Rosie Frost provides an overview of a recent report published by the Westminster Foundation for Democracy,  into the roles that parliaments can play in peacebuilding processes. The full report was written by Professor Nina Caspersen and Dr Gyda Sindre at the University of York and can be viewed here.

Parliaments: the missing piece?

Since 1992, Westminster Foundation for Democracy has supported democratic systems as they emerge out of conflict and into peace and stability. Currently, we have a number of programmes doing just that, from Lebanon to the Western Balkans, from Sri Lanka to Bangsamoro.

The existing academic literature on parliaments’ role in peacebuilding is scarce. Studies on conflict resolution and peacebuilding focus on peace agreements, multilateral organisations, state executives and the military, or at the other end of spectrum, on grassroots community groups and citizens.  Parliaments – the institutions with the capacity to bridge these two – have largely been overlooked.

We commissioned a research paper with the University of York to analyse the experience of some parliaments we’ve worked with, and help build an understanding of the role of legislatures in conflict-affected states. Using case studies, this research focused not on what parliaments could or should do, but what they have done.

The research is clear: parliaments matter. How they implement peace agreements, how they formally operate, and how they govern in relation to peacebuilding has an impact on the peacebuilding process. For WFD and other democracy assistance practitioners there are a few key takeaways for our work.

Facilitate parliaments’ support of peacebuilding

In some cases, parliaments have had a positive impact on peacebuilding. Parliaments have the ultimate legal responsibility for the implementation of peace agreements, including institutional reform and devolution. They have also led the implementation of transitional justice. For example, in South Africa, a parliamentary standing committee oversaw preparations for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and handled amnesty applications that came through that process.

In their formal structure, parliaments in a post-conflict state often guarantee the representation of all conflict identities or ethnicities, through a power-sharing design or when former armed groups participate in the democratic process as newly formed political parties.  Formal rules have also reserved seats for women, such as in Rwanda.

In the long-term, parliaments have great potential to act as platforms for constructive debate and collaboration between groups, govern in support of peace and stability, and help to set the state or region on a path to a more peaceful future.

Parliaments that can support peacebuilding tend to be strong and high-capacity. The challenges they face are more likely to be the result of political conditions, and so support from democracy assistance practitioners should be focused on broad notions of conflict resolution. WFD has a unique convening power which is an important tool to build connections both within parliament and between parliament and outside actors. This should be an important aspect of any peacebuilding initiatives.

Build up sidelined parliaments

Some parliaments have had a negative impact on peacebuilding processes because they are not strong enough to prevent executive dominance, or they are side-lined. For example, in Colombia, obstruction by the President who initially refused to sign Congress-approved legislation to implement the peace agreement, demonstrated the vulnerability of parliament to executive overreach. In such cases, especially where the parliament is new, capacity training and institutional support from WFD and others could be central to the long-term peacebuilding.

Parliament cannot be ignored

What we cannot do is ignore parliaments altogether. Parliaments can be significant spoilers in peace processes. All the characteristics of a pro-peacebuilding parliament could also be used to spoil a peace process. 

Their power to implement a peace agreement means that they can, of course, also choose not to. This includes national parliaments obstructing devolution to new regional ones. And a power-sharing parliament is far from a guaranteed success. Power-sharing arrangements usually include a minority veto, and this allows parties who wish to obstruct the peace process to do so. In Northern Ireland, deadlock saw direct rule imposed from Westminster four times in the first decade of Stormont’s existence, although our report finds that “collaboration is much more dominant than we might expect”.

Of course, parliament is a heterogeneous institution. It is made up of many separate component parts: MPs, staff, political parties, committees, as well as the processes and powers associated with the different roles it performs. Each of these can function differently, and so it is very hard to be clear cut about what impact a parliament is having on peacebuilding.

But we ignore parliaments at our peril. Parliaments may not hold all the power, but they are integral for the successful implementation of peace agreements and for progress towards long-term peace and stability.  There is a valid and important role for democracy support in peacebuilding processes, and a lot at stake from our absence.

Rosie Frost is the Evidence and Learning Officer at the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, where she works on building the evidence base for democracy assistance.

In the first blog post from our annual conference series, Professor Meg Russell offers insight into the challenges, opportunities and lessons drawn from the parliamentary management of the pandemic.

In the UK and around the world parliaments have had to adjust their practices to the unexpected new environment of COVID-19. This has brought major challenges but, some suggest, also opportunities in terms of suggesting future means for parliaments to adapt. This post starts from the core principles of parliamentary functioning, briefly reviews practice under COVID-19, and considers the primary opportunities and challenges presented. It concludes that the future lessons from this unique period reinforce some familiar themes; but they also raise significant conundrums and trade-offs between the different essential principles of what parliaments are there to do.

Principles

Stripping back to the basics, what are parliaments for? Legislative studies scholars have suggested various overlapping lists of functions. For example in the Oxford Handbook of Legislative Studies, Amie Kreppel provides a list of four, which I will boil down to three:

Other terms often mentioned in such classifications include deliberation –much of which takes place publicly – and legitimation, meaning all of parliaments’ functions help them generate broad public support for policy.

Practice

It is easy to see how the circumstances of COVID-19 have challenged some of these principles.

The threats to representation were pretty immediate and obvious. With limits on travel, requirements for social distancing, and heightened risks for people with certain health conditions, parliamentarians gathering from all over the country immediately became a problem. Some legislatures responded by limiting the number who could participate – with those decisions often taken by leaders and whips. Others moved their proceedings online. The UK House of Commons initially did the latter, but then rolled this back in a quite problematic way which breached principles of equal participation.

Effects on linkage were perhaps less dramatic, but the pandemic has clearly made it more difficult for MPs to meet their constituents, and others, face-to-face.

With respect to policy-making there has been concern in the UK and many other countries about the extent of emergency powers granted to executives to deal with the crisis, and the limits on parliamentary oversight. That’s the most obvious effect. But there have also been others. In some legislatures (including initially the House of Commons) limits were applied to ‘non-urgent’ business, such as private members’ bills. This raises questions about who decides what’s urgent. In addition, there are clear interactions between these different effects – if the mode of representation is impacted, that will affect policy-making as well, as discussed below.

Opportunities

It may be counterintuitive to see opportunities in such a difficult situation, but the hasty move to virtual proceedings in many parliaments has demonstrated that there may be positive lessons to learn.

These primarily affect representation. Remote working, where available, has facilitated continued participation for parliamentarians with caring responsibilities, or health conditions, or who may not be able to travel. This has raised questions about whether such modes of working could help, longer term, in supporting more diverse legislators. For example the Centenary Action Group, which promotes enhanced women’s representation, has a campaign ‘to promote the benefits of virtual parliament measures for women and minority groups and encourage the continued use of technological advances’.

Although they remain largely untested during the pandemic, changes to greater virtual working could also have important impacts on linkage. If MPs work more frequently from home, this could facilitate greater local presence and local work. If available, such options would surely be taken up – particularly by MPs with more distant constituencies. But this would raise familiar conundrums about the extent to which constituency work compromises the effectiveness of MPs’ policy work in parliament.

In terms of that policy-making function, most of the impacts have been negative (see below). But clearly there would be benefits in more diverse participation – not just by parliamentarians, but for example by witnesses to parliamentary committees being able to give evidence remotely.

Challenges

Unsurprisingly, the list of challenges is longer. If MPs are shut out (as remains the case in the Commons, despite repeated complaints), that obviously damages representation. At one level this might just be considered a UK quirk, but it highlights the first of many problems with COVID-19 and policy-making.

The Commons is famously an executive-dominated institution, particularly with respect to setting the agenda – Standing Order No. 14 guarantees default government control. In May ministers chose not to renew the temporary order facilitating virtual participation, causing this to lapse – despite opposition by the chamber’s Procedure Committee. This illustrates how, if parliaments do not control their own agendas, this creates opportunities for government (and sometimes opposition) leaders to centralise power.

Similar centralisation is seen in the emergency powers taken by governments to tackle the pandemic. In the UK, MPs often felt shut out – with numerous statutory instruments published at short notice and brought into effect without parliamentary oversight. It was six months before backbenchers forced concessions out of government via a threatened rebellion on renewal of the Coronavirus Act, gaining promises of future votes.

But the challenges for policy-making go far further, and some are far more subtle. While formal proceedings – for example questions, committees and scrutiny of legislation – have been maintained as far as possible during the crisis, much of legislatures’ most crucial influence normally goes on informally and behind-the-scenes. Meetings between parliamentarians (both within and across parties), between them and party leaders or ministers, and between all of these groups and journalists, facilitate crucial informal communication. Some of this is planned, but much depends on chance ‘corridor conversations’. In addition to lacking these communications, ministers, whips and others find it difficult to ‘read the mood’ when the chamber and corridors are largely empty, and some members are logging in over Zoom.

Summing up the lessons

Some of the lessons from the crisis are obvious, and reinforce things that legislative studies scholars already knew. For example, the government’s control of the House of Commons agenda is problematic; extensive policy-making via delegated legislation is undesirable, and scrutiny mechanisms badly need improvement; much of parliament’s power is exerted informally and behind the scenes.

Where it gets difficult, however, is that the potential benefits of virtual participation for parliaments’ representative functions, and possibly linkage functions, become threats when considering impacts on their policy-making functions. The crucial role of informal and behind-the-scenes communications mean that parliamentary effectiveness will greatly suffer if many members are not physically present. In the UK, in the middle of a continuing pandemic, arguments for maximal virtual participation remain principled ones, to restore parliamentarians’ equal rights. But longer term, this isn’t just an argument about tradition versus modernity – it raises complex questions about how to balance the different functions of parliaments and their needs to operate effectively.

Professor Meg Russell FBA is Director of the Constitution Unit, and a Senior Fellow at The UK in a Changing Europe studying ‘Brexit, Parliament and the Constitution’.