Lecture: 'What roles do MPs play and why do they play them?'

Full Title: "What role do MPs play and why do the play them? A latent class analysis of parliamentary activity in the UK Hose of Commons, 2001-2019"
(Prof. Dr. Stephen Bates)
Part of the lecture series "Democratisation and Power Structures"
The roles that politicians play and what factors hinder or facilitate role incumbency have consequences for how well parliaments and individual parliamentarians are able to undertake their representation, oversight and policy-making functions. Work on parliamentary roles, especially in the UK case, has tended to start by interviewing MPs. We take here a different approach by using latent class analysis to analyse parliamentary activity of all backbench MPs (n=2,133) in the UK House of Commons between 2001 and 2019.