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.
Category: Blog
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.
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.
Sarah Childs, Professor of Politics and Gender, Birkbeck College University of London and Distinguished Visiting Researcher, University of Auckland, discusses progress on implementing the recommendations of her report The Good Parliament two years on from its publication.
Changes to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards’ investigation process won’t affect expenses investigations, writes Nick Dickinson. But the reason why reveals the deeper challenges in transforming Parliament into a modern workplace.
In evidence to the House of Commons Liaison Committee this week Theresa May discussed the Restoration and Renewal of the Palace of Westminster. Alexandra Meakin discusses the importance of government support for the R&R programme.
Labour recently announced that any new peers it nominates must commit to abolishing the House of Lords. In this post, Pete Dorey discusses Labour’s track record on Lords reform and why the party has failed to enact serious reforms when in government, arguing that the subject has suffered from a lack of intra-party consensus and a lack of serious interest in reform at ministerial level.