Interpellations concerning the press in the Legislative Sejm (1919–1922): Definition, statistics, authors, addressees, typology, functions

Abstract

Interpellations submitted by members of parliament are an important source for researchers analyzing political and social processes or studying the mechanism of image making by politicians or political parties in the parliamentary forum or the public sphere at large. The media historian would undoubtedly be most interested in those interpellations that throw light on the relations between politics and the media, the functioning of oversight mechanisms with regard to journalism and the defence strategies adopted by the press under governmental or judicial pressure. The article seeks to distinguish this kind of interpellations from the rest by defining them as documents – produced in response to concrete infringements of press freedom — that address the problem of media functioning in all its aspects, formal and non-formal. In the case of the 1919 Legislative Sejm, tools of quantitative and qualitative analysis have been applied to map the content, type of argument, the expected outcomes, as well as the legal and procedural ramifications of the seventy-three interpellations assigned to the press documentary class. Furthermore, each interpellation has been given its own tag with information about its structure and type, its author and addressee, together with their rank and function. The qualitative method was also used to characterize the content of the parliamentary questions and assess their authors' argumentative and rhetorical skills at the point of moving of the motion and in the run-up for the final vote. The history of law approach has been used only to a limited extent, namely to specify the legal grounds and parliamentary regulations concerning the tabling and handling of interpellations. The functioning of the press community and the press as a subject of the 1919 Legislative Sejm are two research areas in which the author of this article has been interested for the last few years.