The MPs in December increased the interaction, but yet again could not prove the rightfulness of each other’s arguments, thus remaining in their “trenches”. The amendments to the Law on High Education, the Law on Spatial and Urban Planning and the Law on Administrative Officials provoked the MPs to discuss more, which can be seen through the increased number of replies and counter-replies.
The Opposition in December increased its share in the discussions, compared to the previous month, reaching 21%. This is equal to the Opposition participation in the discussions in October, which is also the highest level noted on the monitored sessions up till now.
Nevertheless, the debate on many of the legal proposals remains generally weak.
The participants in the monitored sessions this month yet again did not show any interest and readiness for changing their views for the sake of a better quality arguments in the debate, having in mind that none of the MPs changed their views. For the most part, the speakers totally disregarded the arguments of the other MPs.
From the beginning of the monitoring the MPs had the minimum of arguments referring to the public good, while they had the maximum of arguments referring to abstract principles.
For most of the discussions, the MPs used two or more arguments when elaborating their views. In addition, the percent of discussions with one argument increased compared to the previous months, while the number of discussions with no arguments at all decreased.
These are part of the findings from the Fifth Report on the Quality of Debate in the Parliament 
prepared by the Institute for Democracy “Societas Civilis” within the project “Parliament Watch, Strengthening the Political Debate and the Deliberative Discourse”. The reports from the previous months can be found on this link http://www.idscs.org.mk/mk/tekovni-proekti/sobranieto-pod-lupa.
This is the word cloud of the most frequently used words in the debates on seven plenary sessions in December.
