐price drop between parliamentary sessions and MPs’ constituency adherence in a difference‐in‐differences framework to identify if MPs respond differently to variation in the salience of trade‐offs. We find that MPs facing high political costs of climate policies tried to avoid environmental topics, while less affected MPs talked more about investments in Green energy when the oil price declined. Our results suggest that the oil price bust created a “window of opportunity” for advocates of the “Green shift”. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved

Committee coordinators face a classic delegation problem when assigning reports to their committee members. Although a few theoretical developments have focused on the effects of expertise on delegation, empirical studies have commonly assumed monotonic effects. Based on existing informational models, we argue that a more loyal committee member, everything else being equal, is more likely to be appointed as a rapporteur and that more expertise, holding preference divergence constant, has a non-monotonic effect because of informational credibility. Employing accumulated committee service as an expertise measure, these theoretical expectations are tested on all committee report delegations in the European Parliament from 1979 to 2014. Our empirical analysis with non-parametric and parametric hierarchical conditional logit models renders strong support for these expectations. The results hold across member states, political groups, procedures, committees and over time.

The early twentieth century saw many democracies adopt proportional representative systems. The textbook explanation, pioneered by Rokkan, emphasize between‐party electoral competition; the rise of the Socialist vote share made Bourgeois parties prefer PR systems to maximize their seat share. While appealing, this account is not entirely compelling. Consequently, scholars are investigating within‐party explanations of support for such reforms. Particularly, Cox, Fiva, and Smith show how list PR enable party leaders to discipline members and build cohesive parties. Relying on roll‐call votes across the Norwegian 1919 electoral reform from two‐round single‐member plurality to closed‐list PR, they show that the internal party cohesion increased following the reform. We investigate how the Norwegian electoral reform changed the content of parliamentary speeches. Comparing speeches from MPs present both before and after the reform, we show how parties become more cohesive in parliamentary debates under list PR than they were under the single‐member‐district system.

Electoral incentives shape legislative behavior. Individual legislators may have a stronger incentive to develop a personal profile in candidate-centered than in party-centered systems. Moreover, the party leadership may have a stronger incentive to protect the " brand-name " of the party in the latter than in the former system. We investigate whether the electoral system also affect the topics discussed in plenary debates. In particular, we compare the topics discussed in the Norwegian Parliament before and after the 1919 electoral reform. With this reform, Norway changed from being a candidate centered system to a party centered system. By focusing on MPs that serve both before and after the reform, we find that party differences take prevalence over personal characteristics with the change from candidate to party centered system. Specifically, we show how speeches are less constituency focused and turn from being centered around candidates to party ideology as a consequence of electoral reform. A set of placebo-reforms demonstrates that these differences are larger at the time of the reform than in the periods before and after. We hence conclude that the reform caused MPs to change the kind of plenary speeches that they delivered.

What motivates politicians to engage in legislative activities? In multilevel systems politicians may be incentivized by ambitions to advance their careers either at the state or federal level. This article argues that the design of the electoral institutions influences how politicians respond to these incentives. Analyzing a unique dataset of both ‘stated’ and ‘realized’ career ambitions of Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), it finds that those who seek to move from the European to the national (state) level participate less in legislative activities than those who plan to stay at the European (federal) level. For MEPs who aim to move to the state level, attendance and participation in legislative activities is substantively lower among legislators from candidate-centered systems. Importantly, the effect of career ambitions on legislative participation is stronger in candidate-centered systems than in party-centered systems. These findings suggest that the responsiveness associated with candidate-centered systems comes at the expense of legislative activity.

What explains the development of legislative party voting unity? Evidence from the United States and Britain indicate that partisan sorting, cohort replacement effects, electoral incentives, and agenda control contributed to enhancing party cohesion during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Here, these mechanisms are evaluated by analysing a dataset containing all the recorded votes from the Canadian House of Commons, 1867–2011. Overall, we find that partisan sorting and the government’s ability to control the agenda are central to the consolidation of parties over time. Our results underscore the need to integrate institutional rules and legislative agendas into models of parliamentary voting behaviour and suggest that strict party discipline can lead to the development of a multi-party system in the legislative arena.

This chapterexamines political behavior and legislative politics in the European Parliament. It begins with a review of research findings on the political behavior of Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), focusing on the last decade or so. It considers the process of recruitment and election of the members of parliament and how this process affects them and their political preferences. It then looks at the formation of political parties and committees in the European Parliament—the so-called “equilibrium institutions”—and how they

The Treaty of Lisbon reformed the budgetary procedure of the European Union (EU). This paper describes the key changes and presents a game-theoretical analysis of the annual budgetary procedure. Our focus is on the implications of these changes for the budgetary powers of the European Parliament (EP). Against the common belief that the budgetary powers of the EP were strengthened as a result of the Lisbon Treaty, our analysis paints a somewhat more sober assessment of its budgetary empowerment as a result of the reform. We find that the budgetary procedure operates much like the codecision procedure does in the legislative process. Compared to the budgetary procedure used prior to the Lisbon Treaty, it has become more difficult for the Parliament to pass amendments, if it wants to affect what used to be referred to as non-compulsory spending or decrease compulsory spending. The EP’s ability to pass amendments that increase compulsory spending is mostly unaffected. The configuration of preferences and bargaining powers in the Conciliation Committee determine whether on balance the EP is better off under the new procedure.