Legislators between Accountability and Collective Agency (LeColAg)

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Thomas Saalfeld
• Subject Area: Political Science
• Term: from 2019 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 433597474

The competitiveness of parliamentary politics, the hierarchical nature of legislative organization and the dominance of majoritarian decision-making constitute unfavourable conditions for the emergence and reproduction of horizontal collective agency in the form of common beliefs and ‘we-attitudes.’ Nevertheless, influential accounts of legislative learning and the institutionalization and professionalization of legislatures demonstrate the scope for collective agency to emerge and persist among legislators even across partisan lines. The presence of such beliefs and attitudes is subtly reflected in speeches and other forms of political communication on (and off) the floor of the chamber. The proposed project will analyze legislative speeches, parliamentary questions and extra-parliamentary statements of legislators in the British, German and Israeli national parliaments and selected regional chambers in Germany and the United Kingdom. It will describe, and seek to explain, variations in the extent to which: (a) legislators differ individually in referring to the chamber’s collective agency in their political communication; (b) the competition between parties (as teams of individual legislators) moderates expressions of collective agency in the chamber; and (c) chambers as collective bodies differ in invoking collective beliefs and we-attitudes in debates. The aim of these analyses is to: (a) contribute to the empirical and normative debate in political science about elite autonomy and representational gaps due to democratic elitism; (b) contribute to the work of the Research Unit ‘Horizontal Collective Actors’ by developing instruments for the measurement of individual expressions of collective agency (in legislative speeches and other forms of political communication); (c) use these instruments to track individual alignment with collective beliefs and reasoning over legislators’ careers and across electoral cycles; (d) employ models based on rational-choice and sociological institutionalism to explain cross-sectional and diachronic variations in references to collective agency at the levels of individual legislators, parties and chambers; and (e) work with other members of the Research Unit to advance knowledge on mechanisms for the emergence and reproduction of collective agency and autonomy by combining results derived from the analysis of speech-based data with the Research Unit’s theoretical work, agent-based modelling and experimental evidence.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Israel, United Kingdom
• Cooperation Partners: Osnat Akirav, Ph.D.; Professor Philip Lord Norton, Ph.D.
• Co-Investigators: Lucas Geese; Or Tuttnauer, Ph.D.