The Roles and Function of Parliamentary Questions
About this ebook
At an institutional level, questions provide an important source of information for the chamber and are a critical tool of government oversight – as many of the chapters in the volume indicate. Evidence of the impact of questions on executive and bureaucratic oversight challenges conventional views of parliaments as weak and ineffective parts of the political process.
This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Legislative Studies.
About the author
Shane Martin is Director of the Centre for International Studies at Dublin City University where he also lectures in comparative politics. His research focuses on the political economy of legislative organization and in particular on how electoral incentives shape representatives’ preferences, the internal structures of parliaments, executive oversight and the production of public policy. He have taught at the University of California, San Diego and the Pennsylvania State University. He is founding Co-Convenor of the ECPR Standing Group on Parliaments and was founding Co-Director of the European Summer School on Parliaments.
Olivier Rozenberg is Associate Research Professor at Sciences Po, in Paris. He is a member of the Centre for European Studies. His research focuses on the study of political institutions and particularly of legislatures in Europe (national parliaments and the European Parliament). Within this framework, he studies both the sociology of legislators and the policy analysis of parliamentary activities. He is also interested in the Europeanisation of national political systems and the politicisation of European affairs.
