The rise of parliament. Examining the use of the private members’ bill as a tool of legislators

The right of elected members to propose legislation is fundamental to parliamentary democracy, but, somewhat paradoxically, most parliamentarians rarely see their bills become law. In spite of this, members of parliament continue to sponsor bills in most democracies and so we examine another consequence of legislative activity, namely an electoral effect. In other words, do parliamentarians draft bills to win votes?

Our case study is Ireland and the aim of the CSF funding was to to code the legislative bills introduced in parliament by policy area. This is part of a wider interdisciplinary project run by Dr Conor Little in the University of Limerick, namely the Irish Policy Agendas Project and the Public Policy Agendas on a Shared Island project, which is part of the international Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) network. CAP research aims to measure the allocation of attention to policy issues across multiple institutional, political, and societal agendas, and to use those data to understand policy and politics.

One of the key aims of this study was to analyse what explains the recent surge in legislative activity in Ireland. It approached this form of political behaviour from an interdisciplinary perspective, considering different psychological, sociological, political and legal factors. Where once parliamentarians in Ireland might have been accused of ignoring the legislative dimension to their job, this is no longer the case. We sought to explain why this is so.

Team

Principal Investigators: Dr Liam Weeks, Department of Government and Politics, UCC and Dr Conor Little, Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Limerick.

Research Assistants: Tobias Heyduk, PhD candidate, Department of Government and Politics, UCC and Cristoir King, PhD candidate, Department of Geography, University of Maynooth.