Analyzing Parliament’s Function in Performance of Government Policies

Abstract

he aim of this article is to analyze the fourth, fifth and sixth parliament’s transcripts to show that which kind of public policies of the government has been considered by the legislators. The conceptual framework of Almond, Powell and Mundt is used to determine the policies which were significant according to parliament members. The content analysis method is used on the representatives’ pre-agenda speeches, their notifications to administration, their inquiries from ministers and interrogation of ministers and at last their proposals of annual budget. The present research shows that despite different majorities in these three parliaments, representatives in each of them focused totally on the governmental aspects and the social issues have not been considered. According to this paper among different policies of government more than three quarters of MPs actions appertain to distributive policies and most of them have been confined to distributive policies at the local level instead of the national level. It means that extractive policies, symbolic policies and also regulative policies have almost been neglected by MPs. In spite of the constitution’s emphasis on the representatives’ task of inquiring into all the national affairs, they have only focused on their own electorate.

Keywords

• parliament
• public policies
• performances of government
• content analysis