Party whips are well-known for their role as enforcers in the Westminster Parliament, but a new blog by Andrew Defty, University of Lincoln, discusses a less well-known part of their role: offering pastoral care to MPs.
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Author: psaparliaments
The power of parliamentary committees varies greatly, both between countries and over time. Thomas Fleming analyses committees in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, and the UK to argue that committee power is influenced by voters’ attachments to political parties.
In addition to their floor debates, a crucial role of legislatures is to scrutinise government law-making and policy implementation. The House of Commons looks at legislation via bill committees, and its select committees cover each of the Whitehall departments to scrutinise implementation. As part of the 2018 Audit of UK Democracy, Patrick Dunleavy and the Democratic Audit team consider how well current processes maintain parliamentary knowledge and scrutiny of the central state in the UK and England.
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Canada’s ‘amateur’ MPs
In a blog originally posted by the Hansard Society, James Pow discusses how in Canada, the ‘professional politician’ remains the exception rather than the rule, and MPs with prior political experience don’t have an advantage in the development of their parliamentary careers.
Drawing on interviews conducted with British politicians, Dame Jane Roberts explains the different impacts of leaving political office. In a blog originally posted on LSE British Politics and Policy, she writes that the process is often made unnecessarily harsh, something that may be preventing some politicians from standing down altogether, with implications for representative democracy.
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October 2018 newsletter
A little hello from the PSA Parliaments Group team! A short edition of our newsletter this time around, including:
- Our Conference – REGISTRATION OPEN
- Reminder: #PSA19 – general call for papers OPEN
- Reminder: #PSA19 – specific calls for papers: e-petitions and party competition
- Recently on our 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!
Best wishes,
Marc (@marcgeddes), Louise (@LouiseVThompson) Alex (@A_Meakin) and Seán (@S_Haughey)
Dr Felicity Matthews discusses her new Academic Fellowship researching how MPs engage with parliamentary e-petitions, and calls for abstracts on petitions for a themed panel at #PSA19
Emmeline Ledgerwood discusses the impact of a minority government on Parliament, using excerpts from the History of Parliament oral history project archive.
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Essay Competition 2018 Winners
We are pleased to announce the winner of our essay competition this year: Mercy Muroki from QMUL (nominated by Philip Cowley and Daniel Gover), with Katie Power from Surrey (nominated by Louise Thompson) as the runner-up. They will receive their certificates at our conference in autumn.