Dr Meheret Ayenew and Tsedey Mekonnen discuss the rapid increase in the proportion of female MPs in Ethiopia in a blog to mark International Women’s Day
Category: Blog
Relationships and networks have a big impact on parliamentary engagement. Understanding these dynamics is crucial for those academics looking to work with Parliament as part of disseminating their research. Marc Geddes, Katharine Dommett and Brenton Prosser outline why academics must be able to ‘rub shoulders’ with parliamentary staff, building shared understandings and personal trust which can circumvent common barriers around accessibility of research.
By Dr Catherine Bochel, Reader in Policy Studies, University of Lincoln
In a post-Brexit world, the way Parliament works and engages with the public is more important than ever.
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Promoting Gender Equality in Parliaments
By Jacqui Smith and Kristen Sample
Women account for half of the global population, yet represent less than a quarter of the world’s parliamentarians. The causes behind this imbalance are myriad and multi-faceted, based on culturally rooted gender norms, political institutions, and economic disparities. In other words, a woman who is elected to parliament has beaten the odds.
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Data in Parliament? It’s complicated…
By Michael Smethurst and Ben Worthy
We’re the data and search team in the Parliamentary Digital Service. We’re currently working on:
- Building a data platform to power the website. [1]
- Designing and developing a data model that properly ties together parliamentary people, processes and outputs.
- Improving search internally and externally.
This is easy to write but difficult to do. Mainly because it’s complicated.
By Paul Seaward
A short article on the BBC website, written after SNP members burst into applause when their leader in the Commons, Angus Robertson, spoke on 27 May 2015, pointed out that while clapping is not regarded as proper in the House of Commons, there have been a number of occasions on which it has happened. It cited Tony Blair’s last speech in the House of Commons on 27 June 2007, and the speech by Charles Walker on the debate on the conduct of the Speaker on 26 March 2015. Since then, there have been more: a tribute to Jo Cox on 20 June 2016; and David Cameron’s last Prime Minister’s Question Time on Wednesday 13 July 2016. There have been other, earlier, incidents: Robin Cook’s resignation statement on 18 March 2003 was strongly applauded in some quarters of the House, with some Members trying to convert it into a standing ovation. It’s tempting to argue that this tendency to ignore old conventions, and burst into applause, is new – the product perhaps of a society more apt to wear its emotions on its sleeve. It’s notable that the Modernisation Committee of the Commons considered the question of applause in 1998 in response, as it said, to some new Members, who, they said, found it ‘incomprehensible’ that applause was not allowed.
By Kevin Davies and Cristina Leston-Bandeira
Over the last decade, public engagement has become a key role for parliaments. This is shown in the reinforcement of a wide range of types of activity, from expanding the scope of visits to parliament, developing educational resources about the institution, to introducing out-facing programmes actively seeking to engage communities with the work of parliament. Whilst this has represented a clear shift in the way parliaments engage with the public, most of this activity has tended to develop in parallel to actual parliamentary business – as an aside activity.
On the last afternoon of the final parliamentary session before the Christmas recess, Theresa May could put it off no longer and appeared before the Liaison Committee. Here Ben Worthy, viewing the session from outside, considers how she performed. Mark Bennister, utilising his new parliamentary academic fellowship looks at the Committee performance having watched the session from the Committee room.
By Peter Dorey
House of Lords reform remains unfinished business, and looks likely to remain so for a long time yet. The preamble to the 1911 Parliament Act portentously proclaimed that Lords reform was ‘an urgent question which brooks no delay’, yet more than a century later, there have been only sporadic and inchoate reforms. Moreover, these have often been motivated by calculations of partisan advantage, even when depicted as being derived from important political principles. After the 1911 Act, the remainder of the twentieth century witnessed only three further laws pertaining to House of Lords reform: the 1949 Parliament Act, which reduced the Second Chamber’s power of delay (veto) of legislation from two years to one; the 1958 Life Peerages Act, which established a new category of appointed peer to sit alongside the hereditary peers; the 1999 House of Lords Reform Act, which removed most of the hereditary peers, but allowed 92 to remain pending further reform.
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2016 in Parliament
Please note that this blog piece was originally published on the Crick Centre blog, and has been re-posted here with the author’s permission.
As 2016 comes to an end, we await the Supreme Court’s verdict on whether the Government can invoke Article 50 without the authority of Parliament. Having the UK’s highest court consider the constitutional role of Parliament has been one consequence of a referendum which hadn’t even been scheduled at the start of 2016, but dominated a turbulent year in the Palace of Westminster.