Parliaments are – or should be – the locus of the daily management of democratic life. As such, their <i>modus operandi</i> deserves more attention than they usually receive. This book has the merit of approaching this task from a novel perspective, by focusing on the parliamentary discursive practices – both those ritualized and regulated and the more spontaneous ones. This sheds new light on the role of discourse in the collective exercise of power in the process of social choice, in the formation of political identity, and in the nature of public ‘representation’ – among other things. What emerges, surprisingly, from the wealth of information and analyses the book contains, is the diversity of parliamentary discourse in countries as close to each other in a continent that strives for unity. For me this reflects the fact that the core of democracy retains, above all, its plurality.

- Marcelo Dascal, Tel Aviv University,

<i>European Parliaments under Scrutiny</i> is a useful reading for scholars interested in parliamentary discourse in general and such topics as the discursive strategies of interaction and face management, interplay between multiple institutional roles and identities, impact of political transformations on the work of parliaments, linguistic means of attacking, supporting, refuting critique, and negotiating common images of reality in debates and speeches in particular.

- Liudmila Mikalayeva, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich,

Parliaments are by definition places where elected representatives <i>talk</i>. This panoramic survey of national, EU and post-communist styles of parliamentary discourse demonstrates in depth its continually changing complexities and is an important contribution to European self-understanding.

- Paul Chilton, Lancaster University, UK,