This study can be justified on a number of grounds: (a) parliament stability is an increasingly common term used to measure democracy and democratization of a state; (b) parliament is an important and crucial body for decision-making process; (c) the lack of research on parliamentary studies in Asian countries; (d) the use these results may be put to; and (e) the addition to the corpus of knowledge on parliamentary studies.
Parliament is an institution from consociational democracy where the executives gain their authority and are accountable to the legislative authority for making decisions (Lijphart 1984).
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Participation in legislative debates, where the powers of participants are ‘united or fused’
(Strøm 1995: 51), is among the most visible activities of members of a parliament (MPs), yet debates remain an understudied form of legislators’ behavior (Proksch and Slapin 2012: 520).
Therefore, this research is an attempt to fill the academic corpus gap by studying accountability in a parliament setting, focusing on the Chairperson as the center for analysis. Further, it helps to identify the strategies and pattern of interruptions of the Chairperson while managing ongoing debates.
First, there is a need to further the research on the trends of a parliament as an institution so that more can be learned about the broader paradigm shift in democracy. Unfortunately, less empirical research on government responsiveness particularly the parliament has focused on Asian countries. The formation of groups on public opinion is motivated primarily to gain government responsiveness or attention. However, prescriptions for the formation of such groups often overlook the salience or importance of such relationships. For example, issues like increasing budget expenses and inequality of budget allocations (Feldmann 1988; Kelly and Enns 2010) have weakened the main objectives of the groups’ formation. However, much of the research on public opinion to date has been general. Researchers have not treated public opinion and government responsiveness in detail. Government responsiveness to public opinion and policy relations should be better when the measurement for responsiveness focuses on one case study, such as a study on parliament. Consequently, the dynamics of parliament as an institution and important body of decision-making could be specifically drawn. Ilie (2010:1) contends the significance in studying parliament discourse is due to the social developments and changes, making it ‘necessary to examine the underlying negotiation processes and participants’ deeper motivations’. Furthermore, the emerging of the ‘new world order’ and new problems faced by authorities in a new bureaucratic central government has instigated the significance of researching Parliament as a decision-making institution (Jennings 1970: 148).
1.10 Limitations
This study utilized the proceeding papers transcribed by the Malaysian Parliament resource center (spoken words only). This study also did not provide an in-depth transcription, which includes dysfluencies (impairment of the ability to produce smooth speech) and non-lexical utterances (words are conveyed through patterns of stress and intonation, prosody). The study only focused on the content and mechanisms of accomplishing interruptions, which did not
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consider any facial expression (for in-depth psychological explanation) among the actors involved. Therefore, this study only analyzed the content of the uttered conversation and examined the accountability of the Chairperson by analyzing the actors involved during the process of decision-making.
This study also excluded the proceedings after the 14th general election in 2018, which has witnessed a major change in the government when Pakatan Harapan took over the 60 years of domination by Barisan Nasional. The Chairpersons elected from 1957-2013 were the preference of Barisan Nasional and had political affiliations with the party. Hence, this study did not discuss the selection of the Chairperson of the 14th Parliament session, which was also contentious as claimed by the opposition party (i.e., Barisan Nasional) for not going through a proper process.
1.11 Conclusion
The goal of this thesis is to provide an incremental analysis of the role of elements in interruptions by the Chairperson in legislative performances in the Malaysian Parliament to identify the sub-ideology or impartiality of legislation and his or her representative functions.
This finding is significant in that it speculates an alternative to the traditional ‘decline’ narrative and more accurately draws the multitude of performative dynamics of strategies within the legislation in the Malaysian context. Moreover, it questions the traditional (i.e., Western-centric) understanding of political deliberation, defined in a very minimal, non-normative fashion-as “a process of public reasoning geared toward generating political decision or public opinion about how to resolve shared problems” (Smith and Brassett 2008:72; Kapoor 2002:
461-462).
This chapter also attempts to draw on the expectations as to how a Chairperson should be like or presentable as a genuine mediator. In a more pessimistic vein, it might be argued that there is no need for a characteristics setting or model because the setting makes it archaic or ‘hard-to-comply’, and when countries with their prevailing political conditions impose these settings, the results may vary. This argument is supported by reviewing the pattern of selection of a Chairperson in four different countries, namely Malaysia, United Kingdom, Australia, and India. History shows that there were cases whereby the Chairperson was elected without having any political background (in the Lok Sabha, India, Lal Bahadur Shastri was once an activist
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and academic; in the House of Commons United Kingdom, Sir Harry Hylton-Foster was working as solicitor general for England and Wales, and Charles Manners-Sutton was working as Judge Advocate General).
Should a Chairperson have a standard characteristic to function in a Parliament? This study will discuss and suggest the characteristics based on the empirical outcome of the analysis.