Legislators between Accountability and Collective Agency (LeColAg)

问责与集体代理之间的立法者 (LeColAg)

• 批准号: 433597474
• 负责人: Professor Dr. Thomas Saalfeld
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Mannheimer Zentrum für Europäische Sozialforschung
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: Research Grants
• 财政年份: 2019
• 资助国家: 德国
• 起止时间: 2018-12-31 至 2022-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/433597474?language=en
• 关键词: Legislators; between; Accountability; Collective; Agency

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.

议会政治的竞争性、立法组织的等级性质以及多数主义决策的主导地位，构成了以共同信仰和“我们态度”形式出现和复制横向集体机构的不利条件。尽管如此，对立法学习和立法机构的制度化和专业化的有影响力的描述表明，即使跨越党派界限，立法者之间也存在着集体代理的出现和持续的空间。这种信念和态度的存在微妙地反映在会议厅发言和其他形式的政治交流中。拟议的项目将分析英国、德国和以色列国家议会以及德国和联合王国选定区域议会的立法发言、议会问题和议会外发言。它将描述，并试图解释，在何种程度上的变化：（一）立法者不同的个人在提到商会的集体机构在他们的政治沟通;（B）政党之间的竞争（作为个人立法者的团队）缓和集体机构在商会的表达;和（c）商会作为集体机构在辩论中援引集体信念和我们的态度不同。这些分析的目的是：（a）促进政治学中关于精英自治和民主精英主义造成的代表差距的经验和规范性辩论;（B）通过开发测量集体能动性的个人表达的工具，促进“横向集体行为者”研究股的工作（c）利用这些工具跟踪个人与集体信念的一致性，以及对立法者职业生涯和整个选举周期的推理;（d）采用基于理性选择和社会学制度主义的模式，解释在个别立法者、政党和议院各级提及集体机构时的跨部门和历时变化;以及（e）与研究单位的其他成员合作，通过结合来自研究单位的结果，语音为基础的数据分析与研究单位的理论工作，基于代理的建模和实验证据。