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The (worst) laws of the land: The concept of legislative basket cases in Central-Eastern Europe

By Miklós Sebők and Rebeka Kiss.

Is it possible to conceptualise the quality of legislation in a multidimensional manner? If yes, how can we define the laws which are of the lowest quality? This blog examines these conceptual and methodological issues by introducing a theory of legislative basket cases and offering illustrative case studies from Central-Eastern Europe.

How can we conceptualise legislative quality in a multidimensional manner?

One way to start the conceptualisation of legislative quality is to look at some examples which are universally (regardless of party affiliation) considered to be “bad” laws. An example, which we described in more detail in Sebők, Kiss and Kovács, 2023, that highlights the potential failures of the legislative process is the famous case of the ‘Bridge to Nowhere’ in Alaska. The ‘Bridge to Nowhere’ narrative commenced in 1996 when municipal authorities in the city of Ketchikan endorsed a proposal to construct a bridge. This proposed infrastructure aimed to connect the sparsely populated Gravina Island to the Alaskan mainland. The justification for this bridge was vigorously debated, especially since a functional and inexpensive ferry service was already in place. Despite the availability of this service, the  bridge project secured initial federal backing under the ‘Transportation Equity Act of 1998’.

Eventually, the Gravina bridge became a notorious example of wasteful expenditure and dysfunctional legislation, particularly after a dramatic U-turn by Sarah Palin, who was campaigning for the governorship of Alaska at the time. Palin had initially displayed support for the project, only to pivot post-election as governor and ultimately dismissing the bridge in 2007 as an impractical solution. Extant scholarship often correlates such poor legislative practices with authoritarian and illiberal regimes. The case of the ‘Bridge to Nowhere’, however, demonstrates that ‘good’ and ‘bad’ laws are not a regime characteristic as the legislative process leading up to is passage unfolded in one of the longest-standing liberal democracies.

Conceptualising the quality of law-making and legislative basket cases

Although the problem of legislative quality has not generated a unified strand of research in political science and legal studies, various approaches to conceptualisation are available that we can build on:

Based on the literature cited, a ‘good’ law can be characterized by a clear, and publicly supported policy objective which was fleshed out in stakeholder consultations. It should be efficient, coherent, transparent, and relatively stable post-adoption. Essentially, a ‘good’ law meets high standards across four key dimensions of legislative quality: (1) public policy; (2)  formal–legal–constitutional; (3) procedural; and (4) stability.

Conversely, a legislative basket case signifies a major failure in law-making, marked by various deficiencies compromising its effectiveness and legitimacy. Such laws often miss their public policy goals, have unclear purposes, and may conflict with existing laws and constitutional principles. Their drafting often bypasses essential consultations and is rushed through the legislature without adequate justification, leading to a lack of consensus. Post-enactment, these laws are unstable, requiring frequent amendments. The absence of post-implementation evaluations and a failure to establish necessary enforcement conditions further diminish their effectiveness and enforceability. In essence, a law can be considered to be a legislative basket case if it is flawed across a wide-ranging of indicators of legislative quality.

Building on our previous research, which delves into the concept and measurement of legislative backsliding (Sebők, Kiss and Kovács, 2023), in the manuscript serving as the basis of this blog entry, we aim to identify legislative basket cases by employing a multidimensional framework for assessing legislative quality considering content, public process, legal formalities, and constitutional considerations. We examine the quality criteria listed in Table 1 for each law under consideration.

An empirical case study: The Polish Law on Forests

In our presentation at PSA Parliaments Conference 2023, we examined illustrative cases from the Czech, Hungarian, Polish, and Slovak legislation in detail. Here, we focus on the Polish Law on Forests (Act on Forests of 16 December 2016, known as “Ustawa o lasach”) and evaluate it from the perspective of our theory of legislative quality. This piece of legislation was at the centre of a significant legal controversy due to its provisions allowing land clearing and excessive cutting down of trees, which was claimed by its detractors to be in violation of European Union conservation laws. The initial goals of the law were to enhance the rights of property owners regarding tree and shrub growth, simplify regulations on felling trees, and delegate to local governments the ability to adjust greenery protection levels to their needs. The law aimed to introduce a stable solution under the oversight of the Minister for the Environment, who was expected to ensure environmental balance and prevent selective application of provisions (Radecka, 2018).

However, the law’s implementation led to a scandal involving the Minister of Climate and Environment, who approved a logging plan that sparked widespread criticism. The law’s enforceability was complicated by the fact that the area in question—Białowieża forest—is part of the Natura 2000 network and UNESCO World Heritage sites, which is subject to stringent protection standards. The European Commission consistently and formally called on Poland to avoid extensive logging in the primeval forest, which Poland’s government initially ignored and proceeded with the logging activities.

The law faced challenges regarding its constitutionality and compliance with EU law, whereby the Polish government defended its policies by asserting that national legislation mandated sustainable forest management, implying that its tree-cutting practices were environmentally friendly. However, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) sided with the European Commission, ruling that Poland’s policy contravened the EU’s nature conservation rules (C-432/21). Notably, this was not the first instance of Poland facing legal action over forest management. In 2018, CJEU had already ruled that Poland should halt tree-cutting in the protected Białowieża forest (C-441/17). Due to a ruling in 2023 (C-432/21), Poland was required to revise its national legislation to align its forest management plans with EU biodiversity conservation laws.

The procedural aspects of the law’s enactment were also criticised, as it was adopted hastily, without sufficient preparation, stakeholder consultation, and proper public deliberation. The parliamentary debate was conducted in a fast-track manner, raising concerns about the law’s rushed adoption and potential violation of EU directives— this was later confirmed by the judgments mentioned above. Overall, the Forest Law ticks most boxes related to poor legislative quality and, therefore, constitutes an example of a legislative basket case.

As we showed in our presentation at PSA Parliaments 2023 this case is not unique, and similar multidimensional deficiencies can be observed in relation to many other laws passed in the Central-Eastern European region. Notable such examples include the Czech taxation of church restitution (Act No. 125/2019 Coll.), the Hungarian Medical Chamber Law (Act I of 2023) or the Slovak Land Acquisition Law (Act No. 140/2014 Coll.). Avenues for future research include developing methods to measure and quantify individual quality criteria in a multilingual  research design and to assess the causes and consequences of passing legislative basket cases.

About the authors

Miklós Sebők is a Research Professor at HUN-REN Centre of Social Sciences and poltextLAB (poltextlab.com). He serves as the research director of the Hungarian Comparative Agendas Project, and as principal investigator of the V-SHIFT Momentum research project, funded by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. His research in legislative studies includes co-authored contributions such as “The Concept and Measurement of Legislative Backsliding” in Parliamentary Affairs, “Measuring legislative stability – A new approach with data from Hungary”, in European Political Science, and “Comparative European legislative research in the age of large-scale computational text analysis: A review article” in International Political Science Review.

Rebeka Kiss is a Junior Research Fellow at the HUN-REN Centre for Social Sciences and a PhD student at the Doctoral School of Public Administration Sciences of the University of Public Service, specialising in legislative studies. Her contributions to the field include co-authored works such as “The Concept and Measurement of Legislative Backsliding” in Parliamentary Affairs and “The Transparency of Constitutional Reasoning: A Text Mining Analysis of the Hungarian Constitutional Court’s Jurisprudence” published in Studia Iuridica Lublinensia. She has participated in various research projects including as the Hungarian Comparative Agendas Project, the V-SHIFT Momentum research project, and the OPTED – Observatory for Political Texts in European Democracies. 

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Obstruction, Alternation, and Amendments: Evidence from Israel

By Tal Elovits.

Obstruction in parliament dates back to the eighteenth century when legislatures became more diverse and democratic. Parliamentary obstruction is a deliberate strategy used within legislative bodies to delay or prevent legislation from being passed. A minority or individual legislators commonly use it to oppose the majority will. While conscious obstruction can be a strategic tool within a democratic system, its misuse can jeopardize the democratic principles that it means to protect. It can potentially reduce legislative power while increasing executive power, putting the democratic principle of broad representation at risk. If an obstruction is used excessively, it can endanger the proper functioning of legislative bodies, possibly threatening the future of parliamentary government. As a result, extreme caution is essential while employing obstruction techniques (Bell, 2018; Rutherford, 1914).

Previous study points out that obstruction using legislative instruments may be connected to government alternation. According to Zucchini (2011), who used the Italian case study to explore the relationship, the opposition is likelier to use delay tactics following an alternation government, and the more the opposition is ideologically cohesive, the greater the chance they will use obstruction tactics. In this study, I wish to explore the relationship between alternation and legislative obstruction in Israel following the alternation government of 2021 and specifically ask how the alternation affected the amendment’s introduction in the Israeli Knesset. Furthermore, when were amendments used more strategically? The use of amendments in the legislative process will measure legislative obstruction, and this study will be the first to analyze amendments in the Israeli parliament.

As a part of the legislative process, amendment is an instrument that allows parliament members to suggest changes to a bill under deliberation, usually by a committee. In the same way that private members have the right to introduce private member bills, private members may propose changes to a bill. Typically, amendments introduced by individual members of parliament (MPs) are voted on before the final vote of the plenum (Behrens et al., 2023; Mattson, 1995; Palau et al., 2023). Although a form of amendment as a parliamentary instrument can be found in many legislatures, they differ greatly in their restrictions, stage of voting, and deliberation time assigned to a bill considered in the final vote (Strøm, 1995).

The Israeli parliament posits an interesting and vibrant arena to study the possible effects of government alternation. In 2021, what is known as the “right bloc,” led by long-serving PM Benjamin Netanyahu, lost its governmental positions, and Israel had for a year an alternation government for the first time in 15 years. As illustrated in Figure 1, this special circumstance allows us to question and study the possible effects of government alternation in Israel and to provide further empirical evidence for the study of legislative behavior. We set two hypotheses for our study. H1 – Government alternation increases amendment introduction. H2 – Narrow ideological differences between opposition parties foster strategic cooperation.

Figure 1 – Israel political parties 2015-2022 with their coalition status

In Israel, amendments are the only tool allowing parliament members to gain debate time at the committee and the plenary. Each amendment allows a 5-minute speech for each sponsor, which can be multiplied, sometimes reaching hundreds of debate hours on a single bill (Akirav et al., 2010). Therefore, when studying legislative obstruction in Israel, using parliament members in amendments becomes a vital measurement.

Although amendments have been in use in the Israeli parliament since its first day, no data is available for analysis, and retrieving this requires manual analysis of bills in their final wording. This study covers 2015-2022, 3 legislative terms – the 20th, 23rd, and 24th and three different governments, as seen in Figure 1. In the study period, 791 non-budgetary bills have reached the final wording stage. Amendments data was collected manually regarding each bill. Further data, such as the legislative committee, bill category, type of legislation, and when the bill was introduced, were mined from the Knesset Odata API service. In total, 24,001 amendments were gathered. Figure 2 shows the share of bills with amendments by legislative term and yearly quarter. Even without any further statistical analysis, one can notice the different pattern that the 24th term presents.

Figure 2 – Share of bills with amendments 2015–2022

The data gathered was also statistically manipulated to uncover possible mechanisms explaining this change in using amendments. I have constructed two dependent variables: Amendments – dummy, where one is when a bill is introduced with amendment(s), and Strategic – dummy, where one is when amendments are introduced by half or more of the effective number of opposition members. The study hypothesis was tested using statistical Probit regression in Stata in two models —the first tested alternation as an independent variable, and the second focused on the Knesset term as an independent variable. Table 1 presents the results of the two models. Further marginal analysis was done following the first model to uncover the probability of a bill being introduced with amendments under an alternate government. The results, illustrated in Figure 3, show that while under continuous government, the probability for a bill to be introduced with the amendment is 26.4%, under alternation government, the probability rises to 70.8%, supporting the first hypothesis.

Table 1 – Probit model results for amendments and strategic (1)

Figure 3 – Margin analysis following first model probit regression

The result of the second model supports this study’s second hypothesis. As the opposition becomes cohesive, they will increase their cooperation, acting more strategically, providing additional evidence for earlier theoretical and empirical studies suggesting that when ideological distance is small, they are more likely to coordinate in the parliamentary arena (Dewan & Spirling, 2011; Kaiser, 2008; Whitaker & Martin, 2022).

Our analysis also suggests that the use of amendment is related to the legislative term cycle, where both the first month of the new government and the period following parliament dissolution appear to have an effect with a slightly significant positive coefficient and a highly significant negative coefficient, in accordance. At the beginning of a new government, regardless of the alternation status, the probability that a bill will introduced with amendment increases, and this probability drops significantly following parliament dissolution. We found no significant effect on the bill’s content or the committee it deliberated in.

This study’s findings open a wide window into how parliamentarian obstruction may look in Israel and shed light on the use of amendments in the Knesset. Alternation fuels opposition resistance. In Israel, this resistance manifested through the use of amendments. However, one must be aware that with obstructing comes anti-obstruction measures by the majority of parliament. This tit-for-tat escalation into a pattern of obstruction and retaliation can poison the spirit of mutual respect between parties. Partisan mistrust and even demonization replace good faith assumptions of sincerity and reasonableness. Thus, while limited obstruction may sometimes be justified, oppositions must also weigh the risks of it becoming entrenched in political culture. When this balance is disrupted, and the opposition resorts to obstructionist tactics without a clear strategy or purpose, it can weaken the legislature and, by extension, lead to democratic backsliding.

This study sheds light on the important role that amendments play in the hands of Knesset opposition members as a significant instrument in filling the gap in the existing scholarship. Furthermore, this study provides important empirical evidence for the use of legislative instruments by opposition parties, especially in the light of government alternation. Future studies, expanding this study period, might allow us to uncover additional patterns of the use of amendments in Israel’s busy parliament.

This short blog post is part of the author’s PhD project, “The Knesset: A Busy Parliaments in the 2020s”.

About the author

Tal Elovits is a PhD fellow at the Department of Social and Political Sciences, University of Milan, Milan, Italy. Former faction director in the Israeli parliament. tal.elovits@unimi.it ORCID: 0000- 0003-2681-1445

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Necessary Women: pioneering women working in Parliament

By Mari Takayanagi.

Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, many people lived and worked in the Palace of Westminster. Some worked for the House of Commons or House of Lords, some were family members of office holders, and others were servants in households. This included many women. Indeed, at times female residents outnumbered male residents by nearly two to one: the 1911 census, for example, lists 67 women and 36 men living in the Palace of Westminster in addition to the suffragette Emily Wilding Davison who hid there in a cupboard overnight. There were also of course many staff who did not live in, an enormous variety of roles from Clerks to cleaners.

The presence of so many staff may be surprising, as Parliament is always equated in the general public mind with MPs and Members of the House of Lords debating in their chambers. Although some staff might play visible roles, such as the Doorkeepers in their uniforms and the Clerks sitting at the table, they appear almost as part of the furniture – blending in with the Gothic architecture, ritual and ceremony, rather than as individuals. Even more overlooked are the staff in less visible roles, including many women. 

But staff not only work in Parliament, they are also subject to the same kinds of employment and social issues as workers outside Parliament. Recent research by Rebecca McKee has examined ‘unsung heroes’, staff who work for MPs. The staff who work for the House of Lords and House of Commons are similarly unsung. My new book Necessary Women, co-authored with Elizabeth Hallam Smith, uses new archival research to provide the first ever history of women working in the Palace of Westminster. This approach helps reframe Parliament from a solely political workspace to a place of work more generally, highlighting women from all classes working in jobs reflecting gender roles in wider society.

I was delighted to share some of this research at the PSA Parliaments Annual Conference 2023. In this blogpost I’m going to focus on three pioneering women for whom the Second World War brought new opportunities in Parliament: Kay Midwinter, Monica Felton, and Jean Winder.

Kay Midwinter

In May 1940, shock rang around the House of Commons as a woman walked in and stood calmly on the floor of the House, looking around at her new workplace. This was Kay Midwinter, the first female Clerk in the House of Commons. Appointed to free up a man for war service, the ‘Girl Clerk’ as she was termed in the press –she was aged 32 – worked for the House of Commons National Expenditure Committee during the Second World War.  Previous experience of working with committees in the League of Nations in Geneva helped her to get the job. Highly praised by her managers and by Irene Ward and Joan Davidson, the female MPs on the committee, Midwinter worked particularly closely with Ward and Davidson on two reports, on the women’s armed services and women factory workers.

Midwinter later reflected on her time in the Commons as follows:

During the war I was standing behind the Speaker’s Chair about 5 or 6 yards from Churchill while he made all his famous war speeches. He used to glare at me as much as to say “What’s this woman doing?” but he never challenged me…. when it came to laying the Report on the table of the House – you know, my male colleagues said “Oh you’d better not do that, you know, it has never been done by a woman before!” So I said “Well, for that reason I’m going to do it!” So there we are. But really one was up against male prejudice throughout. Absolutely. There was never any question of promotion.

[Oral history recording, United Nations Career Records Project, Bodleian Library]

Not only promotion but pay, for Midwinter was paid less than half the rate of her fellow male Clerks doing the same job as her. Ward and Davidson expressed their opinion that she was ‘inadequately paid’ and she did receive a pay rise, although only to the ‘women’s equivalent’ of the male grade. She moved to the Foreign Office in 1943. After the war she went to work for the United Nations, first in New York and then back in Geneva, where she died in 1996.

Monica Felton

Like Kay Midwinter, Dr Monica Felton worked for the National Expenditure Committee in the House of Commons during the war as a fairly small part of a wider public career – but there the similarities end. Felton was as an elected Labour member of the London County Council, most unusual; Parliamentary staff would not usually have such a public party-political affiliation. She was appointed to the Commons as an economic advisor on the recommendation of Lewis Silkin, a Labour MP on the committee who had also previously been an LCC member.  He and Felton had a strong shared interest in town planning; her significance as a woman town planner has been studied by Mark Clapson.  Felton had a doctorate from the LSE and was previously a lecturer for the Worker’s Educational Association, where she was remembered by students as a Marxist. She worked in the Commons for 18 months before resigning with permission.

After the war, Silkin appointed Felton to be chairman of first Peterlee and then Stevenage New Town Development Corporations between 1949 and 1951. However, she was fired from Stevenage after going on an unauthorised trip to North Korea for the left-wing Women’s International Democratic Federation in 1951. It was a very controversial visit; on her return, she accused American, South Korean and even British troops of involvement in massacres of the Korean population and other atrocities, on Radio Moscow and in the Daily Worker, and was awarded the Stalin Peace Prize. The episode made her infamous and ruined her career in the UK. She made a new life for herself in India, where she died in 1970.

Jean Winder

Jean Winder was the first woman Hansard reporter. She fought a long battle for equal pay, and like Midwinter, was also assisted by Irene Ward MP. In August 1951, Ward stood up in the House of Commons chamber and said:

The House of Commons is run on the basis of equal pay… but there is one woman on the HANSARD staff in the Gallery, Mrs. Winder, who has not got equal pay… I have got Mrs. Winder’s permission to draw the attention of the House to what I consider is an intolerable constitutional position…

[House of Commons Debates, 2 August 1951, col 1710]

Jean Winder was appointed to House of Commons Official Report, known as Hansard, in January 1944 when the Editor was desperate for staff and unable to find a suitable man.  Like Midwinter, Winder was an immediate success in the Commons, highly rated, and performing exactly the same job as her male colleagues who were paid more than she was. Despite support all the way up to the Speaker, the Treasury refused equal pay. It took years of advocacy by Irene Ward before Winder finally achieved equal pay in late 1953. Ward supported Winder in private and in public over many years. This undoubtedly influenced Ward’s politics and relationships with political colleagues as she lobbied inside and outside Parliament.

In conclusion, the stories of Midwinter, Felton and Winder illustrate various themes of Necessary Women including opportunities brought by war, important relationships between staff and MPs, and struggles for equal pay. Sadly, these innovative Second World War appointments had no direct successors in the House of Commons. The next female Hansard reporter was not appointed until 1968, and further female Clerks did not follow until 1969. The indirect and direct contribution of these pioneering women to Parliamentary life and work deserves to be better known.

About the author

Dr Mari Takayanagi FRHistS is Senior Archivist at the UK Parliamentary Archives and a historian of women and Parliament. Her first book, ‘Necessary Women: the Untold Story of Parliament’s Working Women’, co-authored with Elizabeth Hallam Smith, was published in June 2023 by History Press.

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Making the Law Count: The UK Post-Legislative Gap

By Tom Caygill.

Over recent years, engagement in post-legislative scrutiny in Westminster has declined. A mixture of events (e.g. Brexit) and crises (e.g. Coronavirus) has pushed post-legislative review (by government departments) and, as a result wider, post-legislative scrutiny (undertaken by parliamentary committees) down the government and parliamentary agenda. In this blog post, I examine the nature of this decline, the wider reasons for it and suggest how we can move forward from here. As the UK Parliament is often placed on a pedestal as an example of how to approach post-legislative scrutiny, it is vital that it continues to lead by example.

In 2008, the UK Government agreed to introduce a systematic process of post-legislative review by government departments. Legislation would receive a departmental review within three to five years of that Act entering the statute books. Once such a review was completed, a memorandum containing its findings would be sent to the relevant departmental select committee in the House of Commons, for additional scrutiny. 

My 2021 report for the Westminster foundation for Democracy examined the extent and effect of post-legislative review and scrutiny between 2008-2019. Although it was rarely used to begin with, there was an increase in the number of published memoranda by government departments particularly between 2010 and 2015. This also coincided with an activist House of Commons Liaison Committee which was keen to ensure that select committee were undertaking a breadth of different forms of scrutiny (including post-legislative scrutiny).

The story since 2015 however has been a continued decline in the number of post-legislative reviews being undertaken by government departments which means fewer are being sent to House of Commons Select Committees. Although select committees do not need a government post-legislative review in order to initiate post-legislative scrutiny they are considered to be useful triggers to get select committees to consider undertaking post-legislative scrutiny.

Figure 1: Post-Legislative Reviews 2008-2023


Figure 1 shows the extent of the decline which has taken place since a peak in 2012. There are a number of factors which could be at play here. Two big factors slowing the pace of post-legislative review are Brexit and the Coronavirus pandemic which monopolised the intellectual capacity of government departments, for understandable reasons. This pushed post-legislative reviews off departmental agendas, but they have not returned to the agenda of government departments. Another factor potentially at play here is that between 2010 and 2015, the bulk of post-legislative reviews would fall upon the legislation of a previous government (from a different party). There is therefore likely to be a change in enthusiasm from reviewing your predecessors’ legislation rather than reviewing your own. In British politics, governments do not like to admit mistakes as they view it as a sign of weakness.

A further factor here, which coincides with the decline of post-legislative review, is that the House of Commons Liaison Committee since 2015 has taken a less proactive role in shaping the agenda of the committee system. This also means there is no one overseeing the agreement between the Cabinet Office and Committee Office made in 2008. For more information on the gap in scrutiny see my 2020 article on the UK post-legislative scrutiny gap.

There is also a lack of coordination in Whitehall. Lord Norton of Louth has submitted a number of parliamentary questions over recent months in order to identify why post-legislative review has seemingly ground to a halt (no post-legislative reviews have been published on www.gov.uk in 2023). From her answer on the 7th August (figure 2), the Minister makes clear that no further post-legislative scrutiny work is expected within government before the end of 2023.


Figure 2: Parliamentary Question from Lord Norton on post-legislative review currently taking place.


It does look like we will end 2023 without any post-legislative reviews having taken place. As noted above there is no oversight of this agreement which will only contribute to the lack of urgency from government to undertake these reviews.

The lack of co-ordination in Whitehall is also visible in her response (figure 3) to a follow up question from Lord Norton on the 27th September 2023.

Figure 3: Parliamentary Question from Lord Norton on which Acts the government considers eligible for post-legislative review.

The fact that the Cabinet Office does not hold information centrally does give away that there is at best limited coordination and oversight of what is happening in government departments in relation to post-legislative review. At the moment the future of post-legislative reviews does not look promising. Although I will note again that this does not prevent post-legislative scrutiny being undertaken. Indeed, special inquiry committees in the House of Lords will initiate an inquiry without a post-legislative review and then ask for one. Further to this, over the course of the last couple of sessions, there have been between 3-4 inquiries across both Houses. So while post-legislative scrutiny has not stopped, the number of inquiries has reduced.

So what might happen next? This of course could be corrected if there were to be a change in government following the 2024 General Election with a future Labour Government being more than happy to review Conservative legislation. However, we would face the same issue of enthusiasm draining as the term of office goes on. So doing nothing is likely to lead to a repeat of the past 15 years with a peak shortly after an election and then a steady decline.

A more proactive response is needed. There is a need for someone to start overseeing the process of post-legislative review and that should be from the parliamentary perspective as government departments will find reasons not to do them without parliamentary pressure. The Scottish Parliament’s Convenors Group (made up of committee convenors) has made post-legislative scrutiny a strategic priority for the sixth session of the Parliament, and this is having results with eight inquiries having been undertaken since the start of 2022 (and more in the pipeline), with two and a half years to go of this session. It looks set to break records in the parliament. A strategic focus can clearly make a difference and this could be something which returns to the House of Commons Liaison Committee or the House of Lords Liaison Committee (which decides which Acts will receive post-legislative scrutiny via special inquiry committees in the Lords). There have also been arguments for a dedicated joint post-legislative scrutiny committee to over see the process across both Houses but to also monitor the agreement between the Cabinet Office and the Committee Office. A simpler approach would be to create a dedicated space for post-legislative scrutiny on the UK Parliament website, in a similar way to which draft bills (for pre-legislative scrutiny) are featured on the ‘Bills & Legislation’ section of the website. This is also an approach undertaken by the Scottish Parliament. There is also an argument that after 15 years, this agreement is in need of review (indeed many in Westminster argue that these reviews should take place 10 years after passage rather than 3-5 years). This is something that either a dedicated committee or one of the Liaison Committees could do. It is clear from the perspective of the House of Commons (in particular) that there is more work to do to institutionalise post-legislative scrutiny in Westminster. As we approach the end of the 2019 Parliament, this is an important time to reflect on the progress made since 2008 while recognising the need to enhance post-legislative scrutiny further.  

About the author

Tom Caygill is a Senior Lecturer in Politics at Nottingham Trent University

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What are the implications of having the Foreign Secretary sitting in the House of Lords?

By Andrew Defty

The most surprising aspect of Rishi Sunak’s Cabinet reshuffle has been the appointment of the former Prime Minister, David Cameron, as Foreign Secretary. Cameron is no longer an MP and as it is a convention that government ministers sit in Parliament, he has accepted a seat in the House of Lords in order to enable him to take on the role.

Cameron’s appointment raises a number of interesting questions: about the ministerial career of former Prime Ministers; the appointment of Cabinet ministers from the House of Lords; and the implications of this for parliamentary scrutiny.

The political career of former Prime Ministers

David Cameron’s return to front line politics with a seat in the Cabinet is by no means unique but is relatively unusual. As has been widely reported, the last former Prime Minister to take a Cabinet post after leaving office was Alec Douglas-Hume, Conservative Prime Minister from 1963 to 1964, who served as Foreign Secretary under Edward Heath, from 1970 to 1974. Interestingly, Douglas-Hume had previously served as Foreign Secretary while sitting in the House of Lords before becoming Prime Minister. He gave up his seat in the Lords in 1963 in order to become Prime Minister, and for his second term as Foreign Secretary he sat in the House of Commons as the MP for Perth and Kinross.

Other former Prime Ministers who have taken on Cabinet roles after leaving office include Arthur Balfour, Prime Minister from 1902 to 1905, who went on to serve as Foreign Secretary, from 1916 to 1919 in the wartime administration of Lloyd George. Ramsay MacDonald and Neville Chamberlain were both given the opportunity to remain in the Cabinet after stepping down as Prime Minister, with the largely honorary role of Lord President of the Council. Although in Chamberlain’s case this was for only a short period until his death in October 1940.

In recent years, however, there has been a tendency for Prime Ministers to leave parliament completely shortly after leaving office. John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and most recently Boris Johnson all announced they were leaving the House of Commons shortly after the end of their premiership. Cameron’s appointment to the House of Lords is also relatively unusual. Although it had until recently been customary for former Prime Ministers to accept a seat in the House of Lords, Margaret Thatcher was the last former Prime Minister to do so. Of the seven former Prime Ministers currently alive, Cameron will be the only one sitting in the House of Lords, although two, Theresa May and Liz Truss, continue to sit in the House of Commons.

Why has David Cameron been given a seat in the House of Lords?

In order to enable David Cameron to be appointed to the Cabinet, Rishi Sunak has given him a seat in the House of Lords. Although there is no legal requirement for government ministers to sit in Parliament, it is a very strongly held convention. This is based on the principle that ministers must be directly accountable to Parliament and only members may answer questions on the floor of the House of Commons or the House of Lords.

It has been argued that the convention that ministers must be sitting members of Parliament limits the pool of individuals the Prime Minister can draw upon when making ministerial appointments. In a number of other states, ministers can be appointed from outside the legislature which arguably allows for a wider range of talented individuals to be drawn into the government. In the UK, a Prime Minister who wishes to make a ministerial appointment from outside Parliament does have the option of making someone a member of the House of Lords in order to make them available for ministerial office.

This practice is not particularly unusual. Gordon Brown made a number of direct ministerial appointments to the House of Lords including the former MP, Peter Mandelson, who left the Commons in 2004 but was elevated to the Lords in 2008 in order to become Secretary of State for Business, and Andrew Adonis who was appointed to the Lords in order to become a minister in the Department for Education and Skills. David Cameron himself appointed several business leaders to the House of Lords in order to give them ministerial roles, including Stephen Green, the former group chairman of HSBC and Ian Livingston, the former chief executive of BT. More recently, in 2021 the UK’s former chief negotiator for exiting the European Union, David Frost, was made a peer by Boris Johnson, and appointed as Minister of State in the Cabinet Office with responsibility for Brexit.

An alternative approach could have been to find a safe seat for David Cameron which would have allowed him to return to Parliament as a member of the House of Commons.  This would, however, be dependent on a safe seat being made available, possibly by an MP who was already planning to stand down at the next election. This may also have been a decidedly risky strategy given that the government has recently lost several by-elections in supposedly safe seats. In 1964, Patrick Gordon Walker was appointed as Foreign Secretary by Harold Wilson despite having lost his seat in the 1964 general election. He subsequently resigned after losing a by-election in a supposedly safe Labour seat. Moreover, while Cameron may be happy to take on the role of Foreign Secretary, he may not have been prepared to return to the day-to-day grind of fighting an election and being a constituency MP.

While it is not particularly unusual for governments to make appointments to the House of Lords in order to allow individuals to become ministers, it is relatively rare for members of the House of Lords to hold such senior ministerial office. There are usually somewhere between twenty and thirty ministers in the House of Lords, compared to around eighty in the House of Commons. Governments need to appoint ministers in the Lords to enable someone to speak in the upper House on behalf of each government department, but ministers in the Lords tend to hold more junior ministerial positions, as Ministers of State or Parliamentary Under-Secretaries. In recent years, the only member of the upper House who has routinely sat in the Cabinet is the Leader of the House of Lords.

This was not always the case. Up until the end of the nineteenth century it was common practice for Cabinet ministers, including the Prime Minister to sit in the Lords. The last Prime Minister to sit in the Lords was Lord Salisbury who left office in 1902, although the practice of appointing Foreign Secretaries from the upper House continued well into the twentieth century. Lord Curzon was Conservative Foreign Secretary from 1919 to 1924 and was widely expected to succeed Andrew Bonar Law as Prime Minister in 1923. He lost out to Stanley Baldwin in part because it was felt the Prime Minister should sit in the Commons. Lord Halifax was Foreign Secretary at the outbreak of the Second World War and, as noted above, the Earl of Home, was Foreign Secretary before renouncing his title, perhaps mindful of Curzon’s difficulties, to become Prime Minister in 1963. The last Foreign Secretary to be appointed from the House of Lords was Lord Carrington, who held the post from Thatcher’s election in 1979 until his resignation following the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands in 1982.

What are the implications of the Foreign Secretary sitting in the House of Lords?

Lord Carrington’s experience is perhaps revealing of the difficulties Lord Cameron could face. With Carrington unable to answer questions in the House of Commons, answering Foreign Office questions in the Commons was delegated to two junior ministers. In most circumstances this worked admirably well, but when the Falklands crisis erupted, MPs in the House of Commons did not conceal their anger at their inability to question the Foreign Secretary directly. In addition to being accountable to Parliament for their department, senior ministers play an important role in defending the government and the Prime Minister. Lord Carrington’s inability to provide the kind of support the PM needed in the House of Commons contributed to his decision to resign. Lord Cameron may be a useful and experienced ally to the Prime Minister in public and in the media but there is little he can do if things get sticky in the House of Commons.

Cameron’s appointment also means that there is real concern about the impact on parliamentary scrutiny of having the Foreign Secretary sitting in the Lords. The Foreign Secretary will not be available to answer departmental questions in the Commons, which come around about once a month. Nor will he be available to answer urgent questions, which are much more common now than they were when Lord Carrington was Foreign Secretary. In particular, if there is a major international incident which threatens international security or UK interests, the government’s response in the House of Commons will be provided by a more junior minister, who quite possibly does not attend Cabinet. Alternately if the situation is particularly grave, the Prime Minister may find himself delegating for the Foreign Secretary in the House of Commons. Which may appease the Commons but won’t make life easier for the Prime Minister.

The Speaker of the House of Commons was quick to make a statement about the need to ensure that parliamentary scrutiny of foreign policy is not undermined by Lord Cameron’s appointment:

[G]iven the gravity of the current international situation, it is especially important that this House is able to scrutinise the work of the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office effectively. I have therefore commissioned advice from the Clerks about possible options for enhancing scrutiny of the work of the Foreign Secretary when that post is filled by a Member of the other House. I also look forward to hearing the Government’s proposals on how the Foreign Secretary will be properly accountable to this House.

On the other hand, the Foreign Secretary will not avoid parliamentary scrutiny altogether. The House of Lords is likely to institute its own mechanism to provide regular questions to the Foreign Secretary. Moreover, there is considerable expertise in foreign affairs in the Lords, including several former permanent secretaries from the Foreign Office. As a new peer, Cameron will also be unfamiliar with the practices of the second chamber and will quickly realise that he cannot rely on the same level of support in the chamber as he once enjoyed in the more partisan House of Commons.

The Foreign Secretary will also not entirely avoid scrutiny by MPs. Although he can’t appear to answer questions in the chamber of the House of Commons, members of the House of Lords can appear before House of Commons select committees. He is likely to be much in demand from the House of Commons select committee on foreign affairs, as well as a number of joint committees which comprise members from both Houses, most notably the joint committees on human rights and national security and the Intelligence and Security Committee.

As a former Prime Minister, David Cameron is an experienced parliamentarian, but his ministerial experience is confined to that of being Prime Minister. He may find the role of Foreign Secretary and the demands of adapting to scrutiny in the House of Lords particularly demanding. It is also possible that the absence of a Foreign Secretary in the House of Commons may place increased demands on the government and even the Prime Minister himself. Both will be hoping that the benefits outweigh the undoubted challenges ahead.

About the author

Andrew Defty is Associate Professor of Politics at the University of Lincoln and member of the Lincoln Parliamentary Research Centre (ParliLinc).

This piece was first posted on Andrew Defty’s Who Runs Britain? blog.

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Why Parliaments? Part 3

The future of parliaments as watchdogs

By John Keane

This is the third part of a keynote address, delivered in the presence of King Felipe VI, at the conference to commemorate the International Day of Parliamentarism hosted by the Inter Pares: EU Global Project to Strengthen the Capacity of Parliaments (Cortes Generales, León, Spain, June 30, 2023).

The first part of the keynote on the invention of the cortes model can be read here and the second part discussing past and current threats to parliaments here.

European Parliament building in Strasbourg (European Parliament).

So what of the future of parliaments? Do they have a future? When thinking about these various decadent trends, it’s tempting to conclude that the post-1945 renaissance of parliaments is coming to an end. We may even think that we’re already entering the age of phantom parliaments in which legislatures in more than a few countries are simultaneously real and not real, form without much content. In these make-believe spaces, elected representatives claim to serve the people, even though they are of limited or no significance to the people in whose name they pass laws.

A shift to phantom parliaments and executive rule may be welcomed in some quarters, but before the cava is poured, let’s consider the countertrends, and the reasons why, in these years of the 21st century, the cortesmodel of government remains indispensable.

In politics, nothing is set in stone. To speak in quantum terms, contemporary parliaments are in a state of superposition. Just as the fate of Schrödinger’s cat in a box was undecidable, so are parliaments today suspended unpredictably between alternative outcomes. Fightbacks are possible. They are necessary. Remarkably, renewals are happening at multiple points on our planet.

Consider Denmark’s Folketinget: in meetings called consultations (samråd), its powerful European Affairs Committee regularly grills ministers in real-time during sessions of the Council of the European Union in Brussels and Luxembourg. The National Assembly of the Republic of Korea has signed off on the world’s first comprehensive laws against verbal abuse and bullying (‘gapjil’) by family-run conglomerates and other powerful organisations. Romania’s parliament is now digitally fed citizens’ suggestions and complaints with the help of ION, a smart robot, say the wags, designed to improve the ‘intelligence’ of politicians. Proposals are afoot in the German Bundestag to receive non-binding reports from lottery-selected citizens’ assemblies.

Parliaments are also heavily preoccupied with time past and time future. The Welsh legislature regularly consults with the world’s first Future Generations Commissioner. With eyes on the unmade future, the European Parliament has drafted the world’s first AI Act. New Zealand’s (Aotearoa’s) parliament has granted ecosystems ‘the rights, powers, duties and liabilities of a legal person’. The cross-border Nordic network of Sámi parliaments, the Sámediggi is a case of interparliamentary cooperation, featuring consultative bodies whose brief is to promote and preserve indigenous self-determination.

Norway’s Sámi Parliament, the representative body for people of Sámi heritage, opened in October 1989 (Sámediggi).
Watchdog parliaments

How are we to make good sense of this new wave of experiments? My suggestion is to see them as points on a larger canvas, single performances in a grand carnival of parliamentary efforts to rejuvenate the cortes spirit.

Shadows are certainly falling on too many of the world’s parliaments. But these innovations are the first signs of a dawn of renewal. They breathe new life into old institutions originally designed to make binding agreements by lawmakers acting on behalf of different social interests, in the name of the commonweal. More obviously, these parliamentary experiments are today doing what parliaments did for over eight centuries: representing the claims and interests of the represented – and they remind us that parliamentary representation is, by definition, tricky business.

Populists and demagogues be warned: representation isn’t a simple, face-to-face contract between a representative and an imaginary People or Nation. Representation isn’t mimesis. It has a vicarious, fiduciary quality, and this means that when voters choose a representative, representation is as much an ending as it is a beginning. Representation is an open-ended process contingent upon the assent, disappointment and displeasure of the represented. When representatives underperform, or fail on too many fronts, they are sent to hell in a handbasket.

These principles of representation, traceable to the León cortes convened by Alfonso IX, are most definitely alive and kicking in the new parliamentary experiments. That’s why textbooks still tell us that the prime task of parliaments is to represent the interests of citizens by means of free and fair elections. But there’s an error within the textbooks: if we look more closely at what today’s smart, activist parliaments are actually doing, we see a departure of great historical significance ignored by the textbooks.

Parliaments aren’t just chambers or ‘little rooms’ where elected politicians represent their constituents. In our age of monitory democracy, legislatures are becoming watchdog parliaments. In the name of the common good, they blow whistles, sound alarms, warn of wicked problems and pass laws to push back or ban arbitrary exercises of power.

The contrast with parliaments of yesteryear couldn’t be clearer. The first-ever cortes was born of military conquest. Parliaments of the more recent past were too often the castles of the aristocracy, bourgeois mansions, parlours of male privilege, and engines of empire. By contrast, today’s watchdog parliaments, when they work well, stand against conquest in all its various forms. Especially when generously resourced, watchdog parliaments specialise in the public scrutiny and restraint of predatory power. They stand against foolish governments that abuse their power.

Watchdog parliaments snap the chains of majority rule, the blind worship of numbers, by granting voices and rights to minorities excluded from high politics. These parliaments alter our shared sense of time. They extend the franchise to endangered species, wronged ancestors and future generations. In opposition, say, to predatory corporations, greedy banks and rogue mining companies, watchdog parliaments protect and promote the rules of the democratic game. Not to be underestimated is the way they strive to tackle long-term problems, currently sidelined by the short-term mentality of election cycles.

Watchdog parliaments are more than the guardians of electoral integrity. As champions of the public monitoring of power, they target complex, difficult, wicked problems. Their job is to find just solutions for matters such as artificial intelligence, tax havens, polluted environments, pestilences, the plight of stateless peoples, the unregulated arms trade and unending wars of attrition.

When performing these functions, paradoxically, watchdog parliaments push beyond the ‘parliamentary road’ and the fetish of periodic elections. They help redefine democracy and give it teeth. Electoral democracy becomes monitory democracy. Democracy comes to mean nothing less than free and fair elections, but also something much more: citizens’ freedom from predatory power in all its ugly forms, including our reckless relationship with the Earth on which we dwell.

True, the new watchdog parliaments are fragile. They function without much intellectual support. No grand political theories of the order of François Guizot’s lectures on the origins of representative government in the early 1820s, or John Stuart Mill’s Considerations on Representative Government (1861) have come to their defence. They lack guidebooks and operating manuals. This is to say that watchdog parliaments enjoy no scholarly fanfare and no historical guarantees of success. Except to future historians, their chances of survival are unknown.

The only thing that’s certain is that the spirit of these watchdog parliaments – the spirit of young King Alfonso IX – is the grit we humans are going to need as we struggle to deal wisely, equitably, democratically with the rich opportunities and cascading dangers of our troubled century.

About the author

John Keane is Professor of Politics at the University of Sydney and Professorial Fellow at the WZB (Berlin). His latest book is The Shortest History of Democracy (2022), which has already been published in more than 12 languages.

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Why Parliaments? Part 2

Past and current threats to parliamentary democracy

By John Keane

This is the second part of a keynote address, delivered in the presence of King Felipe VI, at the conference to commemorate the International Day of Parliamentarism hosted by the Inter Pares: EU Global Project to Strengthen the Capacity of Parliaments (Cortes Generales, León, Spain, June 30, 2023).

The first part of the keynote on the invention of the cortes model can be read here and the third part discussing the future of parliaments as watchdogs here.

The chamber of the National Assembly of Thailand (The Official Site of The Prime Minister of Thailand)

What about the subsequent fate of the cortes of León? Encouraged by military victories over the Moors, the surviving evidence shows that the cortes managed to survive for several centuries. Long distance government based on the consent of its subjects worked. 

By the end of the fourteenth century, following a merger of the neighbouring kingdoms of León and Castile, the kingdom’s representatives enjoyed considerable powers. Their right of gathering and presenting petitions, and their insistence that agreements struck by the parliament were legally binding, became customary.

Constitutional monarchy produced plenty of strife. The cortes was the site of intense bargaining about definitions of the welfare of the realm. Money was often the key cause of friction. Representatives constantly emphasized that kings were forbidden from manipulating coinage or levying extraordinary taxes without the explicit consent of all the estates. Before the end of the fourteenth century, there were times when the cortes reportedly demanded an audit of the court’s expenditure, even rebates on taxes that had already been paid.

The new León style of government proved geographically infectious. During the thirteenth century, parliaments spread from León and Castile to Aragon, Catalonia, Valencia and Navarre, to Sicily and Portugal, England and Ireland, and across the empires of Austria and Brandenburg. During the next two centuries, parliaments appeared in the large majority of German principalities, in Scotland, Denmark, Sweden, France, the Netherlands, Poland and Hungary. Nearly all these late medieval and early modern parliaments survived until the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Despite the growth of absolutist states, which crushed the assemblies of Aragon, Catalonia and Valencia, many continued to function until the irruption of the French Revolution in 1789. The Navarrese cortes, the Swedish Riksdag and the Hungarian Diéta lasted into the nineteenth century. The powerful Estates of the Duchy of Mecklenburg survived intact until 1918.

By that time, in the aftermath of the collapse of empires and a catastrophic world war, Europe, noted Tomáš Masaryk, had become ‘a laboratory atop a vast graveyard’, a laboratory of democracy in which most European parliaments were besieged by political parties, trade unions, suffragists and other citizens demanding universal suffrage. Many observers expected the dawn of parliamentary democracy, but as we know, the cruel opposite happened. The butterfly of parliamentary democracy became the caterpillar of arbitrary rule. The long democratic revolution unleashed by young King Alfonso IX had run its course.

Here’s another irony: just as ‘the people’ mounted the stage of history, demanding ‘one person, one vote’, parliaments were racked by factional disputes, fierce backlashes and acts of violent sabotage. In countries like Yugoslavia and Romania, monarchs strangled parliaments. Military-backed dictators also savaged their parliaments, as happened in Piłsudski’s Poland and Horthy’s Hungary. Totalitarian rule triumphed in Italy, Germany, Russia and Spain, and also in China, which might otherwise have become the world’s largest parliamentary republic.

Admiral Miklós Horthy, ruler of Hungary between 1919 and 1944, greeted by city officials upon entering Budapest, November 1919, when in a fiery speech he accused the capital’s citizens of betraying Hungary by supporting Bolshevism.

During these first decades of the 20th century, the downfall and disappearance of parliaments gathered pace. Politicians dressed in frock coats and top hats grew scared. The spirit of ‘dead bourgeois parliamentarism’ (Lenin) fractured and paralysed parliaments. Governments rose and fell in quick succession.

In Portugal, whose first 15 years of republican government had been marred by dozens of governments, eight presidents and countless attempted coups, the words of the new dictator Salazar blew like a winter wind across the whole continent, and well beyond. ‘So long as there is not some retrograde movement in political evolution,’ he said in 1934, ‘I am convinced that within 20 years there will be no legislative assemblies left in Europe.’

Rump parliaments

Salazar’s wishful prediction almost came true. By 1941, there were only 11 parliamentary democracies left on our planet. Only three survived in Europe: Britain, Sweden, and Switzerland.

Historians and political scientists tell us the good news that after World War Two parliamentary government made a stupendous political comeback. The not-so-good news is that the long post-1945 renaissance of parliaments is today losing momentum.

There’s writing on the walls of parliaments. We’re living through times in which parliaments are again plagued by legitimacy and performance problems. We need to pay special attention to this new trend. 

We aren’t backsliding to former times, say, to the catastrophes of the 1920s and 1930s. We aren’t even facing the kind of overnight emergencies that gripped Spain on February 23rd 1981 –the moment described with great precision in Javier Cercas’s Anatomía de un instante when, in a hail of bullets, a frightened Cortes fell to the floor and was held hostage for six hours by golpistas.

More recent events in Bolivia, Burkina Faso, Mali, Myanmar, Sudan, Thailand and Yemen suggest that armies are still enemies of parliaments, but the main forces threatening the integrity of parliaments are nowadays different. They seem more banal. Their rhythm is different. But these new threats, if left untreated, are bound in the long run to destroy parliaments as effectively as happened a century ago in the heartlands of Europe.

What are these new sources of ruination? Most obviously, rising tides of reputational damage are lapping around parliament’s doorsteps. Cynicism, grumbling, ressentiment and angry citizens’ protests are becoming commonplace. On an already overheated planet, parliaments are said to be hot air chambers, mere talk shops, fabricators of unreality, quarrelsome kindergartens, warehouses of division, irrelevance and incompetence. Parliaments are the butt of bitter jokes. My Irish working class father – who knew something of the 1605 Gunpowder Treason Plot by supporters of Catholic Spain to blow up England’s House of Lords – liked to say that only one man ever entered parliament with honest intentions, and that was Guy Fawkes.

Tomfoolery and contempt for politicians hurt and harm parliaments from the outside, but just as worrying are the forces of decadence within the walls of parliaments. There’s not just the grandstanding, slam-bang rancour, misogyny and cluelessness of more than a few politicians. Or the ‘dead hand of party discipline’, as Michael Ignatieff put it.

Parliaments are materially corrupted by the combined forces of lobbyists, dark money merchants and revolving doors. In Washington DC, this tangled complex of government agencies, think tanks, corporations, academics and lobbyists with big toes in the lawmaking world of legislatures is known (for obvious reasons) as ‘the blob’.

Something similar is happening in the European Union where, in Brussels alone, nearly 12,000 organisations on the current voluntary EU lobby register declare that each year they spend a total of around 1.8 billion euros on their craft. At least 7,500 organisations operate without scrutiny in and around the European Parliament. Whatever is thought of the ethics of lobbying, the fact is government by moonlight is a growing problem in every parliamentary democracy. Mandatory accountability registers and comprehensive integrity checks to prevent ‘Qatargate’ corruption scandals and to ensure ethical fair play among lobbyists are typically in short supply.

India’s lower chamber Lok Sabha is the nightmare instance of what happens when lobbying, dirty money, shady deals, blackmail and criminality get the upper hand. In what’s known as the world’s largest democracy, more money is spent on elections than in the United States, even though average per capita income is only 3 per cent of US levels.

There’s no state funding for political parties and no proper regulation of party finances. 75 per cent of party funding comes from ‘unknown’ sources, including tax-free electoral bonds bought from the state-owned Bank of India (SBI) and anonymously deposited into the parties’ registered bank accounts. An estimated one-quarter of total election campaign expenditure goes directly to voters as cash and gifts. The upshot is that in Modi’s India parliament becomes a place of business deals, organised crime and ‘resort politics’ (an Indian specialty: party bosses buying off recalcitrant lawmakers in luxury hotel hideaways).1 Following the 2019 elections, unsurprisingly, 43 per cent of MPs in the directly elected Lok Sabha had declared criminal cases against them (self-declaration is an election rule); 29 per cent confessed to ‘serious’ criminal charges, which include murder, attempted murder, kidnapping, rape and other crimes against women.

India’s controversial new ‘temple of democracy’ (Narendra Modi) opened in May 2023 (Press Information Bureau on behalf of Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs, Government of India).

The Indian case shows how, in the name of democracy, parliaments can slowly degrade into mere meetings of more or less corrupted souls. The old saying that the word politics comes from poly, meaning many, and ticks, meaning bloodsucking parasites, then applies with a cruel vengeance. The decadence is perfected when parliaments fall victim to executive capture, to what Thomas Jefferson originally called ‘elective despotism’. In more than a few of today’s democracies, the centre of gravity of government is shifting from parliaments towards media-spun presidential rule. Take note how growing numbers of political oligarchs do everything they can to prorogue their parliaments, take decisions without consultation, all the while ignoring calls for accountability. They boast, contradict themselves and lie with impunity. Their media performances are reality shows. Excrement without nutrient – commonly called bullshit – is their specialty.

When this colonization of parliaments happens, the spirit of the León cortes is replaced by the mantra of Charles de Gaulle: that politics is much too serious a matter to be left to time-wasting, dithering politicians. The trend resembles a slow-motion coup d’état. It is backed by tactics such as government whipping, gag orders, gerrymandering and voter deregistration, emergency rule, compulsory budget limits, and the punishment of dissenting members. There are also kickbacks and favours and, lest we underestimate, sly efforts to outflank parliaments and silence their committees with the help of hand-picked, loyal bureaucrats, journalists, judges and other high officials, as Donald J. Trump attempted during his post-2016 presidency.

Things grow worse when populist parties and their demagogues get their paws on the levers of government. Populism accelerates the transition to elective despotism. Populists like Erdoğan, Kais Saied, Vučić, López Obrador and Kaczyński favour executive rule. They have a taste for prorogued legislatures, or what the English used to call rump parliaments: chambers that resemble chunks of rotting meat infected with maggots, parliamentary representatives who in the name of the people do little more than serve their executive masters on bended knees.

Things grow much worse when populist governments de-regulate, privatize and commodify public services. When neo-liberalism gets the upper hand, parliaments are blindsided. They become complicit in the growth of what should be called democracy exclusion zones: self-regulating banks, lawless tax havens, secret military-industrial complexes, and buccaneer data-harvesting media corporations which elude parliamentary scrutiny and legislative restraint.

The final part discusses the future of parliaments as watchdogs. Please continue reading here.

About the author

John Keane is Professor of Politics at the University of Sydney and Professorial Fellow at the WZB (Berlin). His latest book is The Shortest History of Democracy (2022), which has already been published in more than 12 languages.

  1. See Chowdhury & Keane (2021), To Kill a Democracy, Oxford University Press. ↩︎
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Why Parliaments? Part 1

The invention of the cortes model

By John Keane

This is the first part of a keynote address, delivered in the presence of King Felipe VI, at the conference to commemorate the International Day of Parliamentarism hosted by the Inter Pares: EU Global Project to Strengthen the Capacity of Parliaments (Cortes Generales, León, Spain, June 30, 2023).

The second part of the keynote discussing past and current threats to parliaments can be read here and the third part on the future of parliaments as watchdogs here.

Cloisters of San Isidoro, the place where the first cortes met in León, northern Spain, in 1188 CE (John Keane).

More than eight centuries ago, in these magnificent sandstone cloisters where we are gathered, a young king convened the world’s first parliament of representatives. The beginning was breathtakingly unexpected, a surprise so startling and precious that later generations jostled to lay claim to its fame. In England, politicians and historians have long been fond of saying that their House of Commons is the Mother of Parliaments. The ‘little room’ in London’s Palace of Westminster, said Winston Churchill a century ago, serves as ‘the shrine of the World’s liberties’. The parliamentary historian and aspiring Liberal politician A.F. Pollard repeated the claim that parliaments were ‘incomparably the greatest gift of the English people to the civilization of the world’. My La Vida y Muerte de la Democracia (2018) politely questioned this English prejudice. It showed how, in the spring month of March 1188, in the walled, former Roman town of León, a full generation before King John’s Magna Carta of 1215, Alfonso IX did something extraordinary: he invented an instrument of government soon to be called a cortes, or parliament. A politically autonomous space where differences of opinion were freely debated and laws made peacefully based on negotiated agreements among representatives of various social interests drawn from a wide geographic radius.

The remarkable invention came laced with ironies. The cortes was among Europe’s first precious gifts to the world of modern representative democracy, yet the unfashionable word ‘democracy’ played no role in its birth. The world’s first parliament stood for the open acceptance of differences, yet it was a child of recolonisation and empire building. Its birth was a moment in the Reconquista, a bitter military struggle of Christians to snatch fields and towns from the Muslims of northern Iberia, to set Spain on a course to become the greatest political power in early modern Europe.

At the epicentre of these ironies stood King Alfonso IX of León (1188-1230). At the ripe age of seventeen, returning from exile in Portugal, he accepted the crown of a kingdom beset with military, monetary and morale troubles. The young king was inexperienced, wet behind the ears, but he caught his doubters and foes off guard. He sprang a big surprise. Was he the bullfighter so sure of his coming demise that fear lost its grip and courage enabled his fightback? Did exile teach him the art of historical timing, the precious sixth sense of knowing what will work and what won’t work in any given circumstance? Had he been inspired by the royal meeting (curia) convened in neighbouring Castile the year before, when town representatives (maiores) were among the dignitaries who assembled to confirm the right of accession to the throne of Queen Berenguela, whom he later married? We can’t be sure.

Representatives (known as procuradores) at the León cortes of 1188 (John Keane).

What’s clear is that Alfonso chose to fight his way out of a tight corner by convening a first-ever meeting with representatives of the leading local estates. Gambling with his crown, making compromises that might have destroyed his kingly powers, young Alfonso IX turned to the local nobility, the warrior aristocrats who were committed in their bones to the reconquest of their lands. He called as well on the bishops of the church, the estate that saw itself as the guardian of souls, and the spiritual protector of God’s lands; and he summoned the citizens of the towns (cives), moneyed ‘good men’ (boni homines) respected for their role as elected officers of the town councils called fueros.

It was from inside this medieval triangle comprising the nobles, bishops and urban citizens – the representatives of soldiers, souls and money – that the modern practice of parliamentary representation was born. It was one of those magical moments when the participants couldn’t possibly have known the world-historical significance of what they were doing.

What happened in León wasn’t breaking news. This wasn’t yet the age of breaking news, but the first-ever cortes, as contemporaries soon christened it, radically altered the poetry of politics. It gave a new meaning to the word itself, which until then had been the local term for both the town where a king resides and a city council whose representatives made proposals and demands and granted services to a monarch.

As for the word representation (procurador), there’s an outside chance that locals had absorbed the notion from local Muslims, for whom a legal representative (wākil) was a religious judge chosen by a merchant to act in his stead, for instance handling his lawsuits and acting as the merchant’s banker and postmaster.

The members of the first cortes were certainly familiar with the Latin term procurator. It referred to a man who acts as an agent of another man, with his consent. It referred to someone authorised to appear before a court to defend another person in a lawsuit or dispute. It was used as well to speak of an official (known as the procurador general) who took care of the property and wellbeing of the city, or who acted as a guardian of the interests of the poor (procurador de pobres).

A great refusal

The León parliament transformed the language of politics. It was also a great refusal of divine, absolute monarchy. This cortes was no gathering where monarchs waved the flags of courtly pomp to impress their subjects on bended knee. Against the backdrop of war, the old medieval custom of convening meetings such as the German Hoftage and English witanegemots to swear fealty to a sovereign’s will was cast aside. Tough bargaining among conflicting social interests in the presence of the monarch was the new custom. A parliamentary monarchy was born.

The first parliament was held in the cloisters of the church of San Isidoro, named in honour of the good bishop of Seville famous for his maxim that only those who govern well are true monarchs. It produced up to fifteen decrees (the authenticity of several is disputed) that together amounted to something like a constitutional charter.

The king promised that in matters of war and peace, pacts and treaties he would hereon consult and accept the advice of the bishops, nobles and ‘good men’ of the towns. It was agreed that property and security of residence were inviolable. The representatives accepted that judicial proceedings and the laws they produced would be respected; and that the king’s realm would be guided, wherever possible, by the good customs (mores bonos) and general laws inherited from earlier times – the so-called Book or Liber Iudicorum from the time of the Visigoths. It was also agreed that there would be future assemblies of the king and the estates.

We need to pay attention to the profound historical and political significance of what happened in León. The assembly was the first recorded gathering of all three estates; the interests of the towns had hitherto been ignored in meetings convened by the monarchs of the region. We could say that the surprise inclusion of the towns was the beginning of many centuries of social and political struggle to equalize parliamentary representation – a struggle that’s nowadays still unfinished. But there was more.

This assembly of representatives of the nobility, church and towns promised a new way of governing. The cortes method of handling power supposed that guarantees of fair play could foster political deals among conflicting interests, thus avoiding the use of naked force. In striking contrast, say, to ancient Athens, where citizens feared division and supposed that democracy required a unified sense of political community, the cortes rested on the opposite precept: on the inevitability of competing and conflicting interests. And, for the sake of the common good, the desirability of forging peaceful compromises among them.

Putting things more abstractly, we could say that the cortes redefined politics in four ways. Its embrace of representation had insurgent, disruptive effects. It sharpened people’s sense of the contingency or alterability of power relations. The cortes questioned arbitrary power. It radicalised the old feudal notion of the contractual right of vassals to resist unjust treatment by their overlords. The cortes encouraged representatives to muster the courage to tell the king to go to hell.

Well before the age of party politics, the cortes also underlined the point that representatives don’t necessarily share the same realities and that parliaments are therefore spaces in which reality itself becomes contestable and negotiable. The cortes anticipated Cervantes. It destroyed the metaphysics of reality: within its walls, representatives affirmed that things always have at least two sides- that the windmills of hard reality are inescapably shaped by interpretations that lend them significance.

But the cortes had a third important effect: it offered the possibility of turning disagreements about reality into binding agreements in support of a common good. During these years, Spain was not yet a country. It was very much an invertebrate polity, to use the words of Ortega y Gasset, a space paralysed by social divisions, rebellions and threats of war. The cortes offered a positive alternative: combining social divisions into a more integrated polity, supported by people with straightened spines; a people bound together by their reliance upon parliamentary negotiations and agreed laws backed by the king.

Finally, the cortes created the space for long-distance government. It widened its footprint. It improved the chances of reaching workable agreements among otherwise mutually hostile groups by limiting the numbers of decision makers, some of whom were required to travel great distances. The cortes showed that representative governments could rule their subjects at arm’s length without losing their trust and consent. The government of large territories was possible exactly because the representatives involved in making decisions were entitled to snap at the heels of the monarch, to defend their respective interests in his presence.

The next part discusses past and current threats to parliaments. Please continue reading here.

About the author

John Keane is Professor of Politics at the University of Sydney and Professorial Fellow at the WZB (Berlin). His latest book is The Shortest History of Democracy (2022), which has already been published in more than 12 languages.

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Parliamentary scrutiny: what is it, and why does it matter?

Parliamentary scrutiny is at the heart of UK politics. In this post, Meg Russell and Lisa James examine the four key methods of parliamentary scrutiny, and offer proposals on how to strengthen it, calling for better behaviour by government and strong engagement from backbenchers.

Background

Parliament lies at the heart of UK politics. The legislature is a core institution in any democracy, but is particularly important in the UK, due to our tradition of ‘parliamentary sovereignty’. The government is dependent on the confidence of the House of Commons, which can potentially remove it from office. Parliamentary consent is required for primary legislation, and parliament is a particularly central and important body in holding ministers to account day-to-day.

This makes scrutiny – the detailed examination of policy proposals, actions and plans – one of the essential roles of parliament. Other functions include representation, and serving as a space for national debate – which in turn feed into parliament’s scrutiny function.

This briefing summarises why parliamentary scrutiny matters, what different kinds of parliamentary scrutiny exist at Westminster, some recent concerns about the decline of scrutiny, and ways in which it can be protected and strengthened.

Why does parliamentary scrutiny matter?

The government is responsible for much day-to-day decision-making, in terms of national policy formulation and implementation. But the government itself is not directly elected, and depends for its survival on the continued confidence of the House of Commons. This makes parliament one of the central checks and balances in the constitution – arguably the most central one of all. To provide government accountability, one of the core functions of parliament is scrutiny.

Parliament is a very public arena, with debates televised and transcribed on the public record. Hence parliamentary scrutiny means that ministers must justify their policies in front of an audience, which provides transparency and accountability, and helps to ensure that policies are seen as legitimate.

Crucially, parliament contains many and varied political voices. MPs are elected from diverse constituencies all over the UK, and represent different political parties. The House of Lords includes members from a wide range of backgrounds, many of whom are independent of political party, and some of whom are respected experts in their field. Parliamentary debates, and other mechanisms such as committee calls for evidence, also enable specialist groups and individual citizens to hear about policy and feed in their expertise, evidence and concerns. All of this ensures that different perspectives are heard in parliament when considering government policy.

The mere existence of parliamentary scrutiny, given its public nature and diverse contributors, can have an important effect. Even where nothing visibly changes as a result (e.g. if a government bill remains unamended) studies show that ‘anticipated reactions’ are important. Policy is more carefully thought through because ministers and officials know that it will be scrutinised by parliament. Hence scrutiny improves the quality of decision-making; and if it is lacking, policy may be poorer as a result.

What are the key forms of parliamentary scrutiny?

Scrutiny takes place both in the Commons and in the Lords, and both on the floor of the chamber and in various kinds of committees. At Westminster, even processes not focused directly on government policy require a ministerial response. Scrutiny and accountability thereby come through numerous mechanisms. These same forums also to some extent subject opposition parties to scrutiny, in the sense that they too must set out their own views on the public record.

The key forms and venues for scrutiny are set out below. In a number of these areas there have been recent concerns expressed about weakness or decline in scrutiny, which deserve attention.

1. Scrutiny of legislation

Most obviously, parliament conducts scrutiny of government legislation, and also of private members’ bills, with slightly different mechanisms operating in the Commons and the Lords.

Despite occasional backbench rebellions resulting in visible government climbdowns, scrutiny in the Commons is often seen as weak. But this can be overstated, given that ministers think carefully about the acceptability of bills to MPs before they are introduced. Changes in the Lords also often respond to concerns raised (including behind the scenes) in the Commons.

Nonetheless, adequate bill scrutiny depends on government cooperation. Ministers must ensure that bills are in good shape before introduction, and (given government’s extensive control of the Commons agenda) allow sufficient time for debate. They also need to be willing to listen and respond to reasonable points made by parliamentarians. There have been recent concerns about bills being rushed, and about late government amendments.

There are various known weaknesses in the legislative scrutiny process. Commons public bill committees are temporary and nonspecialist, unlike in many other legislatures, and the process of evidence-taking could be improved. Meanwhile, there is no formal evidence-taking stage for bills introduced in the Lords, or that have their committee stage in the Commons on the floor. This limits opportunities for expert input.

Perhaps the biggest concern in recent years has been about the growing use of delegated (or ‘secondary’) legislation, and increasing powers delegated to ministers in bills. This legislation receives very limited parliamentary scrutiny, raising clear accountability gaps if it implements major policy. Particular controversies emerged in this area during the Covid-19 pandemic, but overuse of delegated legislation has long been criticised, including by parliamentary committees, and expert groups such as the Hansard Society.

2. Parliamentary questions and government statements

Written and oral questions in both chambers put ministers on the spot about policy. Aside from scheduled questions, more ad hoc urgent questions allow sustained questioning on a topic, and their use has grown in recent years. Voluntary government statements take a similar form – and when not offered on key topics may trigger an urgent question.

Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) are the highest profile forum and have long been subject to criticism for their ‘bearpit’ and adversarial nature. They attract attention, but are unrepresentative of most forms of questioning, which can be more constructive but are lower profile. There are regular calls to reform PMQs but even they may have important ‘anticipated reactions’ functions.

The Cabinet Manual states that ‘the most important announcements of government policy should, in the first instance, be made to Parliament’, but there have been many recent complaints about ministers flouting this rule. This again occurred particularly frequently during the pandemic, but has continued – often to the displeasure of the Commons Speaker. Making major announcements outside parliament denies the opportunity for the kind of sustained questioning and democratic accountability that occurs when making announcements to MPs. Follow-up statements or urgent questions sometimes follow, but may be lower profile.

3. Opposition, backbench and adjournment debates

Parliament holds various kinds of debates in non-government time, including Commons backbench business debates, opposition day debates and adjournment debates. Irrespective of the topic, ministers must always appear and explain the government’s position, creating additional accountability. Often such debates are directly focused on government policy, and/or on topics that ministers would prefer to avoid.

Backbench business debates and opposition day debates may result in a vote on a substantive motion. In recent years there have been criticisms of the government’s relatively new practice of instructing MPs to abstain on opposition motions. Although decisions in these votes are not enforceable, the House of Commons Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, has suggested that this shows a ‘lack of respect for the House’.

These two forms of debate are guaranteed a minimum number of days per session in standing orders. But recent years have seen a number of long sessions (2010–12, 2017–19, 2019–21), which gives excessive control to the government over their scheduling.

4. Select committees

The select committees are seen as jewels in Westminster’s crown. They are unusual in international terms for conducting extensive and careful non-legislative scrutiny, for their nonpartisan ethos, and for generally producing unanimous reports. Committees in the Commons mostly shadow government departments, while those in the Lords are more crosscutting.

Committees gather expert and other evidence (including some recently using citizens’ assemblies to elicit considered public views). Ministers are often called to give evidence to the committees, as well as the government being required to respond to their reports. There have been occasional concerns about ministers cancelling committee appearances, but this is the exception.

Research shows that, while the select committees have little ‘hard power’ to force changes, they can be influential through putting topics onto the political agenda, feeding valuable evidence into wider debates, and having an ‘anticipated reactions’ effect – through forcing ministers to consider policy carefully, because they know they may have to publicly explain it to committees later.

In the Commons, select committee structures are routinely changed when government departments are reorganised. This can cause concerns – for example most recently when the abolition of the International Trade Committee left little opportunity for scrutiny by MPs of important international agreements (though such scrutiny remains in the Lords).

How can parliamentary scrutiny be strengthened?

There have been some welcome changes to mechanisms for parliamentary scrutiny in relatively recent years, such as the election of House of Commons select committee members and chairs (since 2010), and introduction of evidence-taking by Commons public bill committees (in 2006).

But this briefing has mentioned various weaknesses in parliamentary scrutiny processes, including recent concerns about decline – for example through primary legislation being rushed or subject to late government amendments, and an overreliance on delegated legislation. Recent polling shows that the public wants new laws to be subject to full parliamentary scrutiny. Improved government behaviour could make a good deal of difference in this area, but the Hansard Society has also proposed procedural changes.

Proposals exist for strengthening Commons public bill committees – e.g. by injecting greater permanence and specialism – and for publishing more government bills in draft. The Commons Procedure Committee has proposed improvements to the private members’ bill process.

Government control of the House of Commons agenda creates weaknesses, including over the timetabling of bills, ministers’ ability to withhold backbench and opposition days, and parliament’s inability to recall itself from recess. The Constitution Unit has proposed changes in this area.

Fundamentally, improved scrutiny depends on better behaviour by government, but also on strong engagement by backbenchers and other non-government parliamentarians. Even seemingly ‘toothless’ scrutiny mechanisms can have important effects, by subjecting government policy to public exposure and debate. Both government and non-government parliamentarians therefore have important responsibilities to maintain the system of parliamentary scrutiny – in order to uphold good quality government decision-making, and the legitimacy of politics in the eyes of the public.

This blog is part of the UCL Constitution Unit’s briefing series designed to inform policy-makers and the public about key constitutional issues and democratic debates. Our briefings draw on international evidence and examine both long-term trends and current developments in the UK. This is part of our project on constitutional principles and the health of democracy.

It was originally published on the Constitution Unit’s blog and is re-published here with thanks.

About the authors

Meg Russell FBA is Professor of British and Comparative Politics at UCL and Director of the Constitution Unit.

Lisa James is a Research Fellow at the Constitution Unit.

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The Blindspots of Deliberative Democracy

By John Keane

During the past two decades, more than a few green-minded scholars have championed ‘deliberative democracy’1 or ‘deliberative ecological democracy’, understood as ‘decentralised, organic and grassroots democratic practices that embody ecological values and give greater weight to the interests of nonhumans and future generations’ (Schlosberg et al., 2019). These green theories of deliberative democracy are less than convincing. They suffer multiple flaws. Their sense of history is poor. There is little or no recognition of the way their protests against the fetish of elections and search for new mechanisms of public accountability squarely belong to the age of monitory democracy. Many speak as if they are ancient Greeks; ignoring core features of classical Greek democracy such as slavery, discrimination against women and the worship of deities, they like to say that ancient Athens is the protype of a new 21st-century form of citizens’ assembly democracy ‘where people come together and their voices are heard and translated directly into policy’ (Russon Gilman & Eisenstein, 2023).

There are additional flaws. Deliberative democrats’ penchant for ‘inclusion’ and ‘participation’ through small-scale, face-to-face deliberative forums begs difficult strategic questions about scalability, including whether micro-level schemes (featuring a few dozen human participants) can be replicated in time-space-variable nested ways at the national, regional and global levels, without relying on structures of human and non-human representation that are deemed antithetical to citizen ‘inclusion’ and ‘participation’. Deliberative democrats downplay the conceptual and normative challenges posed by the ‘artificiality’ of small-scale, pilot scheme experiments in which indefatigable citizen deliberators, supposedly with a plenitude of free time on their hands, are expected to behave as if they are rational and reasonable and dispassionate communicators in a good-natured scholarly seminar.2

Structural constraints on the efficacy of deliberative experiments are typically underestimated, or ignored outright. How or whether the big money and big power of corporations, military-industrial complexes and other vested interests wedded to the old carbon-fueled energy regime is to be reined in by citizens’ assemblies isn’t made clear. What’s more, champions of deliberative democracy typically suppose that there is, or could be, a ‘general will’ consensus about the meaning of ‘ecological values’ crafted through calm, reasoned, democratic deliberation. Resembling 19th-century Christian democrats and champions of the parliamentary road to socialism, ecological democrats fancifully suppose that democratic means (public deliberation in assemblies) have a secret affinity with cherished substantive ends (ecological values). Following in the footsteps of ancient democrats, they dislike faction and disagreement. They prefer ‘harmony’. They are convinced that rational, face-to-face deliberation produces synthesis from division and actionable, working agreements geared to policy implementation. Inspired originally by the work of Jürgen Habermas, many ecological deliberative democrats secretly want to recapture the spirit of assembly democracy. Convinced that green politics heralds the rebirth of ‘participative democracy’3, perhaps even the end of elections and politicians, they misread and downplay the strategic and normative importance of courts, general elections, media platforms, integrity commissions and other power-monitoring institutions. Generally, they seem blind to the ubiquity and functional necessity and positive effects of representation within political life.4

About the author

John Keane is Professor of Politics at the University of Sydney and Professorial Fellow at the WZB (Berlin). His latest book is The Shortest History of Democracy (2022), which has already been published in more than 12 languages.

  1. See John S. Dryzek, The Politics of the Earth: Environmental Discourses (New York 2013); and the introduction to Deliberative Democracy and Beyond: Liberals, Critics, Contestations (New York 2002), where the ‘essence of democracy’ is said to be ‘deliberation, as opposed to voting, interest aggregation, constitutional rights, or even self-government’. What is called ‘authentic deliberation’ is ‘the requirement that communication induce reflection upon preferences in non-coercive fashion’. It is claimed that the emphasis on deliberation in this sense renews concern with ‘the authenticity of democracy: the degree to which democratic control is substantive rather than symbolic, and engaged by competent citizens’ (pp. 1-2 ff). ↩︎
  2. Kevin J. Elliott, Democracy For Busy People (Chicago 2023). ↩︎
  3. Examples include Tim Flannery’s Here on Earth: An Argument for Hope (Melbourne 2010), which speaks of a ‘globally participative democracy’ (p. 252) using the example of the Vote Earth campaign during the 2011 Copenhagen negotiations, a partnership between Google Earth and WWF’s Earth Hour which managed to distribute electronic ballot boxes across thousands of web portals, then to urge people to ‘vote Earth’ in support of a robust outcome of the negotiations, guided by the visionary principle (as Flannery puts it) of ‘online elections, organised by the people, of the people and for the people’ (ibid); and ‘From Another Angle: Democracy, with Claudia Chwalisz’, (Carnegie Council Podcasts, April 18, 2023). ↩︎
  4. The merits and weaknesses of the theory of undistorted communication of Jürgen Habermas are detailed in my Public Life and Late Capitalism (Cambridge and New York, 1984). ↩︎