ABSTRACT
Until now, political science has focused mainly on institutions or political actors and much less on the content of politics, the issues political actors and institutions deal with. Based on the seminal work of Jones and Baumgartner ((2005), The politics of attention: How government prioritises problems. Chicago: University of Chicago Press), the article will study MPs’ issue attention in Parliament and will investigate the source of punctuation in attention allocation. Even if a growing literature is dedicated to this issue, the two main sources of friction – cognition and institution – have not yet been directly tested. Based on an exhaustive database of the parliamentary questions in the French National Assembly between 1988 and 2007, the paper will focus on the dynamics of issue attention in the parliamentary questions at three levels to show that: the general punctuation hypothesis is valid for the parliamentary question agendas; the comparison between the levels of punctuation of the institutionally unconstrained written question agenda and the institutionally constrained question to government agenda is consistent with the idea that higher institutional friction induces higher punctuation in attention allocation; and the dynamics of issue attention in the parliamentary question agendas at the individual level exhibit strong patterns of cognitive friction.
