Author: psaparliaments

Blog

Parliamentary Select Committees: Are elected chairs the key to their success?

Post author By psaparliaments
Post date July 5, 2016

By Mark Goodwin, Stephen Bates and Steve McKay

In the past two months, two of Britain’s richest men have been forced by Parliament to admit to, and apologise for, serious failings in their business practices that could end up costing them millions in compensation. Sports Direct owner Mike Ashley admitted to the Business, Innovation and Skills Select Committee that, despite being Britain’s 22nd richest person with an estimated fortune of £3.5bn, he had not been paying staff in the company’s main warehouse the minimum wage. A few weeks later, the same committee witnessed what many saw as a bizarre performance from another British billionaire, Sir Philip Green, as his failings in the sale of British Home Stores were exposed in between complaints about excessive staring from the committee members. These are just the latest in a string of high profile inquiries by parliamentary select committees over the past six years that have also seen Rupert Murdoch attacked with a custard pie, Michael Gove alleging a ‘Trot conspiracy’ in English schools and a vice president of Google being informed that “you do evil”.

Tags committee chairs, executive-legislative relations, House of Commons, leadership, Mike Ashley, parliamentary scrutiny, select committees, Sir Philip Green

Blog

Do MPs need more support in understanding and writing legislation?

Post author By psaparliaments
Post date July 1, 2016

By Louise Thompson

The scrutiny of legislation is key to the role of MPs. It sounds relatively simple – asking lots of questions about what the government is planning to do and probing elements of bills to make sure that they will work properly, but the task facing them is a formidable one. Not only is the quantity of legislation increasing (particularly from delegated legislation), but the parliamentary timetable is busier than ever. Bills are also becoming much more complex, using terminology which can be tricky to understand. The language used facilitates the interpretation and implementation of the legislation. It is not written with Members of Parliament or the general public in mind. Yet, as this weekend’s discussions about whether the Scotland Act 2016 means that the Scottish Parliament can veto the UK’s decision to leave the EU show, the precise wording of legislation is important.

Tags expertise, MPs, public law, representation, role theory, scientific advice

Blog

Parliamentary sovereignty and the Human Rights Act 1998

Post author By psaparliaments
Post date June 20, 2016

By Matthew Burton

In a recent post on this blog, Chris Kirkland highlights the problematic nature of the concept of sovereignty in relation to the Brexit debate and the forthcoming referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union. On the one hand, Brexit campaigners argue that the UK has already lost its sovereignty to the European Union. A legally precise argument in this vein would point to the EU doctrines of supremacy and direct effect, which allow nationals of Member States of the EU to enforce EU law within the courts of the Member States, and requires EU law to take priority whenever it conflicts with a principle of domestic law. On the other hand, as the referendum demonstrates, the Westminster Parliament is free to legislate to withdraw from the EU whenever it wishes, and from a legal perspective at least, could do so without the need for any kind of referendum or national vote.

Tags European Court of Human Rights, House of Commons, human rights, Human Rights Act 1998, parliamentary scrutiny, parliamentary sovereignty, scrutiny

Blog

The Consequences of Anti-Politics

Post author By psaparliaments
Post date June 17, 2016

Please note that this blog piece was originally published on the Crick Centre blog, and is available here. This piece has been re-published with permission from the author.

By Marc Geddes

The killing of Jo Cox on Thursday was a horrific attack on British democracy, which happened in the context of an increasingly bitter and hostile referendum campaign on UK membership of the European Union. Today, this attack overshadows every aspect of British politics, but more broadly it is arguably the extreme tip of an ‘anti-politics’ iceberg that is extending across the western world.

Tags antipolitics, British politics, mental health, political violence, public engagement, public opinion, representative democracy

News

House of Commons Academic Fellows

Post author By psaparliaments
Post date June 15, 2016

Following several months of working on this idea on behalf of the group, we’re very pleased to announce the House of Commons, in partnership with the Political Studies Association (PSA), are implementing the House of Commons Academic Fellowship Scheme.

Blog

How Twitter conversations highlight the different purposes of petitioning

Post author By psaparliaments
Post date June 15, 2016

By Cristina Leston-Bandeira and Viktoria Spaiser

Hashtag conversations over Twitter are common place. They are used to comment on TV programmes, conferences, general themes and now petitions. The new Petitions Committee of the House of Commons has been using hashtags to support the development of discussions associated with the themes of the petitions being debated in parliament. Are these discussions on Twitter just a lot of hot air, come and gone, or can they help us understand the different purposes of petitioning? In this blog piece, we find that, instead of just noise, these Twitter discussions help to identify themes linked to petitions, different levels of sentiment associated to petitions, varying levels of polarisation, but also those petitions that despite achieving very high numbers of signatures, actually have little traction.

Tags House of Commons, petitions, Petitions Committee, public engagement, Twitter, UK Parliament

Events News

Call for Papers: “Making Parliaments Work: What Makes For an Effective Parliament?”

Post author By psaparliaments
Post date June 9, 2016

Politicians, the public, think tanks, journalists and academics alike have increasingly focused in recent times on how parliaments and legislatures work and how to make them work better in terms of policy-making, representation, scrutiny and accountability. Yet, despite this focus, the evidence base for making judgments about the effectiveness of parliaments and legislatures is arguably not as extensive as it could be, perhaps partly because of methodological difficulties in assessing the influence, impact and power of these institutions.

This one-day conference of the PSA Parliaments & Legislatures Specialist Group, co-hosted by the University of Birmingham, seeks to concentrate on the evidence – whether qualitative and/or quantitative and from a range of theoretical and analytical traditions – of parliamentary and legislative effectiveness and the effectiveness of parliamentary and legislative reform.

The conference, to be held at the Institute for Government in central London on 28^th October 2016, will be followed by the PSA Parliaments & Legislatures Annual Lecture.

To register an interest in presenting a paper, please contact Stephen Bates (s[dot]r[dot]bates[at]bham[dot]ac[dot]uk) with initial ideas before August 31^st 2016. We welcome contributions beyond the UK Parliament, namely on the devolved legislatures and/or with a comparative dimension. Registration will open in early September.

Blog

The backgrounds of MSPs and MPs: it’s about the parties, not the culture

Post author By psaparliaments
Post date June 9, 2016

By Paul Cairney and Phil Cowley

There is an interesting set of stories, by David Leask and colleagues in the Herald, about the background of MSPs. We take an interest as part of a team of scholars comparing backgrounds in Westminster and devolved assemblies and examining how parties decide between many sources of representation, from sex and race to employment and locality.

In this post we examine the latest data on education as a proxy for class. It suggests that there would be little difference between Holyrood and Westminster if they had the same balance between parties.

Tags Scotland