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

Background

The right of elected members to propose legislation is fundamental to parliamentary democracy, with private members’ bills (PMBs) one of the oldest instruments at the disposal of parliamentarians. Historically, the number of PMBs both sponsored and enacted in the Irish parliament has been very low, but considerable change has been underway since 2011. There have been more PMBs sponsored in the Houses of the Oireachtas since the beginning of 2011 than in the preceding nine decades and, while enactment remains rare, there have been more PMBs enacted since 2010 than in the preceding seven decades.

One of the key aims of this study is to analyse what explains this surge in legislative activity. It approaches 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 seek to explain why this is so.

Aims

The aim of the project is to examine the factors behind the rise in legislative activity in the Irish parliament. Specifically, the funding from the Collective Social Futures Interdisciplinary Fund is being used to code the bills that are sponsored in the Irish parliament, of which there are approximately 150 per year.

The coding is along policy lines and is linked to the The Irish Policy Agendas Project and the Public Policy Agendas on a Shared Island project. Both of these are part of the interdisciplinary 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. IPAP and PPASI measure the allocation of attention to policy issues on the island of Ireland, they analyse those data, and they provide codebooks and data to support public policy research and education.

Implementation plan

The coded data will be combined with an original dataset from another project worked on by Dr Liam Weeks for the Houses of the Oireachtas Parliamentary Research Office. That project analysed the impact of private members’ bills over the 2011-22 period, while the aim of this project is to consider the other dimensions, the causes of this behaviour. With the new and expanded dataset, the intention is to examine the evolution of PMBs as a legislative tool back to the foundation of the state.

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.