Welcome to the December edition of our newsletter, which includes:
- Annual Conference, 17 Nov – huge success!
- Feedback and Ideas Wanted
- PSA Annual Conference 2018
- Second Edition of Parliament and the Law
- Recently on the blog
If you have any notices / messages you would like us to circulate to the group, please let us know (including events, new research projects, grants, publications, etc.). Or other ideas for the group and feedback for us, they’re welcome too!
Finally, we also want to wish you all the very best over the festive period – Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. We look forward to welcoming you to our events in 2018 and sending you updates about all the exciting parliamentary stuff that’s inevitably going to happen in the coming 12 months!
Best wishes,
Marc (@marcgeddes), Louise (@LouiseVThompson), Alex (@A_Meakin) and Leanne (@LeanneMarieC)
1 Annual Conference 17 November: A huge success!
The PSA Parliaments and Study of the Scottish Parliament Group co-hosted their annual conference Legislatures in Uncertain Times on Friday 17 November at Holyrood.
The conference was a great success, with over 60 academics and practitioners attending to hear and discuss papers on issues ranging from public engagement with parliaments, post-legislative scrutiny, the relationship between the media and parliaments, and innovations inside and outside of parliament. For a full recap of the day, take a look at our Storify.
We want to thank everyone involved in organising the conference, as well as, and most importantly, all paper-givers, chairs and attendees.
2 Feedback and ideas wanted
In order to build on our successful 2017 Annual Conference, we are planning ideas for our next conference.
Please complete the following feedback form – regardless of whether you attended our conference or not. We want to know what you liked about the conference, and what you thought could be improved. We also want to hear from you if you did not attend, to understand how we can make next year’s conference as useful to as many people as possible.
All answers will be anonymous.
For the form, please click here.
3 PSA Annual Conference 2018
Thank you all for submitting papers to our PSA Annual Conference panels. We have a great line up, with six panels and 24 papers covering everything from enhancing parliamentary democracy to organising and managing parliaments. There will also be an exciting panel with four of the current House of Commons academic fellows (a great opportunity to find out about their research, but also to discuss the practicalities of being a fellow) and a joint panel with several other specialist groups exploring populism in political systems. See our website for the full list of papers and panels.
Please make sure you register for the conference – all details available here
4 Second Edition of Parliament and the Law to be published in February 2018
Following five years after the publication of the first edition of this title (and 20 years after its predecessor, The Law and Parliament) this new edition of Parliament and the Law, edited by Alexander Horne and Gavin Drewry, includes contributions by leading political scientists, constitutional lawyers, and parliamentary officials. It provides a wide-ranging overview of the ways in which the law applies to, and impacts upon, the UK Parliament, and it considers how recent changes to the UK’s constitutional arrangements have affected Parliament as an institution. It includes authoritative discussion of issues of topical concern, such as: the operation of parliamentary privilege, the powers of Parliament’s select committees, parliamentary scrutiny, devolution, English Votes for English Laws, Members’ conduct and the governance of both Houses. It also contains chapters on financial scrutiny, scrutiny of delegated legislation, parliamentary sovereignty, Parliament and human rights, and the administration of justice. Aimed mainly at political scientists, legal academics, and practitioners, it examines the many fascinating ways in which the law interacts with and influences the work, the constitutional status and the procedural arrangements of the Westminster Parliament. The book was supported by the UK’s Study of Parliament Group (a registered charity, founded in 1964 for the purpose of studying parliaments and parliamentary assemblies) and all royalties from the book will go to the SPG: Full details
5 Recently on the blog
- Important but underrated: Parliamentary Questions in the Northern Ireland Assembly (Sean Haughey, Liverpool)
- Everyone loves select committees these days. But have they really changed? (Stephen Bates and Mark Goodwin, Birmingham, and Steve McKay, Lincoln)
- Socialising new British MPs: the role of good advice in cultivating legislators’ loyalty norms (Nick Dickinson, Exeter)
- Standing up for parliament: how non-elected officials represent parliament as an institution (David Judge, Strathclde, and Cristina Leston-Bandeira, Leeds)
- Report of the Lord Speaker’s Committee on the size of the House of Lords: a real opportunity for progress on reform (David Beamish, former Clerk of the Parliaments)
- How an arcane piece of parliamentary procedure may force the Government to release its Brexit impact assessment studies (Andrew Defty, Lincoln)