Legislators between Accountability and Collective Agency (LeColAg)

议会政治的竞争性、立法组织的等级性质和多数主义决策的主导地位构成了以共同信念和“我们态度”形式出现和再生产横向集体机构的不利条件。然而，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，集体代理的范围在立法者中出现并持续存在，甚至跨越党派界限。这种信念和态度的存在微妙地反映在会议厅内外的演讲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、议会问题和议员的议会外发言。它将描述并设法解释以下方面的差异：(a)立法委员在其政治宣传中提到商会的集体机构时各自不同；(b)各党派之间的竞争（作为个别立法者的团队）缓和了议事厅中集体力量的表达；(c)作为集体机构的各议院在辩论中援引集体信念和我们的态度方面存在差异。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导致的代表性差距的实证和规范辩论；(b)为“横向集体行动者”研究股的工作作出贡献，开发衡量集体力量的个人表达的工具（在立法演讲和其他形式的政治传播中）；(c)利用这些工具在立法者的职业生涯和整个选举周期中跟踪个人与集体信念和推理的一致性；(d)采用基于理性选择和社会学制度主义的模型来解释个别立法者、政党和议会各级提到集体机构的横截面和历时变化；(e)与研究股其他成员合作，通过将基于语音的数据分析所得的结果与研究股的理论工作、基于主体的建模和实验证据相结合，推进关于集体能动性和自主性的产生和再生产机制的知识。

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.