Political parties and parliamentary oversight committee seats: sharing and trading the costs

ABSTRACT

Political parties are important actors for making the chain of delegation in parliamentary systems work in practice, but less constructive in securing the corresponding chain of accountability that goes in the opposite direction. This article, however, argues that parliamentary oversight (accountability) conditions improve in institutionalised settings, like in central oversight committees. The article explores political parties’ strategies related to this type of task by investigating who sits in this type of committee. The expectation is that in this setting political parties will share the oversight responsibility, but that smaller parties want to trade the costs because they have fewer resources compared to larger parties. The investigation focuses on the five Nordic national parliaments with strong parties that control elections as well as the committee seat allocation. Overall, the investigation shows that institutionalisation does seem to spur joint responsibility and that larger parties take the load of this type of activity.

KEYWORDS:

• Parliamentary oversight; oversight committees; committee seat allocation; political parties; seniority

Acknowledgements

I gratefully acknowledge helpful comments and suggestions from the following professors and associate professor from the Department of Political Science at Aarhus University: Helene Helboe Pedersen, Christoffer Green-Pedersen, and Roman Senninger, respectively. I also express my thanks for comments on different parts of this research from discussants in the ECPR Standing Group on Parliaments’ 7th and 8th conferences, in 2022 and 2023.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In addition to the Finnish and Danish specific PAC committees, the PAC function for the Norwegian case is part of the central oversight committee (West, 2023).

2 There is one example of the value 2 but it was changed to 1 in the dataset.

3 For minority governments, support parties are included in the opposition category.

4 Döring, Holger, and Philip Manow (2020). Parliaments and governments database (ParlGov): Information on parties, elections, and cabinets in modern democracies. www.parlgov.org and dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/parlgov. For some very recent elections, this information was found on the parliamentary and government webpages.

5 For the Danish Folketing and the Finnish Eduskunta, the political parties for the representatives from Faroe Islands, Greenland, and Åland have been removed from the dataset. They do not participate in this type of committee.

6 Parties can select the same MPs for the committees for the different election periods, and 71 of the 438 MPs appear more than one time in the data set.

7 For 18 of the individual MPs, it was not possible to find information about background education.

8 For three political party units there is no information on ideology.

9 The Left/Right ideology variable is in the opposite direction compared to a bivariate correlation test. A standard OLS regression with robust standard errors (political party) leaves the same result as in Table 3, but without a significant Left/Right ideology variable. The robustness test of excluding the Danish audit committee seats from the data leaves the same result, but increases the coefficient for the party position variable, which becomes significant at the 0.01 level. The country test leaves the results unchanged but reports multicollinearity issues for the ideology variable when Iceland or Finland is excluded from the sample.

10 A standard logit analysis, but with robust standard errors (political party) gives the same result. The same robustness test, an exclusion of the Danish audit committee seats, gives the same result.

11 A fixed-effects OLS analysis with clustered standard errors (political party) shows the same result. The same robustness test, a removal of the Danish audit seats, leaves the result unchanged. The OLS alternative test leaves the same result, but for the country tests, the exclusion of the Norwegian case is that the type of government is significant together with the party size, but only for the OLS analysis, not the Poisson analysis.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Danish Carlsberg Foundation (Special Research Project CF19-0618

Notes on contributors

Hallbera West

Hallbera West holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Department of Political Science, Aarhus University (2018) and is an affiliated post.doc researcher at the department.