People's Voice or Information Pool? The Role of, and Reasons for, Parliamentary Questions in the Swiss Parliament

Reasons identified in relation to representatives' decisions to use parliamentary questions range from challenging the government, raising citizen-oriented concerns, disseminating one's name among constituents, controlling the government, and asking for information. To disentangle these motivations, this paper investigates whether parliamentarians with more direct electoral links, stronger representational orientations or higher career ambitions tend to ask more questions. They are analysed using a new dataset on all parliamentary questions from the legislative period 2003–07 in the Swiss Lower House, the Nationalrat. The main finding is that parliamentary questions are often used to gather information from the executive more so than to represent citizens' concerns. It is particularly the less experienced and the ambitious parliamentarians who use this forum as an information platform to demonstrate their activity, to gain attention and to prepare legislative acts.