As the Brexit chaos continues, Professor Margaret Arnott discusses the constitutional issues it has posed for inter-parliamentary relations in the UK.
Category: Blog
This week marks forty years since Conservative MP Airey Neave was killed as he left the Palace of Westminster. Emmeline Ledgerwood explores his little-known work to promote science in Parliament.
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Trust, parliaments, and stability
In a new post based on a paper from our Making Sense of Parliaments conference, Aileen Walker, Associate at Global Partners Governance, discusses how to build public trust in parliaments.
The official, substantially verbatim report of what is said in both houses of Parliament is an essential tool for ensuring democratic accountability. This record, Hansard, contains a wealth of data, but it is not always fully accessible and easy to search. Lesley Jeffries and Fransina de Jager explain how a new project, Hansard at Huddersfield, aims to improve access to the Hansard records and contribute new ways of searching the data.
For more than half a century (1921-72), the existence of a devolved parliament in Northern Ireland created a contradiction at the heart of Unionist thought: while proponents of ‘the Union’ championed legislative autonomy in one part of the United Kingdom (Northern Ireland), they simultaneously denigrated moves towards devolution in Scotland and Wales on the basis that it might constitute a ‘slippery slope’ towards full ‘separation’. In a new blog from our Making Sense of Parliaments conference Dr David Torrance sheds light on a neglected aspect of broader debates about parliamentary devolution in the UK.
In a new blog for our Parliament Overviews series, Florencia Corbelle introduces the Argentinian National Congress.
On 18 February, seven Labour MPs resigned from the Party to sit as an independent group. Operating without the formal support of a parliamentary party they will face several institutional barriers to working effectively in the House of Commons, writes our Co-Convener, Louise Thompson.
Dr James Strong looks to history to understand the influence of the House of Commons over the UK’s use of military force abroad, in a blog from our recent Making Sense of Parliaments conference.
In a new blog from our Making Sense of Parliaments conference Nicole Nisbett and Cristina Leston-Bandeira discuss how digital public engagement is organised across different departments within the UK Parliament.
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Governing under pressure?
Is the psychological strain on MPs not only damaging to their health, but also threatening the health of our democracy? Dr James Weinberg discusses new research, with colleagues from political science and psychology, into the pressures on mental health and wellbeing that accompany political office