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The Butterfly Effect: Representation as Fractal Politics

What does a coastline have in common with effective rhetoric? Each component resembles something bigger, and bigger, and bigger. And what can this sort of fractal pattern show us about politics? To Alex Prior, fractals illustrate successful representation, and the impulses that drive it

‘As above, so below’

In launching the ‘Science of Democracy’ blog series, Jean-Paul Gagnon argues that democracy’s words require a new narrative. Agustín Goenaga credits Gagnon with a ‘living archive’ of stories. As I have argued previously, the best way of understanding narratives and stories – and their importance to democracy – is through their fractal nature.

Fractals are patterns; we see them constantly. They are in trees, lightning, coastlines. If you zoom in on any of those images, they still resemble themselves. This is self-similarity, a defining characteristic of fractals.

Self-similarity is a defining characteristic of fractals and of representation, which makes present what is not physically there

It is also a characteristic of representation (in its many forms): ‘making something present’, typically by acting on something or someone’s behalf. The notion that we can make present what is not physically there (a constituency, an idea, or anything else) is central to my research on parliamentary systems. Such systems depend on representatives making others’ voices and values present.

Fractal politics?

Self-similarity – and recursion (the repetition of a structure with continual reference, at each stage, to the structure itself) – is applicable to politics in many ways. For example, some advocate ‘fractal democracy’ as a practical model of governance. Says Jasper Sky: ‘Groups of seven people each choose one representative, and those seven representatives then meet to choose a representative, and so on, up several levels of representation…[with] the person at the top of the fractal hierarchy to be held fully accountable at every level.’

Fractals also give us a conceptual framework for politics. ‘Fractal politics’, writes Gordon Fletcher, ‘reflects the sociological sensibility that people seek out self-similarity in the form of opinions and worldviews that align with their own identity’. Fractals can help us understand not only political communication and support, but the ways in which we interact with our own social reality.

But how can we study (or even conceptualise) these opinions and those who ‘make’ them? And what does it really mean to seek out self-similarity (i.e., to seek ourselves) in the opinions and worldviews of others? The answer to both questions lies in representation.

A fractal reading of representation

Fractals can be read into theoretical works on representation, such as those of Derrida, who contends that ‘[e]verything begins by referring back (par le renvoi), that is to say, does not begin’. Derrida’s description centres around self-similarity and recursion (‘referring back’), as well as infinite replicability (‘does not begin’).

So far, so fractal. But fractals are even more relevant to contemporary representation theory. Saward’s theory of the representative claim identifies how ‘[m]akers of representative claims suggest to the potential audience: (1) you are/are part of this audience, (2) you should accept this view, this construction — this representation — of yourself, and (3) you should accept me as speaking and acting for you.’

Representation is a ‘claim’ made to an audience about the maker of the claim (a politician, for example), about what they ‘stand for’, and about that audience

Saward shows us how representation works. It is a ‘claim’ (or a series of claims) made to an audience about the maker of the claim (a politician, for example), about what they ‘stand for’, and about that audience.

A representative claim can be made at different scales (e.g., to a person, a group, a region), sometimes simultaneously. It is also accepted or rejected (i.e., interpreted) by audiences at many different scales (e.g., myself as an individual, as a citizen, as a person, etc). Fractals are invaluable in helping to conceptualise the way that representative claims in politics and beyond connect (or fail to connect) with their audience.

Effective (and ineffective) representative claims, in fractals

Consider Obama’s effective ‘yes we can’ 2008 slogan. People saw themselves within this slogan, at many (potentially infinite) scales:

Figure 1: An effective representative claim

Representative claim 'Yes we can' mapped out down to a fractal level, in a triangle figure

The left image resembles the right image at every scale. Effective representative claims resemble the audience at every level; audience members identify themselves within (with/in) the claim. We thereby read effective representative claims as successful appeals to self-similarity.

This process is not always successful. On 4 June 1958, against the backdrop of the Algerian War of Independence and the collapse of the Fourth Republic, Charles De Gaulle arrived in Algiers and uttered the famous words Je vous ai compris! [I understood you!]. To this day it is unclear who De Gaulle was addressing: Algerians? French Algeria? Colonists? The military?

Figure 2: An ineffective representative claim

Representative claim 'I understood you' mapped as a square figure, that is not fractal

The failure of this representative claim lies in a failed appeal to self-similarity. It failed to reflect (or even define) an audience at any scale.

Self-similarity matters for the maker of the representative claim, not just the audience. Obama included himself (‘we’) in a claim of common purpose, with/in which the audience recognised themselves. De Gaulle’s claim (‘I understood you’) lacks self-similarity. Audience members were left wondering who ‘they’ were, who De Gaulle was, and who/what he ‘stood for’.

Why fractals matter

The mathematician Edward Norton Lorenz is closely associated with chaos theory and the ‘butterfly effect’, by which small initial variations eventually yield drastic outcomes. For example – a person writes a short essay in Canberra; later, I see a broad and rich international academic debate. Fractals are a component of chaos, and a means of visualising it.

Studying representation in action (via fractals) clarifies the appeal of self-similarity, and why some statements are all-encompassing in their alienation

They also provide a means of studying narratives and stories within a ‘science of democracy’. Moreover, studying representation in action (via fractals) clarifies the appeal of self-similarity. We seek patterns, and we seek ourselves. This matters in terms of content and context. Alongside the political statements and patterns discussed earlier, consider that Obama reflected an audience (‘we’) descriptively and symbolically, in a way that De Gaulle could not, and arguably never claimed to (‘I…you’).

Fractals show us how ambiguous (but ostensibly all-encompassing) political and other statements are, in practice. They are all-encompassing only inasmuch as they alienate everyone at the same time. This mattered in 1958, it mattered in 2008, and it matters today.

By Alex Prior, Lecturer in Politics with International Relations, London South Bank University

Alex’s research focuses on public engagement with parliaments and other political institutions. His work also discusses the usefulness of narratives and storytelling in conceptualising, as well as strengthening, political engagement. He tweets @VoterEngagement

This post was originally posted on The Loop blog. See the original post here: https://theloop.ecpr.eu/the-butterfly-effect-representation-as-fractal-politics/

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Breaking the Glass Chamber: Women, Politics and Parliament, 1945-1997

By Anna Muggeridge

Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, women struggled to achieve political representation at the highest levels and at times, what progress and gains had been made could be lost. The number of women sitting in the House of Commons at any one time, for example, did not slowly but steadily increase. Fewer women were elected in the general election of 1951 than had been elected in 1950; fewer in 1966 than in 1964, and fewer in 1979 than (October) 1974. 1979 famously saw the first woman Prime Minister, but Margaret Thatcher’s relationship with feminism and the wider women’s movement is but one contentious aspect of her premiership. Notably, Thatcher only appointed one woman to a Cabinet position (Baroness Young, who served for just two years) and when Thatcher herself resigned and was replaced by John Major, the country had no women in Cabinet until 1992, when Gillian Shephard and Virginia Bottomley were appointed Education and Health Secretaries respectively. The first Black woman MP, Diane Abbott, was not elected until 1987, almost seven decades after the first white woman, Nancy Astor, took her seat in 1919. And in 1997, Labour’s landslide victory saw more than 100 women elected but this achievement was diminished and trivialised by labelling them ‘Blair’s Babes’. The story of women parliamentarians, and indeed women’s wider engagement with politics, through these years is therefore more nuanced and complex than an initial glance might suggest, and there is still much to be discovered about their experiences.

In September, the Mile End Institute at Queen Mary, University of London, will host a conference which seeks to bring together historians, political scientists, and sociologists to generate new conversations, relationships, and understandings of what politics meant to and for women in the second half of the twentieth century. In addition, the conference will play host to a number of current and former female members of both the House of Commons and the House of Lords, who will reflect on their own experiences, including Baroness Angela Browning, Dame Margaret Hodge, Baroness Estelle Morris, Baroness Emma Nicholson, Baroness Dawn Primarolo, Baroness Gillian Shephard, and Siân James. We will also hear from campaign groups including 50:50 Parliament and the Fawcett Society, who will lead discussions about the future of women in politics. Keynote lectures by historians, sociologists and political scientists – including Professor Laura Beers, Professor Julie Gottleib, Professor Khursheed Wadia, Professor Clarisse Berthèzene, and Professor Sarah Childs, will enable scholars to reflect on the different insights and perspectives from cutting edge research on women in political campaigns, parties and institutions.

It is only by drawing together those working in a range of disciplines, as well as those with direct experience of working in and with parliament, that a true picture of women’s experiences in politics in this period will start to emerge. More significantly, the conference offers the opportunity to develop new directions in research into women’s politics in the later twentieth century, shaping the questions and lines of enquiry of current and future researchers into this relatively understudied area of British political history.

Papers at the conference will address a variety of local, national and international themes. With talks by, for instance, Micaela Panes on women’s activism in South Wales before the 1970s; Tom Chidwick on women’s role in the campaign for a Scottish Assembly, and Charitini Ntini on women’s in the Provisional IRA during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, we ask how far national identities impacted on gendered politics in this period. Other papers explore women’s experiences on the international stage, something which has often been overlooked, such as Richard Johnson’s examination of women and Euroscepticism or Charlotte Lydia Riley’s analysis of women and British overseas development policy.

A number of talks will explore the experiences of women from minoritized backgrounds in this period. Farah Hussain’s timely keynote invites us to consider the role Muslim women play and have played within the Labour party. Beckie Rutherford asks how disabled women conceived of themselves as ‘political’, while Ashlee Christofferson will address the whiteness of ‘sex discrimination’ legislation. While there may, broadly speaking, have been progress in terms of the number of women sitting in Parliament between 1945 and 1997, there is still much opportunity to reflect on how other aspects of individuals’ identities—their race, class, sexuality or religion, for example—intersected with their gender within and outside the House of Commons.

Indeed, many of the papers at the conference will address campaigns which did not (necessarily) take place within parliament, such as Rose Debenham’s talk on the women of Greenham Common; Frances Galt’s research into women’s industrial disputes around the time of the 1970 Equal Pay Act, or Grace Heaton’s analysis of women’s roles in the campaign for the ordination of women. At the same time, other papers will consider how structures, institutions and cultures worked to exclude women: and how women sought to break down these barriers: with Emma Lundin providing a comparative perspective on gender quotas and gatekeeping strategies and Gillian Murphy reflecting on the post-war lobbying group Women for Westminster.

The conference therefore offers a unique opportunity for academics, politicians, policymakers and campaigners to come together to discuss the female political experience in the second half of the twentieth century, and, in so doing, open up new directions for current and future research. We very much hope that you will join us at the Mile End Institute at Queen Mary, University of London from Thursday 15 to Saturday 17 September. Details of how to watch the main sessions if you are not able to attend in person will be available nearer the time. You can view the full programme and sign up for tickets at the MEI website.

Dr Anna Muggeridge is Lecturer in History at the University of Worcester and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Mile End Institute.

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Reflections from Shenzhen – understanding Westminster select committees 

By Winnie Zhou

This year, the SCIE Politics Club organized multiple events on the topic of UK select committees. We’ve witnessed many meaningful debates and thoughts coming out during the process. 

At the start of the term, the Head of Humanities and Social Sciences faculty and founder of SCIE’s Politics club, Mr. Richard Driscoll introduced us to the basics of the select committee. To better answer our questions on how the select committee works in real life, Mr. Richard led us through a recent report published by the Health and Social Care and Science and Technology Committees, a select committee in the House of Commons[1]. It concluded the UK’s major lessons from Covid 19 regarding public health management by analyzing six critical areas of responses: preparedness, non-pharmaceutical intervention; social care; impact on different communities, and vaccines distribution. Within each section, specific statistics and quotations of experts are referenced. 

We further discussed the comprehensiveness of the report by reading it in detail. A problem identified in the report was the lack of resources in the NHS. The Royal College of Midwives reported that “NHS was short of over 3,000 midwives and that 40% of RCM members worked three or more hours of unpaid overtime every week, suggesting that the NHS had been ‘reliant upon the goodwill of those who staff the system.'”,[2] the specific data of which provides convincing evidence of the credibility and accuracy of the report. However, the solution explicitly given to this problem, “the experience of the demands placed on the NHS during the covid-19 pandemic should lead to a more explicit, and monitored, surge capacity being part of the long term organization and funding of the NHS”[3], seems vague and unpromising. We are concerned that an unclear short-term and long-term target may be hard to follow up. 

On January 6th, 2022, our school invited Dr. Alexandra Meakin from the University of Leeds to lecture on the select committee system in depth. A majority of our Politics Club members appreciated this opportunity and joined the event passionately. Dr Meakin showed us a detailed understanding of the working mechanism of the select committee and its composition. The lecture taught us that the select committee, usually a permanent division representing the public to examine and make recommendations to governmental policy, consists of MPs elected in the secret ballot. It conducts pre-appointed hearings with experts, goes through the written evidence submitted by experts, and ultimately forms reports to the government. 

Most interestingly, she listed some common arguments about the strengths and weaknesses of the select committee, which inspires interesting thoughts in us. For example, statistics show that the select committee’s suggestions are relatively practical, among which the executives implement over 40% of recommendations. This helps improve policymaking a lot. Also, she explained the advantages of its membership which reflects the composition of parties in the Commons. Hence, a report representing a cross-party consensus would more forcefully influence the House of Commons. 

However, she also admitted some flaws in the select committee. The cross-party composition may make the select committee less effective in giving a thorough recommendation, as reaching consensus may sacrifice some detailed plans. MPs are also busy with businesses outside the select committee, so they may not devote sufficient time to drafting a comprehensive report. Compared with the Commons in general, the select committee usually does poorly in terms of diversity. Most detrimentally, the select committee lacks formal power. They can not directly implement but merely suggest policies to the government. Nor does the committee have any mechanism to follow up the changes in governmental policies. That’s why around 60% of the recommendation provided by the committee cannot be implemented as expected. 

Dr. Alexandra Meakin’s lecture inspires interesting thoughts among our club members. We actively participated in the Q&A session to discuss further the role of the select committee. One of our members asked about how the committee balances between the power constraint on the Chair, and the consistency of the policy recommendation or the committee’s expertise. To further explain, the student considered that giving the Chair a relatively huge power to control the committee’s agenda may be a prerequisite for systematic policy recommendation over time, yet this may allow the power of the Chair to grow uncontrollably – a threat to the democracy. Dr. Meakin agreed that this conflict constitutes the core conflict within the select committee. Based on her expert knowledge, she concluded that, in practice, different chairs solve this problem with their approach. Some may lean towards reaching a consensus in the committee at the sacrifice of effectiveness, while others may take a more rigid grip to reinforce their ideas. This would also have something to do with the composition of the committee. The extent of party politics in the committee may be a crucial factor determining how fiercely effectiveness collides with consensus. 

Inspired by Dr. Meakin’s answer, another club member added a follow-up question. Because the composition of the committee reflects the composition of the Commons, the club member was wondering whether this membership benefits the majority party, and if so, to what extent the committee can still achieve its goal of supervising the government, especially over some fields at the core of party struggle. Dr. Meakin admitted the composition does somehow formally benefit the majority party while offering some counter-arguments for us to think about. For example, the backbench MPs don’t necessarily agree with the governmental policies, if not critical of it, thus are still likely to provide insightful recommendations. Also, being in the same party with the government, the MPs from the majority party are more incentivized to give constructive criticism for the governmental policies, as improving the government’s performance yields benefit in the elections. Yet, it’s correct to question the extent of criticism the committee can give. With the harsh party whip, a select committee with a majority of MPs from the majority party is unlikely to provide criticisms at the risk of infringing the government’s fundamental interests. In response, one student added another question: the select committee supervises the government, then what institution is responsible for overseeing the select committee? Dr. Meakin’s answer of “the Parliament” also led us to think about democracy in the UK. The lack of the absolute doctrine of separation of power in the UK political system may indicate the impossibility of strict supervision over the majority party’s power. 

In addition to theoretical analysis, we have seen other interesting practical questions. One student extended our previous club activity to discuss the effectiveness of policy during the Covid and how the select committee may help improve that. Another student also asked about how the lesson from the select committee may improve our work at the student council. Dr. Meakin shared constructive suggestions for us from her years of experience working for a select committees. The event ultimately concluded with our heated discussion and abundant new knowledge in our heads. 

With continued interest in the topic, we plan to organize a Mock Education Select Committee at the Humanities and Social Sciences week at our school, on the subject of “cap on the number of international students admitted in the UK universities,” a relevant topic to us all. Members from our Political Club will represent the 11 MPs in the committee, while four competitors outside of the club will act as four experts to provide written evidence and go through a hearing process. We hope that this event can boost students’ interest in political affairs and encourage critical thinking throughout the process. 

Author Details

Winnie Zhou is 18 years old and is a student at Shenzhen College of International Education (SCIE).

[1] Health and Social Care, and Science and Technology Committees, House of Commons. “Coronavirus: lessons learned to date: Sixth Report of the Health and Social Care Committee and Third Report of the Science and Technology Committee of Session 2021–22.” Sept. 2021, https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/7496/documents/78687/default/

[2] Ibid., p.28

[3] Ibid.

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The Prime Minister, the Parties, and the Ministerial Code

By Professor Michael Gordon

The current Prime Minister’s long running battle with the Seven Principles of Public Lifecontinues to gather pace.  Boris Johnson’s actions relating to the pandemic ‘partygate’ scandalhave arguably violated each of the principles established by the Nolan Committee in 1995:  selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership.  The Prime Minister’s full house of ethical violations concerning his attendance and subsequent denials of social gatherings held in Downing Street, contrary to lockdown restrictions, have also yielded Fixed Penalty Notices from the police for him, his Chancellor, his wife, and other government officials, with the prospect of more to follow.  Yet the Prime Minister remains committed to staying in post, and has refused to resign.

A key accusation made against Johnson by Peter Hennessy (the historian and now member of the House of Lords) is that his actions during the partygate scandal, combined with his refusal to resign, have ‘shredded the Ministerial Code’, generating ‘the most severe constitutional crisis involving a Prime Minister that I can remember’.  Similarly, the political journalist Robert Peston has argued that if Conservative MPs refuse to topple Johnson, they will ‘blithely ignore the ministerial code’, with the consequence that ‘the constitution means little or nothing’.

It is of course understandable why the Ministerial Code has had such prominence in this episode – it is a relatively clear, succinct, and publicly accessible statement of some relevant rules and principles concerning ministerial conduct.  The very idea of a ‘Ministerial Code’ sounds constitutionally important, and also effectively highlights the hypocrisy of Johnson apparently refusing to adhere to the standards applicable to ‘ordinary’ ministers, given the Code is formally issued in each new Prime Minister’s name accompanied by a personalised foreword preaching about the importance of upholding ‘the very highest standards of propriety’ (2019).

Yet the pre-eminence of the Ministerial Code in debates concerning the Prime Minister’s conduct also raises some important questions.  In particular, in this blog post I want to consider whether the Ministerial Code is the best reference point by which to assess the Prime Minister’s actions, and what impact its central status could have on the debate around whether the Prime Minister should resign.

There are two key issues which make it questionable whether the Ministerial Code should be the primary tool for critiquing the conduct of the Prime Minister.  First, the fact that the authority of the Code flows from the Prime Minister, and is therefore a statement of constitutional principles derived from the executive.  Second, the specificity of the Code – and especially the rules concerning the provision of accurate information to Parliament – seems to invite quite technical analysis of the Prime Minister’s conduct, and even his state of mind, when assessing whether the legislature has been misled.

The PM as Arbiter of the Code

First, it is made explicitly clear that the Ministerial Code is the Prime Minister’s document, and it is for the Prime Minister to apply and enforce: ‘Ministers only remain in office for so long as they retain the confidence of the Prime Minister.  He is the ultimate judge of the standards of behaviour expected of a Minister and the appropriate consequences of a breach of those standards’ (2019, para 1.6).  This was also accepted by the High Court in the recent case of FDA v Prime Minister [2021] EWHC 3279 (Admin).  While the court (dubiously, in my view) held that some questions relating to the Ministerial Code might be justiciable (in this case, the interpretation given to the concept of ‘bullying’), Lewis LJ and Steyn J acknowledged at para [60] that the Prime Minister was the ultimate decision-maker in relation to whether there had been a departure from the standards set out in the Code.

Of course, it has long been true that a Prime Minister has the decisive say over ministerial resignations.  Writing in 1956, long before the publication of a Ministerial Code, the political theorist Samuel Finer – who was sceptical about the ‘constitutional folk-lore’ concerning the existence of a ‘supposed’ resignation convention – identified three factors which determined whether a minister would lose their office: ‘if the Minister is yielding, his Prime Minister unbending and his party out for blood’.  If, as in the present circumstances, the minister under pressure is also the Prime Minister, then his or her decision-making effectively accounts for two out of three of these variables.

Yet if criticism of Boris Johnson’s conduct is made against the benchmark of the Ministerial Code, of which he is the stated arbiter, this sets up an accountability paradigm which is entirely premised on the fact that it is a matter of the Prime Minister’s own moral calculation whether to resign.  If Finer’s third variable – the attitude of the political party – was already peripheral, in focusing on the text of the Ministerial Code it is written out of the picture.

This first limitation of accountability via the Ministerial Code is now partly being addressed by Parliament taking a greater role in the accountability process.  The vote last week in the House of Commons to order an investigation into the Prime Minister’s statements to Parliament about the non-occurrence of parties in Downing Street is a welcome reminder that it is a matter for the Commons to determine whether a Prime Minister has misled the House.  But while it will surely add to the overall political pressure on Johnson and the government, any such investigation remains some way off – pending the completion of the police investigation and the publication of Sue Gray’s full and final report – and the consequences of it are difficult to anticipate, especially if the Prime Minister manages to survive until that point.  The Conservative Party has a majority on the Privileges Committee, which will carry out the investigation without its current chair Chris Bryant, who has recused himself on the basis of his previous criticism of Johnson.  A vote on any recommended sanctions would then come back to the whole House, where the Conservatives also enjoy the protection of a substantial majority.  And while potential sanctions include a (likely short) suspension from the Commons, the Privileges Committee could not instruct Johnson to resign as Prime Minister.

More importantly, Conservative MPs have not to this point lacked a formal means to remove the Prime Minister, which they could attempt through a no confidence vote in his leadership of the party or even in his government – instead, it has been the unwillingness of a majority of MPs to use these constitutional mechanisms which has ensured Johnson remains Prime Minister.  But at least these parliamentary developments have refocused the debate and remind us that, in this case, whatever the text of the Ministerial Code may say, the Prime Minister does not have the exclusive power to determine his own fate.

Avoiding Technicalities

The second challenge raised by the pursuit of Prime Ministerial accountability by reference to the Ministerial Code is that it may be encouraging an unhelpfully technical approach to the rules which prohibit misleading Parliament.  The relevant provision of the Code (which is replicated in a Commons resolution of 19 March 1997, Cols. 1046-47) says ‘It is of paramount importance that Ministers give accurate and truthful information to Parliament, correcting any inadvertent error at the earliest opportunity.  Ministers who knowingly mislead Parliament will be expected to offer their resignation to the Prime Minister’ (2019, para 1.3(c)).  This provision is unusual in the Code in identifying a specific potential sanction – resignation – for misleading Parliament.  And there is also plenty here for those who are used to dealing with legal rules to get their interpretive teeth into, in particular the question of when an error will count as ‘inadvertent’, and what it means for a Minister to mislead Parliament ‘knowingly’.

The risk, however, is that focusing on the textual formulation of this rule encourages a legalistic approach which distracts from the underlying normative purpose of the principle that Ministers should not mislead Parliament.  There will be rapidly diminishing returns from a debate about whether ‘knowingly’ means the Prime Minister must have intentionally or consciously lied to Parliament to violate the relevant norm, or whether having (or claiming to have) a misguided subjective belief that he was giving accurate information based on the assurances he had received would be sufficient to avoid a technical violation.  It also, crucially, sets up the defence Johnson has already used to deny he misled Parliament – that it did not occur to him ‘then or subsequently’ that the gathering he attended to celebrate his birthday would be a breach of the law, so in that sense there has been no knowing deception.

Instead, when establishing whether the Prime Minister misled the Commons, his alleged state of mind need not be the decisive factor.  The scale and significance of the misleading claims are also material, a point which emerges from the speech of Harold Macmillan in the debatefollowing the resignation of John Profumo for misleading the House of Commons in 1963: ‘I do not remember in the whole of my life, or even in the political history of the past, a case of a Minister of the Crown who has told a deliberate lie to his wife, to his legal advisers and to his Ministerial colleagues, not once but over and over again, who has then repeated this lie to the House of Commons’ (HC Deb 17 June 1963 vol.679, cols.54-55). 

In relation to partygate, the current Prime Minister expressed a clear position, repeated in the House of Commons and elsewhere (on one count, the denials of rule breaking were made some 39 times), about a matter of major public significance, which has proved to be inaccurate.  Going down the rabbit hole of whether the Prime Minister did or did not know that he was misleading the Commons is a distraction from the fact that, regardless, he ought to have known.  Especially as the head of the government which enacted the relevant secondary legislation regulating the response to Covid-19, as the political leader responsible for communicating the need for and effect of these rules directly to the people, via television press conferences on a regular basis throughout the pandemic, or even simply (as we are frequently reminded) as a public figure who obtained an education from an expensive school and a leading university.

There is a recent precedent which reinforces this approach.  In 2018, Amber Rudd resigned as Home Secretary having misled the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee over the existence of immigrant removal targets.  The information she relied on was prepared by civil servants within her department, but in her resignation letter to the then Prime Minister Theresa May, Rudd wrote ‘I have reviewed the advice I was given on this issue and become aware of information provided to my office which makes mention of targets.  I should have been aware of this, and I take full responsibility for the fact that I was not’ (emphasis added).

There are of course a multitude of factors which shape any ministerial resignation, and no doubt Rudd’s departure from office was influenced by other considerations.  They include the objectionable nature of the removal targets which she had denied existed, wider public outrage about the deportation and denial of rights by the state of the generation of black Commonwealth citizens caught up in the Windrush scandal, and the fact that Rudd’s resignation might be viewed as a form of sacrificial accountability which protected her Prime Minister Theresa May, who as Home Secretary had been the leading architect of the hostile environment immigration strategy which led to Windrush.

Yet with all these caveats, Amber Rudd’s resignation shows that we need not get caught up in excessively technical arguments about the Prime Minister’s state of mind which are elevated in this debate by overfocusing on the written text of the Ministerial Code.  In constitutional terms, this is a precedent which indicates the Prime Minister should be expected to resign.

Nevertheless, even in a situation where 78% of the public do not believe the Prime Minister’s claims, there is no authority which can compel him to accept this conclusion and resign (although as Alison Young points out, there are still consequences for him to bear in the meantime, in the form of vociferous political criticism).  Looking beyond the Ministerial Code, however, at least allows us to construct the argument that the “it never crossed my mind” defence is an inadequate defence – constitutional principles have been violated, because the Ministerial Code is not exhaustive or determinative of the Prime Minister’s obligations to Parliament.

Conclusion

The Ministerial Code is a valuable document in clarifying many standards applicable to government ministers in an accessible way.  But over-emphasis on the Ministerial Code as the central instrument of political accountability generates some challenges. 

If the Ministerial Code becomes a de facto replacement for the deeper constitutional conventions of ministerial responsibility, rather than a supplement to them, it imports a key structural problem: it emphasises the PM–Cabinet accountability relationship over the government–Parliament accountability relationship.  This is especially problematic when it is the Prime Minister whose conduct is the subject of scrutiny, as well as being the formal source of these ethical rules within government.  Reliance on the Ministerial Code as the primary vehicle for establishing ministerial standards also demonstrates that, as well as generating the potential for accountability, the existence of precise written rules can be a limitation if those rules are susceptible to being interpreted narrowly.

These tensions are evident in the debate about whether the Prime Minister should resign over partygate.  The Ministerial Code is obviously not the main problem in the UK constitution at present, but it is nevertheless worth considering how a shift in constitutional discourse might create some scope for more effective accountability in practice.

I’m very grateful to Alison Young for her comments on an earlier draft of this post.

Mike Gordon, Professor of Constitutional Law, University of Liverpool

This post was originally published on the UK Constitutional Law Blog. Republished with the permission of the author.

(Suggested citation: M. Gordon, ‘The Prime Minister, the Parties, and the Ministerial Code’, U.K. Const. L. Blog (27th Apr. 2022) (available at https://ukconstitutionallaw.org/))

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Held in contempt: what’s wrong with the House of Commons?

The sight of Ukrainians standing in front of Russian tanks should provide a sharp corrective to any complacency about the permanence of democratic systems around the world. Of course such complacency would already be misplaced given the evidence of increased autocratic tendencies and democratic backsliding of governments in numerous countries, which is becoming the subject of a growing academic literature. But it is a stark reminder of our responsibility to work to strengthen the effectiveness and public reputation of parliamentary democracy, if we value it.   

The UK parliament is not immune from these pressures. The Brexit process demonstrated that UK governments are willing to sideline and even – in the case of Boris Johnson’s prorogation – close down parliament in order to achieve their political aims. And the Covid-19 pandemic has seen government become ever more accustomed to using emergency powers that require only retrospective parliamentary approval. As two House of Lords committees have noted in recent reports (Democracy denied and Government by diktat), growing use of skeleton bills which provide only minimal policy detail and leave the rest to be filled in with sweeping regulatory powers has further minimised parliament’s ability to play its role in the democratic system. Meanwhile the executive’s strong control over the Commons agenda limits the ability of MPs to enhance the effectiveness of their own institution.   

In my new book, published in April, I argue that – for too long – MPs have been careless of the reputation of the House of Commons and resigned to a declining spiral of public trust in their institution. MPs need to recognise the threat to our democratic system represented by the contempt in which the public hold parliament. Low public trust in parliament is not a problem that can be easily solved. But nor is it an immutable conundrum before which MPs can simply shrug their shoulders and carry on as before. There are obvious issues about the way in which MPs and the House of Commons operate which could and should be addressed, to make our democratic system as effective and as valued as it should be.

Perhaps most fundamentally, the House of Commons is not descriptively representative of the population it serves. This matters for reasons of justice and symbolism but also the effectiveness and legitimacy of the House. Political parties have made efforts that have been more (Labour) or less (Conservative) effective at increasing the representation of women in the Commons but it is frankly pathetic that gender equality has not been achieved over 100 years since women became eligible to be elected to the Commons – we are still stuck at 34%. Other aspects of diversity – including disability and ethnicity – have been even less susceptible to change. 

And there is no guarantee that even existing slow progress towards an representative house might not be reversed. The evident pressures of life as an MP (including the risk of being murdered in your constituency surgery), anachronistic working practices and the physical constraints of the parliamentary estate could all slow or even reverse recent trends towards increased diversity of MPs. Some of the answers to these problems lie elsewhere, but MPs should think much more actively about how to make parliament an inclusive and accessible workplace which is attractive to a diverse range of candidates.

For example, while many MPs feel that the rituals, traditions, language and heritage of parliament lend gravitas and importance to their deliberations, the way parliament works can also be exclusionary and impenetrable for those on the outside looking in. This may even be the case for MPs themselves. Even those you might expect to be the most accomplished at understanding the plethora of standing orders, precedents, rulings and conventions may lack confidence in deploying them. Sir Charles Walker, former chair of the Commons Procedure Committee cheerfully admitted to me that – after running the committee for seven and a half years he knew “very little “ about procedure. The complexity of parliament’s rules and procedures lead to undemocratic disparities in the ability of MPs to perform their roles, handing power to the whips. They must be simplified. 

A further problem which I highlight in the book as damaging the public reputation of the House of Commons is the exceptionalism of too many MPs. The doctrine of ‘parliamentary sovereignty’ – that parliament is the highest legal authority – leads some MPs to treat themselves as a class apart with damaging consequences for public perceptions of parliament. Such exceptionalism has been at the root of many parliamentary scandals over the years – from MPs’ expenses to #MeToo. Sadly the ‘partygate’ scandal has provided a new and live example of the corrosive effect on public trust when those in power assume there should be one rule for them and another for everyone else. MPs need to recognise the rationale for and consequent limits to their privileges, striving to make the House of Commons an exemplar in following the rules it sets for others, rather than an exception to them.

The catastrophic decline in trust in parliament has so far failed to prompt serious attention from MPs, let alone action. In some ways this is unsurprising – the history of the House of Commons – in common with that of many other institutions – demonstrates that significant change only happens in the window of opportunity following a crisis. Brexit and Covid both posed significant challenges for MPs but neither were seen by them as justification for serious reforms. This is dangerously complacent. Russia’s autocratic challenge to Ukraine’s fledgling democracy should remind us to value and invest in our parliamentary system. The House of Commons is held in contempt, but it need not be.  

Dr Hannah White OBE, Deputy Director of the Institute for Government

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New visual cues in the UK Parliament

“The medium is the message”. Marshall McLuhan

The use of videoconferencing technologies in the UK Parliament allows political representatives to be seen in a new setting, which representatives can – to a large degree – arrange and present as they see fit. This marks a departure from – and in some sense a juxtaposition with – traditional parliamentary imagery and backdrops. In turn, it also ushers in new discussions of political representation and communication.

For several years now I have been studying Parliament through narrative, in order to better understand existing practices and perceptions (both inside and outside the institution). A useful definition of narrative is provided by Barthes (1975), who discusses narrative as an “ordered mixture of substances”. This means that there is a sequential – or structural – nature to this concept. Narratives are comprised of things that are in themselves purely incidental, even coincidental, but have been presented collectively in a meaningful way in order to express an idea or concept. 

So what are these ‘substances’ in a parliamentary context? How can we identify them? As Puwar (2010)observes, “grilles, galleries, rooms, vents, statues, paintings, walls, halls, curtains, stairwells, seats, rods and feet provide points from which to tell the sedimented, layered and contested stories of occupation, performance and ritual”. In using this observation to build on the aforementioned definition of narratives, we can construct a coherent view of what parliamentary narratives are: an ordered mixture of storytelling substances.

In this context, ‘disorder’ – i.e. any rupture with established narrative(s) – is subject to a swift institutional response. A couple of years ago, in the Commons chamber, MP Peter bone wore what was widely – and fairly accurately – described as a ‘silly hat’ in connection with his charity work. At the time, Commons Speaker John Bercow said that, ideally, the hat would never be seen again by anyone in society, and especially not in the House of Commons. This incident was allegedly a violation of a 1998 ban on hats (yes, there is a ban on hats in the Commons…).

These incidents are by no means particular or peculiar to the UK. We have seen the calling-out of political slogans by Speakers in a range of parliaments, in response to items or statements that appear to be political or partisan. Anthony Rota, Speaker of the House of Commons in Canada, has previously voiced concern over MPs’ backgrounds, on the basis of their straying from ‘political neutrality’. 

There is something intriguing about these moments. The Speakers do not typically focus on how the ‘offending’ items make the MP look; instead, they focus on how these items make Parliament look. Of course, this is reasonable rhetoric for a Speaker, but it also hints at a certain anxiety around rupturing the ‘visual fabric’ – and the inherent theatricality – of Parliament.

The use of videoconferencing technologies (such as Zoom and Teams) has added new storytelling substances into parliaments’ visual discourses. When they are not physically present in the chamber, political representatives are now able to broadcast their immediate surroundings into parliamentary premises, and by extension to the viewing public. This is especially significant in cases such as Prime Minister’s Questions, and other high-profile parliamentary events.

This matters because for centuries, the UK Parliament has largely had visual cues – and the way(s) in which these are ordered – under its exclusive control. This has been turned upside-down (or sideways, at least) by parliamentarians using videoconferencing technology. They now have a measure of control over their immediate surroundings, which they can curate and arrange as they please (within some of the institutional bounds discussed earlier). 

This development raises new questions about visual narratives, discourses, and parliamentary symbolism. Therefore, it has been disappointing to see that direct academic study has been rather limited. Media discussion on this topic – and the popular discourse more broadly – has been both narrow and shallow. Rankings of Conservative MPs’ flag backdrops from best to worst, and rankings of MPs’ houses (as seen via video calls), don’t tell us very much about MPs, much less what they may be trying to represent about themselves (and who/what they represent). 

The closest thing we get to an analysis – in a media context at least – is a discussion of the link between MPs’ backgrounds and their personalities:

While Liz Truss gets very patriotic on Zoom with her large flagpole, SNP Westminster leader Ian Blackford always sits surrounded by signed memorabilia from his beloved Celtic Football Club, with two footballs behind him. Alister Jack, Scotland Secretary, is good at showing his loyalty to the homeland too, with some nice Dumfriesshire oil paintings.

These visual cues – by which representatives can (attempt to) connect with publics and/or their own constituencies – underlines the significance of MPs as “living symbols of a locality” (Crewe 2015). The nature of these visual cues – and their likelihood of success – varies widely. From the aforementioned flagpoles, football memorabilia, and oil paintings, to Clive Betts’ Lego Palace of Westminster, it is fair to say that these backgrounds are neither accidental nor incidental. They are attempts by MPs to communicate, or to connect: to represent themselves to publics, and to represent publics (or some element of them) to publics. 

A common theme across what we have discussed so far – visual ‘disruptions’ in Parliament, as identified by Commons Speakers, and the independently-curated backgrounds facilitated by videoconferencing – is institutional anxiety. A lot of this is focused around the presence of new technology in the Commons, especially that which enables communication at a distance. I have written previously about then-Leader of the House Jacob Rees-Mogg’s assertion, in June 2020, that a ‘virtual parliament’ is damaging to politics, which “is better done face-to-face, even if the whites of the ministerial eyes are six feet away”.

Leaving aside Mr Rees-Mogg’s words – and their highly militaristic connotations – it is also interesting that the UK Parliament was at pains to show that, even as a virtual/hybrid parliament, it was still the same legislature. Back in April 2020, its news feed was careful to note that “[t]o maintain continuity and tradition…the symbolic and historic Mace is still placed on the table whenever the House is sitting and a socially distanced Speaker’s processing still takes place”.

This anxiety is also palpable outside of the ‘Westminster village’. Playwright and screenwriter James Graham, in May 2020, discussed the importance of physical proximity in order to build and maintain empathy (which is unarguably an important component of representation). Nevertheless, his central argument, including the assertion that “there was no Microsoft Teams in ancient Athens”, is highly problematic. First of all, a lot of things weren’t present in ancient Athens, including a model of democracy that we would find equitable or desirable (this point is relevant to direct and representative models of democracy). 

Secondly, Graham’s central argument – that an absence of physical presence equates to an absence of opportunity to build empathy – simply does not hold up, in theory or in practice. Let’s deal with practice first. When MPs’ chosen backdrops are visible and thereby available to publics, there is engagement (even if this takes the form of satire, ridicule, or open hostility). In other words, we see de-mystification in these moments. It is difficult to overstate how much of an asset this can be; in building empathy, in underlining MPs’ status as ‘living symbols’, and – crucially – to complementing physical proximity.

I saw this first-hand while conducting research for the Inter-Parliamentary Union’s upcoming Global Parliamentary Report on public engagement with parliaments. For logistical reasons (relating to geographical distance and to Covid-19) almost all of the research interviews and focus groups were conducted via Zoom. This, as you might imagine, created a different atmosphere – and, in several respects, a more personally engaging one –than if the discussions had all taken place in constituency offices, or in parliamentary buildings. The spaces we saw on Zoom were windows into the personae of MPs and staff. 

This is the same sense of empathy that so many commentators (inside and outside of Westminster) perceive to be at risk, and that videoconferencing technology can – in fact – help to generate. 

Let’s now turn to theory. John Parkinson (2013) observed that legislatures are “places where competing narratives are told and claims on public resources are made, scrutinized, prioritized, accepted, repackaged and rejected”. Puwar, as we have already discussed, acknowledged that the stories told in – or, more accurately, by – parliamentary space are contested ones. Contestation – within what we might describe as normative bounds – is intrinsic to Parliament’s institutional identity. Parliament exists because of contestation.  

The idea that videoconferencing technology, ‘virtual parliaments’, and so on, constitute a rupture, or a situation of precarity, within an established parliamentary narrative (relating to democratic and historical continuity, for instance) is unfounded in theoretical and basic practical terms. The UK Parliament (more than most parliaments) continues to operate in a state of narrative flux, meaning that contestation itself can be read as a political status quo. Videoconferencing technology continues this process in a highly visual way, but with the benefit of a greater potential for empathy through seeing a glimpse of MPs’ real lives, however they may choose to present them. 

Dr Alex Prior, Lecturer in Politics, London South Bank University and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of East Anglia.

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Turning Right: Donald Trump and the GOP Direction of Travel 

In January 2022, an NBC poll asked GOP voters whether they considered themselves to be ‘more a supporter of Donald Trump or more a supporter of the Republican party?’ In response, 56% prioritised the party and 36% Trump. A year earlier the same question had the numbers even at 46% each. These numbers suggest some loosening of the former president’s grip on the GOP, yet his continuing presence is most unusual. In another early 2022 poll 50% of Republicans and Republican leaning independents named Trump as their preferred party nominee in 2024. In January 1982 or January 1994 there was no clamour amongst Democratic and Republican party loyalists for the return of Jimmy Carter or George Bush Snr respectively following their one-term presidencies.

Scholars continue to argue about whether the former reality television star’s presidential triumph in 2016 was a one-off aberration. Did it reflect a very particular political moment as two deeply unpopular major party candidates battled in a toxic atmosphere throughout a campaign infused with sexism, or was that toxicity a product of longer-term underlying trends? Trump’s capture of the Republican nomination in 2016 was certainly unexpected, and shocked much of the conservative establishment, yet if the messenger was initially an unwelcome outsider, it is possible to see the message as the culmination of many years of right-ward populist and illiberal travel.

A reminder that the politics of personal destruction were rife decades before the arrival of Donald Trump includes Newt Gingrich’s 1990s embrace of political conflict as no-holds barred culture wars Yet, prior to 2016, the party’s presidential nominee had been an established if not always establishment figure. Reagan’s emergence in 1980 was a surprise to much of the outside world but he had been a high profile player in GOP circles for some time and had nearly captured the nomination in 1976. Subsequent nominees, Bush Snr, Dole, Bush Jnr, McCain and Romney all paid more homage to Reagan’s small government conservatism than Eisenhower’s accommodation to the New Deal, but that also meant that they all operated within an identifiable conservative ideological framework. Opponents complained that this sometimes included racist populist dog whistles. The National Populism on offer from Trump in 2016 had a different flavour as the candidate turned the volume up well beyond whistling and blasted out messages that were denounced by the party’s previous Vice-Presidential nominee as being  “like the textbook definition of a racist comment”.

Nevertheless, there is a school of thought that argues Trump’s populist rhetoric did not translate in populist governance. Instead, it proposes that the efforts to implement  such an agenda  were undone by his own extreme administrative incompetence. This in turn exacerbated the institutional fragmentation which plagues all presidential efforts to fulfil their campaign promises. Hence, Trump’s signature legislative achievement was a set of tax cuts – a policy fully in line with Reaganism and the wishes of more traditional Republican grandees. 

 Such a focus, however, may underplay Trump’s longer term impact. First, he decisively settled some long-running internal GOP policy debates,  not least the division over immigration policy. In 1986 Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which amongst other things, included a pathway to legal status for many undocumented immigrants. In his second term President George W Bush advocated for similar measures and, in 2013, 14 Republican Senators signed on to a bipartisan bill that contained comparable elements. Always more the preserve of the party’s elite, that approach is increasingly taboo. The restrictionist sentiments of party’s base, so explicitly articulated by Trump, now dominates. 

Second, in collaboration with the party’s establishment leaders, President Trump cemented in a conservative majority on the Supreme Court that could last for a generation. The real power player behind this achievement for the conservative movement was then Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. For months he blocked Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to succeed Antonin Scalia after the latter’s unexpected death in 2016 on the grounds that a justice should not be confirmed in an election year. Next, after Trump had nominated replacements for both Scalia and the retiring Anthony Kennedy, the White House and McConnell rushed through the nomination and confirmation of justice Amy Coney Barrett. This was to replace ‘liberal lion’ Ruth Bader Ginsburg after her death a mere 35 days before the 2020 presidential election.  

Third, Trump’s continuing influence over the party is illustrated by the numbers of party identifiers who believe that the 2020 election was fraudulent. Even on the day that the deeply shocking events of January 6th 2021 unfolded, 147 elected Republicans chose to ignore the facts and embrace the ‘Big Lie.’ It is not simply that many Republican identifiers still claim to believe the ‘lie’, but that in many states there have been concerted attempts to pass laws that empower partisan bodies to challenge the legitimacy of vote counts. These efforts go beyond the voter restriction measures, anti-democratic though those already are, that have become increasingly common in GOP controlled states in recent years. The new endeavour offers real potential to overturn the will of voters who have been able to participate.

At this stage it remains uncertain whether Trump will choose to run again in 2024. Even if he does not, his brand of politics will live on, embraced by emerging potential candidates such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Missouri Senator Josh Hawley. In the meantime, Trump’s influence will be tested in some of the 2022 Republican Party primaries as candidates he has endorsed compete for votes. In some cases, there has been an unseemly competition to be the Trumpiest candidate. The GOP nomination race for the open Senate seat in Ohio is a case in point. Perhaps the most interesting example is in Georgia where Trump has backed former Senator David Perdue in his challenge to incumbent Governor Brian Kemp. Kemp’s sin was not a policy based aberration from Trumpian principle but his refusal to help Trump overturn the 2020 presidential result in the state. In a twist, and a challenge to Trump, the Republican Governors Association has backed Kemp. Polls suggest a close race between the two.

One irony is that many Democrats feel that their prospects are enhanced when Trump has a higher profile. They might reflect that a majority believed that to be the case in 2016. That view was mistaken then and however far short Trump fell in turning his populist rhetoric into governing reality his legacy goes beyond standard measures of presidential achievement. Trump’s personal longevity as a political force is uncertain and there are some signs that his hold over the GOP maybe slightly eroding, but his provocations intensified the divisions in an already divided polity in ways that will be extremely difficult to heal.

Dr Clodagh Harrington, Associate Professor in American Politics, De Montfort University, and Dr Alex Waddan, Associate Professor in American Politics and American Foreign Policy, University of Leicester.

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A case of innovative parliamentary oversight? Faroese and Greenlandic MPs in the Danish Parliament 

By Mette Marie Staehr Harder and Hallbera West

Controlling the government is a key task of any democratic country’s parliament. One widely used legislative control tool is parliamentary questions which are typically used by members of the opposition. In the Faroe Islands and Greenland, as in most parliamentary settings, members of the national parliaments; the Løgting and Inatsisartut, may pose questions to their national government, thus controlling their government. However, more atypically, the two Faroese MPs as well as the two Greenlandic MPs who are elected to the Danish parliament, the Folketing have an alternative arena for control of their government at home. Hence, in theory, these four North Atlantic members of the Danish Folketing may also pose parliamentary questions to the Danish government concerning the actions or inactions of their home-rule government. If applied this way, the Folketing could act as an alternative arena for control of the national periphery government, and we would be witnessing an example of what we term cross-parliamentary control. 

Questions and Data

Thus far, this type of control in which representatives use the control tool of another country’s parliament to control their home government has not yet been an issue of much attention in the legislative literature. Yet, as the influence of national parliaments vs. governments is challenged due to processes of globalization, international collaboration, and specialization of the executive branch among others, the need to understand parliamentary control and thus the quality of democracy through unorthodox perspectives of multilevel governance grows increasingly important. Therefore, we set out to study the following research question: 

In addition, if such cross-parliamentary control exists we ask: 

To answer these questions, we study a newly collected dataset consisting of parliamentary questions posed by North Atlantic members of the Danish parliament to Danish ministers in a period of 15-years (2005-2020). As the literature quite concordantly states that mostly parliamentarians in opposition make use of tools for control, we exclusively study the questions posed by North Atlantic MPs who represent political parties that are in opposition at home(N=869). As such, our data is selected from the premise that it is within this data, we are most likely to find examples of cross-parliamentary control.  

Importance of cross-parliamentary control

In providing a theoretical possibility for conducting cross-parliamentary control, the case of the Danish Realm is a seldom case – yet it is not unique. Hence, other parliaments – e.g. the French parliament as well as Westminster—may provide similar opportunities for members elected in districts with different levels of national self-government. 

The perspectives on cross-parliamentary control offered by the Danish case have importance beyond the similar cases: Empirically, it is not a new observation that the power of parliaments vs. the executive power is challenged due to processes of globalization, international collaboration, and specialization of the executive branch. Also, research shows that parliaments are finding ways to take back power (Raunio 2014; Martin & Vanberg 2011; Bergman & Strøm 2011: 14-16; Saalfeld 2000; Judge 1995, 8; Norton 1990, 3–4). Yet, the appliance of cross-parliamentary institutions for control as a means which strengthens parliamentary control of the government has not been an object of much scholarly consideration. Rather, instead of cross-parliamentary foci, scholars have studied ways in which international collaboration among parliaments remedy national parliaments’ loss of power. For example, the occurrence of this within international inter-parliamentary institutions (IPIs) has spurred much recent scholarly interest (Cofelice, 2018; Costa, 2016; Costa et al., 2013; Flockhart, 2004). In turn, scholars have stressed the importance of not overlooking the role played by national parliaments in international politics, diplomacy and sub-state units para diplomacy though this is normally thought of as an area of the executives (e.g. Ackrén 2014, Malamud and Stavridis 2011; Pintz 2019; Sabic 2008). Our study contributes to the field of legislative oversight by studying this phenomena from a perspective of multi-level governance rather than the conventional national –or the more recent—inter-parliamentary contexts. 

Results

Corresponding to our expectations, our analyses show that most of the questions posed by the North Atlantic members of the Danish parliament, who are in opposition at home, concern the actions or inactions of the Danish government. Nevertheless, 7.8 pct. of these questions concern the actions or inactions of the members’ home government. Hence, they enact cross-parliamentary control: either as direct control in the short run or as a more indirect, long-run control which create a sense of being potentially controlled from abroad (for this “long-run” sense of being potentially controlled we find inspiration in Bentham’s Panopticon as described by Foucault).  

Moreover, in line with our initial expectations, which are based on the former findings of Harder and West (Harder 2021; West 2019), we find that Greenlandic MPs make use of this possibility to a much larger extent than the Faroese members do. However, contrary to our expectations, it is the members from the parties that are most critical towards the Danish Realm, which makes the most use of the opportunity to gain information on the actions of their home-governments from the Danish Authorities. Especially, this tendency is particularly strong for Faroese members. We believe this to be a sign that partisan motives at home are more important to North Atlantic politicians in the Danish parliament than we initially expected them to be. 

Finally, and in line with our expectations, most of the questions posed are questions that ask for information regarding the actions or inactions of the government at home. Though we assume that these questions primarily have the effect of creating an awareness of potential control at home as well as providing MPs with concrete information, if picked up by the media at home, some of these questions will quite surely also have partisan effects at home. 

In conclusion, the theoretical possibility of cross-national control turns out to be used by the MPs elected in the North Atlantic peripheries. This type of control has not yet been described in the legislative literature. Moreover, it is not described as a possibility within the few formal institutions that guide the North Atlantic behavior within the Danish parliament (The Danish Constitution most notably). Nor does it seem to have been anticipated among the institutional designers when the North Atlantic representation in the Danish parliament was last adjusted (in the early 1950s). Nevertheless, through their practical representative behavior, North Atlantic MPs have innovated this tool to control their home government – a tool which may even be extra powerful because a foreign government is involved. 

Authors

Mette Marie Staehr Harder, senior lecturer in Political Science, Karlstad University, Sweden and visiting fellow at the Department of Law, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. mm.harder@jur.ku.dk 

Hallbera West, assistant professor in Political Science, University of the Faroes Islands and  program leader of West Nordic Studies. hallberaw@setur.fo

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The Speaker of the Lok Sabha: Performing and Consuming ‘Neutrality’ in the Indian Parliament

By Mouli Banerjee

The Indian Parliament has been in crisis for a while now. With record disruptions, protests that have broken out in the well of the House, regular walk-outs staged by Opposition Members of Parliament, and MPs of the governing coalition often disregarding the House’s Rules of Procedure, the democratic legitimacy of the Parliament of India has been increasingly fragile. How does such a parliament interact with and shape broader public discourse? And more importantly, what can the consumption of the parliamentary proceedings, and its iterations and reproductions outside the walls of the parliament tell us about the legitimacy of a parliament in such ostensibly turbulent times? I suggest that answering these questions requires looking at the parliament as a space, and the different elements and actors that bring it to life, through the lens of performance and performativity. To do that, in this piece, I link these broader questions to a particular figure in performance: the Speaker of the Lok Sabha, the elected Lower House of the Indian Parliament. 

The Parliament as Stage, the Speaker as Performer 

The interdisciplinary interfaces of politics and performance provide a fertile ground for this analysis, making it possible to study parliaments as stages, and meaning-making on such stages as a performative process (Crewe and Müller 2006; Crewe 2015; Spary, Armitage, and Johnson 2014;  Rai and Johnson 2014; Parkinson 2012). These processes have a crucial discursive value, creating normative definitions by repetition and reiteration (Rai 2010). But these performances also need to be staged strategically in order for meaning to not just be created but also be adequately consumed. 

This applies to the performance of all MPs and parties within the space of the Parliament. Here, however, I want to focus on the role of the Speaker of the Lok Sabha in particular, to understand the implications of embodied performances of that role (its generation and its consumption)  within the current Indian democracy. I suggest that the Speaker is a ‘figure in performance’ in more ways than other MPs. By taking on the role of the Speaker, an MP layers their parliamentary performance with an additional role: that of party-neutrality. What tensions emerge, then, between the purported party-neutral position of the Speaker and instances of party-favouritism in a fragile democracy?

The Contentious Neutrality of the Speaker in the Indian Parliament

The position of the Speaker in the Indian Parliament does not imply official neutrality. There is however an expectation of the Speaker’s neutrality, which follows from a slightly convoluted path of explanation. The Tenth Schedule of the Constitution of India, added only in 1985, enlists the “Provisions as to disqualification (of MPs) on ground of defection”. It allows Speakers and Deputy-Speakers of both houses of the Parliament as well as the Speakers and Chairpersons of the states’ Legislative Councils and Legislative Assemblies an exemption from disqualification from their political party on grounds of defection, while they hold the Speaker’s chair, if the voluntarily give up party membership while they hold the chair (even if they are to re-enter the party once they step down from the Speaker’s role) (Government of India 1985). This, compounded with the presiding authority inherently implied in the chair, has come to confer an expectation of neutrality from the Speaker, even as paradoxically the Speaker of the Lok Sabha must not just normally first be elected as an MP on a party ticket but must also in practice return to a party’s folds for re-election in the subsequent terms. There are also no provisions or privileges currently in place to incentivise party neutrality for the Speaker of the Lok Sabha, once they step down from the role. 

Instances of past Speakers of the Lok Sabha performing their expected neutrality have been a part of broader media conversations. Meira Kumar, the Lok Sabha Speaker from 2009 to 2014, stated in a national interview that much to the chagrin of her party (the then-ruling Indian National Congress) she refused to clamp down on protests by Opposition MPs inside the House because they are representatives who must be allowed dissent (NDTV 2012). Before her, Communist Party of India (Marxist)’s Somnath Chatterjee famously faced expulsion and wrath from his party for refusing to vote on the party line and citing his duty to party-neutrality as the Speaker as his grounds for defying party diktat (Bagchi, Suvojit 2018). The Speaker of the last Lok Sabha, who has captured much recent attention,  Sumitra Mahajan of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), had to apologise in Parliament and expunge her own words from the transcript of a parliamentary debate, after protests from Opposition MPs erupted post her party-biased statements from the Speaker’s chair (NDTV2015).

The figure of the Speaker in performance, especially in the performance of this neutrality, thus is clearly politically charged. Much of the mainstream debate on the Speaker’s neutrality takes on a normative tone, i.e. it is framed in terms of whether or not, and to what extent, the Speaker can justly be party-neutral. Employing the lens of performance-performativity instead allows us to step outside this normative reading, and locate the ways in which these claims of neutrality function as a potent tool not only to signal a balanced parliamentary discourse inside the House but to also allow a discursively charged transmission of these embodied performances outside of its walls and into public discourse. 

The Parliament as a ‘Videosphere’

The witnessing of the performance is key to its existing. I borrow here from critical legal perspectives wherein when the courts transformed people from spectators of justice into witnesses and participatory audiences (Resnik and Curtis 2011, 295), part-taking in the physical space/stage of the courtroom where the theatricality of legal discourse-making plays out (Goodrich and Hayaert 2015). This can be extended to the parliament as well – parliaments are screened and transmitted, creating legislative “videospheres” (Goodrich Cf. Peters 2014, 48) where meanings multiply, destabilize and evolve. 

As parliamentary proceedings in India are transmitted and consumed, on television and online, not just via official governmental channels but as material for proliferating news media, how do the Speaker’s performances multiply and proliferate? With every new ‘reproduction’ of the performance beyond original parliamentary proceeding, the performance of neutrality becomes further distanced from the Speaker themselves, and take on an instrumentalised life of their own. This opens up multiple possible avenues of analysis and of future research. I have selected here some examples from video clips of parliamentary debates available on the internet to illustrate my argument.

Which videoclips of the Speaker’s performances, then, do particular media channels choose to instrumentalise, and how do they narrativise them? Some examples from Sumitra Mahajan’s time as the Speaker (form 2014 to 2019) provide us with an entry point to these questions. Hailing from BJP, the right-wing party in power currently at the Centre for its second consecutive term, Mahajan, with a long, successful political career, has been widely popular by her nickname ‘Tai’ (an endearing term for ‘elder sister’ in Marathi) in the Parliament, press, as well as in online conversations on her  interjections in the Lok Sabha (The Indian Express 2014). While the Parliament’s official channel, Sansad TV, maintains neutral thumbnails of Mahajan, it is worth contrasting this with the discursive framing by media channels sympathetic to the ruling party – BJP’s own official YouTube channel as well as the channels of India’s dominant right-wing news media. BJP’s YouTube channel has captioned videos of the Speaker, for example, with “Smt. Sumitra Mahajan strongly censures opposition parties for their irresponsible obstructionism”(Bharatiya Janata Party 2018). Again, telecasting a particularly polarised interaction between Rahul Gandhi, the president of the Indian National Congress (a key Opposition party), and Narendra Modi (India’s current Prime Minister), Republic World, one of India’s leading right-leaning news channels, for example, captioned their video – “Speaker Sumitra Mahajan Criticises Rahul Gandhi’s Behaviour In Lok Sabha” – with a thumbnail that showed a panel of a winking Rahul Gandhi placed next to a panel of a displeased Sumitra Mahajan (Republic World 2018). Another more polarising right-wing channel captioned the same video “Rahul Gandhi COMEDY with Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan” (News Hour India 2019), while the more mainstream national news channel, India Today, reported this debate with the caption “Speaker Sumitra Mahajan Sparks Row For Mocking Rahul Gandhi”(India Today 2019). Most of the polarised video transmissions of Mahajan’s speeches carry thumbnails of her pointing fingers at someone or gesturing to ask for explanations, next to visuals of Opposition MPs with serious faces or downcast eyes. The captions repeatedly use narrative versions of a ‘scolding’ in action.

Performing Rebuke

Of course, all parliamentary performances are open to discursive instrumentalisation by political parties, so what makes these transmissions of the Speaker’s interventions in the parliamentary videospheres different? I would argue that this assumption of neutrality allows the conceptualisation of a framework of “rebukes” to the Opposition, which is operationalised when the parliamentary performance and its visual dissemination come together. It is also relevant that two of the last three Lok Sabha Speakers have been women, and the gendered aspect of the rebuke and its embodied visuals also contributes to the overall performance of neutrality and the authority derived from it. There is much to be mapped out in order to analyse the full implications of these performances of neutrality (and rebuke) and how they are narrativized by parties in power, but this piece has hopefully laid some initial groundwork in the direction of scoping out the ways in which parliamentary discourse proliferates through the videospheres of a rapidly weaking parliamentary democracy. 

Mouli Banerjee is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick. 

References:

Bagchi, Suvojit. 2018. ‘Somnath Chatterjee (1929–2018) : Remembering the “Gentleman” of Indian Politics | Economic and Political Weekly’ 53 (37). https://www.epw.in/journal/2018/37/commentary/somnath-chatterjee-1929%E2%80%932018.html.

Bharatiya Janata Party. 2018. Smt. Sumitra Mahajan Strongly Censures Opposition Parties for Their Irresponsible Obstructionism. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xT4fcWBIu5Q.

Crewe, Emma. 2015. Commons and Lords : A Short Anthropology of Parliament. London, UNITED KINGDOM: Haus Publishing.

Crewe, Emma, and M G Müller. 2006. Rituals in Parliaments. Frankfurt/Main: Lang.

Goodrich, Peter, and Valérie Hayaert. 2015. Genealogies of Legal Vision. Genealogies of Legal Vision. London: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315774268.

Government of India. 1985. The Constitution (Fifty-Second Amendment) Act. https://www.india.gov.in/my-government/constitution-india/amendments/constitution-india-fifty-second-amendment-act-1985.

India Today. 2019. Speaker Sumitra Mahajan Sparks Row For Mocking Rahul Gandhi. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUMA7ig0Hg4.

NDTV. 2012. Won’t Act against Unruly MPs: Speaker Meira Kumar to NDTV. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7ZHZik6UDQ.

———. 2015. ‘Lok Sabha Speaker Expunges Her Own Remarks After Congress Protests’, 2015. https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/lok-sabha-speaker-expunges-her-own-remarks-after-congress-protests-1258172.

News Hour India. 2019. Rahul Gandhi COMEDY with Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDTnIZdn2p0.

Parkinson, John R. 2012. Democracy and Public Space. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199214563.001.0001.

Peters, Julie Stone. 2014. ‘Theatrocracy Unwired: Legal Performance in the Modern Mediasphere’. Law & Literature 26 (1): 31–64. https://doi.org/10.1080/1535685X.2014.888200.

Rai, Shirin. 2010. ‘Analysing Ceremony and Ritual in Parliament’. The Journal of Legislative Studies 16 (3): 284–97. https://doi.org/10.1080/13572334.2010.498098.

Rai, Shirin M., and Rachel E. Johnson, eds. 2014. Democracy in Practice. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137361912.

Republic World. 2018. Speaker Sumitra Mahajan Criticises Rahul Gandhi’s Behaviour In Lok Sabha | #ModiTrustVote. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O21njBl7MqU.

Resnik, Judith, and Dennis Curtis. 2011. Representing Justice Invention, Controversy, and Rights in City-States and Democratic Courtrooms. Yale University Press.

Spary, Carole, Faith Armitage, and Rachel E. Johnson. 2014. ‘Disrupting Deliberation? Comparing Repertoires of Parliamentary Representation in India, the UK and South Africa’. In Democracy in Practice : Ceremony and Ritual in Parliament, edited by Shirin Rai and Rachel Johnson. Palgrave Macmillan UK.

The Indian Express. 2014. ‘Soft-Spoken Speaker Sumitra “Tai” Is a Battle Hardened MP’, 2014. https://indianexpress.com/article/india/politics/soft-spoken-speaker-sumitra-tai-is-a-battle-hardened-mp/.

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What ever happened to impeachment in the United Kingdom? Accountability, history and the decline of parliamentary impeachment

Drawing upon my doctoral research undertaken at King’s College London, this blog post examines why impeachment fell into decline in the United Kingdom. My research considered this decline with reference to key moments of parliamentary and constitutional history, moments where Parliament and the country faced times of crisis. This blog post argues that it is possible to trace the causes for this decline alongside the development of alternative accountability mechanisms. Furthermore, it also argues that there is scope for seeing impeachment not so much as a factional device (which it was at times), but as a major development in permitting the House of Commons to achieve the accountability of key officials within and outside of the executive.

When thinking about impeachment it is safe to assume that most people in this country will not be thinking of the impeachment that originated in the Good Parliament of 1376, where the Commons impeached Lord Latimer on the basis of financial irregularities and his military record, but rather the United States of America.

The previous President of the United States of America Donald Trump was impeached twice, firstly in 2019, and secondly in 2021. Trump was acquitted on both occasions by the Senate.  Prior to Trump, the most recent presidential impeachment was that of President Bill Clinton. President Clinton’s impeachment has been re-explored in popular culture in Impeachment: American Crime Story that has recently aired on the FX network. Impeachment is at the forefront of American popular political culture and countless fictional presidents have resigned to avoid the threat of impeachment (for example House of Cards and Veep), or have been impeached, or in the case of the West Wing censured.

It is not the case in the United Kingdom. As noted above, impeachment originated in England in 1376 during the final years of Edward III’s reign and enabled the Commons to demand that leading officials were held to account for their conduct. The precise nature of the process would not be settled for some time, and impeachment was used in various hybrid forms in the years following 1376. What is clear is that the origins of impeachment are linked to Parliament’s response to times of national crisis, which in 1376 related to England’s military misfortunes during the Hundred Years War, the financial crisis the country faced, and real concerns over how the country was to be governed due to the monarch’s infirmity and the fact this the king’s likely successor would be a child

The last British impeachment concerned Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville, who was accused of the misuse of public funds. Melville was ultimately acquitted by the House of Lords in 1806. Most recently in 2004 there was an attempt to impeach Tony Blair, the then Prime Minister, over the Prime Minister’s conduct in relation to the decision to invade Iraq. This attempt went nowhere, despite a formal motion drafted by experienced MPs and assisted by a legal opinion drafted by Conor Gearty and Rabinder Singh QC of Matrix Chambers.

Why has there not been an impeachment since Melville’s acquittal in 1806? The short answer is that since the 1740s, when Sir Robert Walpole resigned after realizing he longer had the confidence of the House of Commons, impeachment started to be superseded by alternative political accountability mechanisms.

My doctoral research drew heavily on the historical use of impeachment in this country and has considered four case studies that demonstrated how impeachment was used. These case studies were the so-called ‘revival’ of impeachment in the seventeenth century, the use of impeachment during the factional disputes between the Whigs and Tories at the start of the eighteenth century, the impeachment of Warren Hastings in 1787 and the impeachment of Viscount Melville. This blog post will briefly consider the third case study, that of Warren Hastings.

Perhaps the most famous impeachment in British history was that of Warren Hastings, the former governor-general of Bengal. Hastings’ impeachment was the culmination of many years of concern within the metropolis over the conduct of the East India Company’s servants in India and the financial liability of the Company’s control over an increasing amount of territory. Reform of the Company and its governance in India had been attempted by Lord North’s Regulating Act of 1773, there had also been a serious attempt to proceed against a colonial governor, Sir Thomas Rumbold of Madras, and had been both a select and a secret committee into the Company’s conduct. Therefore, it is possible to see Hastings’ impeachment as a product of this perceived crisis over the East India Company and the influence that it (and its often very rich servants) had on the political life of the country.

The call to impeach Hastings was led by Edmund Burke MP and his then political ally, Charles James Fox MP, who were in turn supported by Hastings’ political rival, Sir Philip Francis. The impeachment has been written about by a range of academics and contemporary commentators and was recorded in the popular culture of the late eighteenth century, most notably in the caricatures by James Gillray and James Sayers. In terms of how the impeachment was portrayed by contemporaries, it is interesting to contrast Gillray and Sayer’s treatment of Hastings, as evidenced by Gillray’s caricature, ‘Impeachment ticket. For the trial of W-RR-NH-ST-NGS Esqr’ and Sayers’ caricature ‘For the Trial of Warren Hastings, Seventh Day’.

Having been impeached by the House of Commons in 1787, Hastings was then tried before the House of Lords, with his trial lasting seven years. The prosecution was conducted by the managers, which included Richard Sheridan MP and Edmund Burke MP on behalf of the House of Commons. Hastings was eventually acquitted, but the conclusion of many contemporaries was that the impeachment had not been a success, as the public and politicians had grown tired of the prosecution’s allegations.

It is interesting to consider the question of what if Parliament was today confronted by a modern-day Hastings? The East India Company and Hastings represented a threat to the nation and one that despite legislative reform remained unresolved (see the Regulating Act 1773, Fox’s India Bill in 1783, and Pitt’s India Act of 1784).

If Parliament was faced by a modern-day Warren Hastings, then alternative accountability mechanisms could be used rather than impeachment. There could be an investigation by the relevant select committee, debates in both Houses of Parliament, and the Prime Minister could be persuaded to establish a public inquiry. There could also perhaps, depending on the nature of the allegations, be a prosecution before the ordinary courts.

Taking a step back from the Hastings impeachment, it is important to note that impeachment had originated in the late fourteenth century as a way for the House of Commons to prosecute grievances outside of the ordinary criminal justice system and lead to a trial before the House of Lords. Despite a record of partisanship, arguably never more so than at the start of the eighteenth century, it is possible to see impeachment as a valuable accountability mechanism, in as much as it enabled the House of Commons to hold the executive to account.

So, what about the status of impeachment today? Is it possible that it could still serve a purpose, or is it to be considered as obsolete and confined to the history books?

My doctoral research, which will be published by Routledge as My doctoral research, which will be published by Routledge as Accountability, Impeachment and the Constitution: The Case for a Modernised Process in the United Kingdom (2022), has argued that by drawing upon the development and the operation of impeachment in this country’s history, it offers a way to see impeachment as empowering the House of Commons in the face of a powerful executive.ve.

At a time when there is a concern that there has been a disregard for the accepted constitutional norms (as evidenced by the decision to prorogue Parliament for five weeks and failure to enforce the Ministerial Code) it is argued that a modernised form of impeachment could empower the House of Commons to take on the role as the guardian of the constitution and ultimately proceed against government ministers, who are alleged to have acted in a way as to breach the accepted constitutional norms.

Through a mixture of deterrent, sanction and public scrutiny, it is argued that a modernized and revised form of impeachment would make a valuable contribution to the existing accountability toolkit and buttress the political constitution. To avoid concerns over partisanship, show trials and executive dominance of the House of Commons, it is proposed that impeachment would be modernised. No longer would there be a focus on crimes, instead impeachment would be concerned with breaches of the constitution. The eventual determination of wrongdoing would no longer be determined by the House of Lords, but drawing upon the Danish practice of impeachment, it would be determined by a specially constituted Court of Impeachment.

Dr Chris Monaghan, Principal Lecturer in Law, University of Worcester