Month: January 2015

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Reflections on the Speaker’s Digital Democracy Commission Report

By Cristina Leston-Bandeira

Today’s launch of the report of the Speaker’s Digital Democracy Commission (DDC) marks the end of an extraordinarily interesting year for us Commissioners. The DDC was established by the Speaker of the House of Commons to explore the potential of digital technology to support a modern and inclusive parliamentary democracy. Throughout the year we have collated evidence, listened to people and organised workshops across the whole of the country from all walks of life, as well as internationally. The Report reflects this. It shows the diversity of views we have received on many issues from the making of legislation to the language of parliament.

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In Defence of Prime Minister’s Questions

Please note that this blog piece was originally published on the Crick Centre blog on 21 January 2015, and is available here.

Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg’s suggested this week that prime minister’s questions should be abolished. Today we follow up our blogs on BBC Democracy Day by responding to Clegg’s comments. Marc Geddes, Associate Fellow of the Crick Centre disagrees with Clegg, arguing that he misunderstands how the drama of PMQs helps the public understand how politics works.

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Overview of Parliaments

The Norwegian Storting: A less predictable parliament

By Hilmar Rommetvedt

In his seminal article on ‘numerical democracy and corporate pluralism’ published in the 1960s, Stein Rokkan claimed that ‘votes count, but resources decide’. Important political decisions were not made in the Norwegian Parliament, the Storting, but at the negotiating table where civil servants met with representatives of organized interests. For decades to come, most Norwegian observers subscribed to the ‘decline of legislatures’ put forward by Lord Bryce. However, today we may speak of a revival of the Norwegian Parliament. For since the 1970s, the Storting has become a more active, less predictable and more influential political institution.

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Do Irish Voters Love Bicameralism?

By Muiris MacCarthaigh and Shane Martin

In a referendum held in October 2013, voters in the Irish Republic were given the opportunity to abolish the Irish Senate (Seanad Éireann). What was meant to have been a populist centrepiece of political reform for the governing coalition ultimately produced a surprising outcome: Irish voters, despite being heavily disillusioned with the political system and political elites, voted to retain bicameralism, albeit on a turnout of just under 40 percent and by a thin margin (51.7 voted to retain the Seanad).

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Overview of Parliaments

The Czech Parliament: Bicameralism in Central Europe

By Martin Kuta

The current Czech Parliament arose from its predecessor established after 1968 when reforms towards federalization were undertaken in former Czechoslovakia. The Chamber of Deputies, the lower chamber of the Czech Parliament, has existed since 1993. In 1996, senators of the upper chamber gathered for the first time. Institutionally speaking, the emergence of the Czech Parliament was much more complex since the members of the Chamber of Deputies in the first electoral period (1993 onwards) had been elected in the general elections in 1992. The 1992 general elections were held to elect members of the Czech National Council – a state-level parliament of the Czech Republic, which was a part of the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic, a predecessor of the current Czech Republic – and members of the Federal Assembly. With the split of the former federation, only the state-level deputies retained their mandates. The Czech parliament therefore started as an “unimportant” state-level chamber of second-order deputies because many party leaders were present in the Federal Assembly which was seen to be much more important.

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A driver’s guide to parliaments and political reform in the Arab World

By Dr Sue Griffiths and Sameer Kassam

Parliaments in the Arab world were dismissed prior to 2011 as rubber-stamps for their regimes, and afterwards as too dysfunctional to warrant serious consideration, but their stories since have reflected broader trends in those countries.

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