Majority Rule and Minority Rights in European Legislatures (en)

DEN HAAG (PDC) - In april 2012 an ECPR Joint Sessions of Workshops took place in Antwerp organised by Michael Koß (Potsdam) and Radoslaw Zubek (Oxford), where research director dr. Arco Timmermans presented a paper with Astrid Spreitzer on Consensus Politics and European Integration in the Parliaments of Luxembourg and the Netherlands.

Context and aims

The evolution of minority party rights has so far been analyzed chiefly in presidential democracies, particularly in the United States, where scholars have mapped such rights and have explained any changes with institutional, partisan and ideological factors. In Europe, a comprehensive focus on the evolution of procedural rights of individual MPs and opposition parties has so far been largely absent. Against this background, the objective of this workshop was to bring together scholars working on legislative politics and organization to examine the conditions under which the rights of individual members and opposition parties are curbed (or expanded) in European legislatures. In particular, the workshop addressed the following questions: What rights do individual MPs and opposition parties have in European legislatures? Do such rights change over time and, if so, how and why? How can cross-country variation in the evolution of such rights be explained? We defined minority rights broadly to include a variety of formal and informal, constructive and obstructive, individual and partisan privileges that members and opposition parties can resort to in European legislatures to counteract majority (or government) power.

Papers and workshop discussions

We deliberately decided to randomly assign both slots for papers as well as discussants to papers in order to avoid any bias. Due to the generally high level of coherence of all accepted papers (of which 14 were presented at the workshop), we were nonetheless able to have a conclusive discussion which basically centered around three major topics: the evolution of parliamentary rules, the application of these rules, and the impact of different rules (especially those of agenda control) upon the cohesion of parliamentary groups.

All of these topics were initially raised on the first day of the workshop. Bjørn Erik Rasch kicked us off with a paper on the impact of insincere voting under the successive procedure, followed by Astrid Spreitzer and Arco Timmermans, who discussed the impact of European integration on consensus politics and in the parliaments of Luxembourg and the Netherlands

 The two final papers of the first day discussed the impact of parliamentary rules on parliamentary behavior: first, in the Hungarian case, on minority behavior (Réka Várnagy, Gabriella Ilonszki & Peter Ondre), and second, in the Italian case, on legislative speeches (Daniela Giannetti).

The second day saw three papers aiming to unpack majority/minority relations in legislative behavior: first, with respect to the impact of agenda control on the German Bundestag (Christian Stecker & Radoslaw Zubek), second, with respect to the logic underlying the legislative process in Italy (Andrea Pedrazzani), and finally, with respect to reforms of the British House of Commons departmental select committee system (Alexandra Kelso). Another paper aimed to use the distribution of mega-seats (committee chairs and vice-chairs) as an indicator of parliamentary powers (Jorge Fernandes), while the final paper of the second day studied a topic overlooked by the existing literature, the origin and impact of the investiture vote of governments on majority rule in European Parliaments (Shane Martin).

Two of the three papers presented on the third day paid special emphasis on minority rights: first, Sarah Sinram and Christoph Hönnige showed that abstract judicial review served as a minority right in European legislatures. Second, Ulrich Sieberer investigated the games underlying parliamentary rule changes more closely. Sieberer could demonstrate that, against conventional wisdom, parliamentary rules were changed rather often and mostly following the strength and ideological position of parliamentary majorities and minorities, respectively. Finally, Jack Blumenau presented a model to systematically explain the impact of agenda control on party cohesion in the European Parliament.

The final day saw two papers taking a macro perspective on parliamentary change. Taking Germany as an example, Michael Koß aimed to explain the historical evolution of parliamentary agenda control. Finally, Katja Heeß presented a paper which argued against the assumption that increasing complexity of political processes caused ever more proportional procedures in European legislatures. Rather, she discerned a trend towards majority rule. The workshop concluded with a coda where everyone was invited to discuss the remaining key issues about the tension between parliamentary majorities and minorities. All discussants agreed that further research was necessary to ascertain why the rights of both groups differ in different contexts and which mix would ideal under which circumstances. The most important findings of the workshop can be summarized as follows: It is possible to both pin down determinants of parliamentary rules as well as rationales parliamentary actors follow in reforms of these rules; consequently, parliamentary rules indeed systematically affect legislative outcomes and are affected by macro-phenomena such as Europeanization. However, we still need to assess a larger number of countries over longer time periods to systematically disentangle causal patterns underlying these relationships.