Matthew Hamilton of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association UK Branch discusses the common challenges faced by Public Accounts Committees across the Commonwealth.
Month: May 2020
Jonathan Chibois of EHESS discusses recent technological innovations in the French National Assembly within the context of longer, historical trends in parliamentary reform.
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May 2020 Newsletter
We hope that, wherever you are, you are keeping safe and well. We have some updates for you, including:
- Our Annual Conference: Call for Papers/Blogs
- Undergraduate Essay Competition: Closing Date Approaching
- Changes to the Team: Goodbye to Marc and Hello to Stephen
- Recently on the Blog
If you have any notices/messages you would like us to circulate to the group, please let us know.
Best wishes,
Stephen (@Stephen_R_Bates), Louise (@LouiseVThompson), Gavin (@GavinHart10), Seán (@S_Haughey) and, for the last time, Marc (@marcgeddes)
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The Senate of Canada: Coming of a New Age?
Matt Williams of Jesus College, Oxford provides a fascinating overview of the effects of Trudeau’s reforms in the Canadian Senate.
In 2014, Justin Trudeau disbanded the Liberal caucus of Senators in Canada’s upper house. On becoming Prime Minister, in 2015, he appointed independent Senators on recommendations of a non-partisan body. More than half of Senators (58/103 in 2019) are now independents. In this blog, I will assess what observable effects, if any, reform has wrought on the Senate’s representativeness (Pitkin 1967), independent-mindedness (Russell 2001) and “redundancy” (Patterson and Mughan 1999). Statistical analyses of all 16,629 senatorial votes recorded in the 42nd Parliament are presented, along with machine reading data from all 1,611,817 words of enacted legislation. Preliminary evidence suggests that Senators are independent-minded but not transforming legislation, so a new age of Canadian bicameralism is yet to come.
The PSA Parliaments 2020 Annual Conference will be held on 12-13 November at the Council House, Birmingham.