Insights into the consensus machine of parliament: The conference of presidents in the Austrian National Council

Abstract

Parliaments are arenas of political dispute, but at the same time they require a generally accepted basic consensus and its concrete implementation in organisational issues such as the design of the parliamentary agenda and the handling of procedural conflicts. To resolve such conflicts, many parliaments use coordination committees, consisting of members of the presidium and representatives of the parliamentary groups. The article at hand analyses the Presiding Conference (PK) in the Austrian National Council as such a coordination committee on the basis of detailed interviews with its members. What role does the PK play in setting the agenda in the National Council and what mechanisms does it use to establish and reproduce a basic procedural consensus? The analysis shows that the PK and the preparatory informal round of club directors primarily determine the National Council's timetable agenda and serve as a coordinating body for a wide range of procedural and organisational issues. The highly consensual interaction in the PK can be explained by six institutional mechanisms - personality-oriented or interaction-based - including the strict separation of procedural and political decisions, the orientation towards precedents, the anticipation of obstruction possibilities, a consensus-oriented understanding of members' roles and the repeated interaction in a small, confidential and highly professionalised group. These theoretical mechanisms can be generalised beyond the National Council and show how parliamentary organisation can promote stable and fair parliamentarianism even under conditions of political polarisation.