Parliamentary questions

Abstract

Do political parties increasingly engage in non-legislative parliamentary activities? To what extent is the range of issues addressed through parliamentary questioning becoming more diverse? Is overtime change in issue attention during question time incremental or rather stable and occasionally interspersed with radical changes? These questions have generated an intense debate in legislative and agenda-setting studies during the last decades. The goal of this chapter is to explore these trends by focusing on a specific type of non-legislative activity: oral questions to the cabinet in the plenary. The analysis relies on the data available in eight countries of the Comparative Agendas Project: Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and the United Kingdom.