By Kento Ohara.
Literature on the changing nature of the UK constitution in recent years abounds. Although there is a widespread perception that the UK constitution has been undergoing some significant change recently, there is little consensus to date on how to conceptualise this change. In addressing this challenge and placing the UK’s recent constitutional developments in a comparative context, my project focuses on executive-legislative relations in the UK as the underlying dimension in the country’s recent constitutional evolution. This focus flows from the fact that the sovereignty of crown-in-parliament has been widely identified as the core of the UK constitution. To repeat the well-rehearsed phrase of the late English constitutional thinker Walter Bagehot, it is the ‘close union, the nearly complete fusion of the executive and legislative powers’ that is the ‘efficient secret’ of the (English) constitution (2009, p. 11). Notable recent developments within the UK’s sovereign parliament (especially the House of Commons) and its relationship with the executive branch include: major shake-ups in the Commons’ select committee system (Fisher 2015; Russell 2011), increasing number of rebellions within parliamentary parties (Cowley & Stuart 2012; 2014) and new legislation on the prime minister’s dissolution power (Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011; Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Act 2022). The role perception of MPs and their career patterns, amid the rise of ‘career politicians’ in UK politics, have also been said to be going through some transformation, influencing attitudinal changes on part of these politicians to a certain extent (Fisher 2015; Heuwieser 2018).
How then can we conceptualise these changes in UK executive-legislative relations, and how can we measure such changes empirically? My project seeks to address these questions by turning to the classic works of Polsby (1975, ch. 4) and Wilson (1885) on Anglo-American comparison of legislatures. Drawing on these influential studies on comparative legislatures, my project proposes the concept of ‘Congressionalisation’ of the UK House of Commons. It is argued that both institutionally and behaviourally, UK executive-legislative relations are incrementally becoming more similar to those observed between the US executive and congress.
Traditionally, the UK’s executive-dominated parliamentary system has been contrasted with the US presidential system, where Congress dominates the legislative process. Whereas in the UK the parliamentary majority, controlled by the executive, is vested with extensive agenda control and legislative power in its fusion-of-power model of government, under the US’s division-of-power constitution, the executive and legislative branches retain a much more significant degree of power to constrain each other in the legislative process (not to mention the heftier role of the judicial branch) (Bagehot 2009; Lijphart 1992; Wilson 1885).[i] This arrangement has created what the US political scientist Richard E Neustadt called a system where ‘separated institutions shar[e] power’ (1960, p. 39). This Anglo-American difference has long been noted by American and British constitutional thinkers, perhaps most notably by the future American president Woodrow Wilson, who decried the American system as a ‘congressional government’ (1885).
It was Polsby who picked up on these earlier observations on the different levels of policy-making influence legislatures have in Western democracies, and conceptualised the Westminster parliament as the ideal-type of an ‘arena’ legislature, in contrast to the ‘transformative’ Congress in the US (1975, pp. 278ff). In short, an arena legislature exercises very limited policy-making powers, whereas a transformative legislature enjoys a vital role in shaping policies. Following Wilson’s and other earlier observations, Polsby attributed this difference in policy-making influence of the UK and US legislatures primarily to the strength of their committees. Whilst the UK featured ad hoc standing committees to scrutinise bills, congressional committees yielded significant and effective policy influence. Indeed, some ‘mega-seat’ committees, such as the House Rules Committee, have acted as gateways for bills thereby exercising considerable agenda control, a power that is usually reserved for government ministers in the UK.
Polsby also proposed some preliminary hypotheses as to why some legislatures enjoyed larger policy-making influence than others. According to Polsby, it was the ‘character of parliamentary parties’ (emphasis added) that was related to the extent to which a legislature was ‘arena’ or ‘transformative’: the more coalitional, decentralised and flexible the parties, the more transformative the legislature.[ii] Among these characteristics, the first dimension (the extent to which parties are coalitional) related to the electoral parties, and the third dimension (flexibility) to the legislative parties, whilst the second dimension (the extent to which parties are decentralised) concerned both electoral and legislative parties. Hence, with respect to the internal working of legislatures, Polsby’s argument on the difference between the UK parliament and the US congress can be summarised into the following three key aspects:
- Committee strength: the US congress features stronger committees in terms of policy influence than the UK parliament.
- Agenda control: the US congress features a more decentralised, coalitional agenda control over its business than the UK parliament.
- Legislative parties: the US congress features parties that are more decentralised in terms of the distribution of legislative posts and more flexible (less party-disciplined) in terms of intra-legislative voting than the UK parliament.
My project argues that the UK parliament is indeed incrementally growing similar to this classic understanding of the US congress on these three dimensions, and seeks to corroborate the Congressionalisation argument by empirically measuring recent changes in these three aspects.
Existing studies do point to some recent developments in Westminster with regard to these three aspects. For example, studies have shown that with reforms to both public bill committees (legislative committees, formerly known as standing committees) and select committees (executive oversight committees), parliament is in a better position to scrutinise the government effectively (Levy 2009; Benton & Russell 2013). Especially in the case of select committees, these institutional innovations seem to have strengthened Parliament’s policy-making influence (Russell & Benton 2011; Lynch & Whitaker 2019). Although the UK government still retains unrivalled agenda control (a pledge made by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition to establish a House Business Committee in the House of Commons went unfulfilled), there now exists the Backbench Business Committee, which determines the topics to be debated during backbench business, giving parliamentarians more control over their own time (Matthews 2015). Distribution of legislative posts, such as select committee chairs and membership, has also become more decentralised, taking patronage away from the party whips (Fisher 2015; Russell 2011).
It is also important to note the behavioural changes on part of both MPs and the executive as well. Party cohesion in the House of Commons has waned in recent years with rebellions and government defeats becoming increasingly more common (Cowley & Stuart 2012; 2014). The preventive, as opposed to reactive, influence of Parliament has also manifested in the government’s approach to the legislative process, with the government’s Guide to making legislation explicitly advising ministers to anticipate potential dissent in Parliament (Cabinet Office 2022, pp. 159-160; see also Russell & Cowley 2016; Russell et al 2016). This is more akin to what we are used to see in the US context, where the executive branch is required to anticipate and bargain with congressional actors to achieve policy goals (e.g. Mayhew 1974, p. 107).
My project seeks to further this comparison of the British and American legislatures, especially on the flexibility dimension of legislative parties. I am devising new measures on divisions, i.e. intra-legislative voting, and on parliamentary speeches, that will allow me to trace behavioural changes of parliamentarians over time, especially in relation to Anthony King’s ‘modes’ of executive-legislative relations (1976). This will make a novel contribution to the literature on UK parliamentary reform and cross-national comparison of legislatures, as well as documenting the logic of Westminster’s evolution over recent years.
[i] Takayasu’s recent contribution highlights the changing roles of the judiciary and the House of Lords in the UK constitution as well, which he denotes as ‘Madisonianisation’(2018, in Japanese). My project focuses on the UK’s narrower executive-legislative relations.
[ii] Later studies have also confirmed that in parliamentary systems, having a coalition government is correlated with stronger parliamentary power to scrutinise the executive (Martin & Vanberg 2011; André et al 2016).
About the author
Kento Ohara is an MPhil student reading Politics (Comparative Government) at the University of Oxford. He is primarily interested in legislatures in parliamentary democracies, mainly in the UK, Germany and Japan, and how their internal procedures change over time.
