Members of worldwide parliaments partake in debates, where they have the opportunity to hold governments to account by asking pre-submitted questions. The UK House of Commons uses a ballot system to determine which members are selected to ask a question from those
who expressed an interest in doing so. This paper is the first in the literature to exploit this randomization to show that the asking of such questions increases a member’s chances of being reelected by their constituents.
It is shown that while the ordering of parliamentary questions is determined at random, the practicalities of conducting debates introduce a potentially endogenous element to the determination of which questions receive oral answers (particularly the speed at which questions
are answered). This paper uses a matched sampling approach to cope with such non-random cases, but also includes alternative results, to show that the findings are not reliant on the use of this technique
