Hierarchical, Decentralized, or Something Else? Opposition Networks in the German Bundestag

Abstract

Members of the German parliament may force government to publicly answer questions by issuing minor interpellations (kleine Anfragen). We use 3,608 interpellations from the session 2009–13 that have been signed by authoring and supporting members to construct the social network of support relations among members within the three opposition parties. We find that parties differ markedly in terms of internal structure. While social democrats organize hierarchically, Greens cooperate horizontally. The network for socialist Linke in contrast shows signs of homophily and social segregation. Our approach yields a novel perspective on intraparty politics in parliamentary systems which are notoriously difficult to analyze.

Oral Questions in the European Parliament: A Network Analysis

“…The values indicate how many edges run between nodes from different groups, the values in brackets show the average weight across the respective edges; the rightmost column indicates the ratio of average weight for edges within the group to those pointing outside. As predicted by H1a groups usually have stronger edges (higher average edge weights) within than among them (as can be seen from comparing diagonal and off-diagonal cells), yet a significant amount of cooperation between different groups can also be observed -by far more than is established from questioning networks in parliamentary systems (see Metz and Jäckle 2016). This seems to confirm H1b.…”

“…The only theorizing of why legislators would ask a question together is from Metz and Jäckle (2016). They draw on both a signaling perspective and on the notion of personal expertise, arguing that legislators in the German Bundestag who support others' minor interpellations might do so to signal personal support and show how well connected they are in the party.…”

“…While the main focus of this article is descriptive, i.e. to present a network of the MEPs and investigate its patterns, two hypotheses regarding the peculiarities of the network may be derived: Metz and Jäckle (2016) have found that parties play a major role in structuring the network of interpellations in the German parliamentary system. However, in presidential systems, where parties are weaker, networks seem to approach a so called "small world" that encompassed most legislators (TamCho and Fowler, 2010;Fowler, 2006a).…”

“…Also, regional origin has been found to matter for parliamentary as well as presidential systems (Metz and Jäckle, 2016;Fowler, 2006a:469). Given the fact that the EU is far from being as integrated as nation states like Germany or the USA, we assume nationality to be the second most important driving factor for tie formation.…”

“…Using them to map out the connections among legislators can give us a clearer image of how exactly this function is (collectively) exercised (see Martin, 2011:4). Second, work from presidential (TamCho and Fowler, 2010) and parliamentary systems (Metz and Jäckle, 2016) has uncovered quite different networksa "small world" of partisan, yet densely interconnected legislators in the former versus strongly parochial parties and a separation of government and opposition in the latter. While these differences can be expected given the different systems of government, analyzing a supranational setting such as the EP can help to gain a deeper understanding of the role of systemic features on network structure.…”