Legislators between Accountability and Collective Agency (LeColAg)

议会政治的竞争性、立法组织的层级性和多数决策的主导地位，构成了以共同信念和我们的态度形式出现和复制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，即使在党派界限之外，集体代理机构在立法者中也有出现并持续存在的余地。这种信仰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的区域议院议员的立法发言、议会问题和议会外声明。它将描述并试图解释在以下方面的差异：(A)立法者在其政治沟通中个别提到商会的集体机构时存在差异；(B)政党之间的竞争(作为个别立法者的团队)缓和了商会中集体机构的表达；以及(C)作为集体机构的商会在辩论中援引集体信仰和我们的态度时存在差异。这些分析的目的是：(A)促进政治学中关于精英自治和由于民主精英主义造成的代表性差距的经验性和规范性辩论；(B)通过开发衡量集体机构个人表达的工具(在立法发言和其他形式的政治交流中)，促进研究单位“横向集体行为者”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型，解释在个别立法者、政党和议院一级提及集体机构时的横向和历时差异；(E)与研究股其他成员合作，通过将基于言语的数据分析的结果与研究股的理论工作、以代理人为基础的模拟和实验证据结合起来，增进对集体机构和自治产生和再现的机制的认识。

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.