PSA ParliamentsFollowing the success of our Essay Competition of 2016, we are pleased to announce the launch of our Essay Competition 2017! The winner will be presented with a prize of £100 and a runner-up prize of £50. Last year’s winners were presented the award by the Clerk of the House at our annual one-day conference.
Please note that this blog piece was originally published on the UK Constitutional Law Association’s blog, and is available here.
Legislation is complex, but it is also essential to the functioning of our political system. A great deal of primary and secondary legislation hits the statute book every parliamentary session. Even the so-called ‘zombie parliament’ of the 2014-15 session saw 25 bills passed into law, with around one government bill being passed every five sitting days. MPs and peers therefore have a difficult job to do, scrutinising a deep and fast flowing stream of legislation every session. And it is important to get it right. Effective legislation requires not just accurate wording within the text of a bill, but an understanding of how that bill will work in practice and the difference it will make to people’s lives. Involving the public in legislative scrutiny can therefore add much value to the process, bringing an alternative perspective to the pros and cons of legislation.
Reporting on new research that looks at the way parliamentary staff wish academics would engage with Parliament, Katharine Dommett argues that researchers would benefit from not only rethinking where and how they target research, but also the very form academic research should take.
Thank you to everyone that attended and participated in our first one-day conference (we hope the first of many!). It was a fantastic event with a range of academic panels, a practitioner roundtable, a poster exhibition, and our annual lecture from the Clerk of the House of Commons, David Natzler. You can see a full summary by following the Twitter hashtag: #ParlConf. We also have a summary of the paper and poster abstracts available here.
As part of our one-day conference, there will also be two posters on exhibition:
Does Experience matter? The effect of pre-parliamentary careers on MPs’ participation in parliamentary debates
By Wang Leung Ting (LSE)
This paper seeks to explore how MPs pre-parliamentary career affect their performance in parliament. Utilizing theories from both occupational psychology and legislative studies, it is hypothesized that the utilities of legislative activities may varies among legislators depended on the experiences, skills and knowledge they earned during their pre-parliamentary career. MPs who are better equipped to carry certain aspects of their responsibilities are going to focus their attention in those areas while less attention is given to their other tasks. This hypothesis is then tested on a dataset of biographical information of all British MPs who are elected for the first time in the 2010 general election. Using MPs’ participation in parliamentary debate as a case, the results indicate that variations in pre-parliamentary career do influence the number of speeches they made during debates. It is found that experience in legal profession encourage MPs to speak more often while experience in media, national party politics and in-constituency local government reduce the number of occasions that they speak. These results suggest MPs’ professional and political pre-parliamentary experiences do have implication on their performance in Westminster, and the occupational composition of the parliament as a whole may have consequences on its’ functioning and effectiveness.
Comparing Legislative Speed: Event History Analysis on Hong Kong Legislations
By Nick Hin-Kin Or (Southampton)
This poster discusses and explains how the application of event history analysis – time-to-an-event – provide insights in measuring and analyzing legislative speed. Instead of counting whether and how many legislation passed, this poster stresses on the importance of timing and duration in legislation that is rarely addressed in the legislative studies. Censoring data in event history analysis provides a useful measurement concept to deal with bills that failed to pass within the time frame of a certain government or legislature. The plots of Kaplan-Meier Curves also provide visually clear and vivid diagram for comparing the legislative speed of different governments or legislatures. I will demonstrate the application of event history analysis with the legislative data from Hong Kong and discuss the implication of the method.
Author: Jessie Blackbourn
Abstract:
Sunset clauses – clauses which provide for the expiry of a law or part of a law at a later date – have been included in a number of Australia and the UK’s anti-terrorism laws in recent years, but have rarely led to the cessation of the relevant measures. There must, therefore, be some other reason for their inclusion in these types of laws, which are often exceptional in nature. This paper argues that parliament’s purpose in incorporating sunset clauses into anti-terrorism laws can be imputed from parliamentary debates. It is to ensure accountability; so that exceptional measures that are often enacted in haste and during a terrorist crisis are revisited by parliament at a future date to determine whether they continue to be a necessary addition to the statute books. This paper questions whether sunset clauses in anti-terrorism laws in Australia and the UK are fit for purpose. Drawing on an analysis of two Australian and three UK anti-terrorism laws, it concludes that they are ineffective at enabling parliament to hold the government to account.
This paper will be delivered as part of our academic panel on “Westminster and Beyond”, between 2.00pm and 3.30pm.
Authors: Mark Bennister (Canterbury), Alex Kelso (Southampton) and Philip Larkin (Houses of Parliament)
Abstract:
Prime ministerial power is always contingent, based on the utilisation of personal and institutional resources, subject to various formal and informal constraints. Parliament is both a political resource to be utilised, but also a veto-player. Regular prime ministerial appearances before the House of Commons Liaison Committee, begun in 2002, have added to parliament’s scrutiny toolkit. This article considers the accountability of the prime minister to parliament by analysing the emergence and development of the Liaison Committee evidence sessions, and draws on interviews with participants and examination of the session transcripts, in order to assess the value of this scrutiny mechanism within the broader framework of prime ministerial-legislative relations. We particularly focus on the way MPs question the PM in the session, revealing a deeper understanding of the motives and nature of scrutiny in this forum.
This paper will be delivered as part of our academic panel on “Westminster and Beyond”, between 2.00pm and 3.30pm.
Authors: Meg Russell (Constitution Unit, UCL) and Daniel Gover (Constitution Unit, QMUL)
Abstract:
The Westminster parliament, like many others around the world, is frequently criticised for being weak in policy terms. This applies particularly to the legislative process, where Westminster is often dismissed as merely a ‘rubber stamp’. But such criticisms depend on a simplistic, one-dimensional conception of parliamentary power. In this paper we present conclusions from our forthcoming book on the legislative process at Westminster, which is the largest study of the process since Griffith’s classic Parliamentary Scrutiny of Government Bills (1974). Twelve bills were traced through all their stages in both chambers; all 4361 amendments proposed were analysed for their effects, complemented by over 120 interviews with those involved. This analysis shows that parliament has a very substantial influence on the legislation agreed. Few non-government amendments are accepted, but (as Griffith found), many government amendments implement demands from non-government parliamentarians. However, parliament’s influence goes far further than that. Using Steven Lukes’ (1974) three ‘faces’ of power as a starting point, we suggest that parliament – and the different sets of political actors within parliament – wield several distinct forms of power. Once these are understood, Westminster cannot be dismissed as a ‘rubber stamp’, or merely reactive, but is instead a significant initiator of policy.
This paper will be delivered as part of our academic panel on “Westminster and Beyond”, between 2.00pm and 3.30pm.
Authors: Greg Power, Sue Griffiths, Llinos Madeley (Global Partners Governance)
Abstract:
International parliamentary assistance aims to support legislatures in fragile or developing states to increase their effectiveness, but has a patchy track record. Traditional approaches have largely focused on structural and institutional ‘quick fixes’, with the underlying assumption that with the right rules, training and resources, things are bound to improve. This rarely happens. More recently, international donors and implementing agencies have begun to consider the underlying causes of governance and political problems and the need to address patterns of behaviour and institutional norms, not just structure and process. Over the past decade, Global Partners Governance (GPG) has designed and delivered projects in parliaments around the world that actively engage with the incentives, interests and politics that influence institutional reform. But measuring the effect of our interventions on parliamentary effectiveness remains a challenge. To begin to address this, GPG has developed a design and monitoring tool, KAPE, which supports our behavioural approach to increasing parliamentary effectiveness. KAPE uses qualitative and quantitative indicators to monitor emerging pockets of good practice, which we then seek to replicate more widely, creating an institution-wide effect that alters the processes, behaviour and performance of the institution as a whole.
This paper will be delivered as part of our academic panel on “Parliaments in Comparative Perspective”, between 10.00am and 11.30am.
Author: Mark Egan (States of Jersey)
Abstract:
There are significant problems with measuring the effectiveness of parliamentary activity in having “influence, impact and power”, to use the terms of reference for our conference. It may also be difficult to identify what makes for “better” policy-making, representation, scrutiny and accountability in terms of achieving more influential or powerful legislatures. This paper, from a parliamentary practitioner, adds two extra elements of complexity to the debate: the effects of legislature size and political culture on assessing parliamentary effectiveness. Drawing on a comparison between the UK House of Commons and the Jersey States Assembly it argues that a small legislature can struggle to perform all of the functions which are now routinely expected of a larger legislature. In addition, a jurisdiction’s political culture plays a crucial role in determining attitudes within a legislature and amongst the electorate about the roles a parliamentary body and its members are expected to play.
This paper will be delivered as part of our academic panel on “Parliaments in Comparative Perspective”, between 10.00am and 11.30am.