The official, substantially verbatim report of what is said in both houses of Parliament is an essential tool for ensuring democratic accountability. This record, Hansard, contains a wealth of data, but it is not always fully accessible and easy to search. Lesley Jeffries and Fransina de Jager explain how a new project, Hansard at Huddersfield, aims to improve access to the Hansard records and contribute new ways of searching the data.
Tag: House of Commons
On 18 February, seven Labour MPs resigned from the Party to sit as an independent group. Operating without the formal support of a parliamentary party they will face several institutional barriers to working effectively in the House of Commons, writes our Co-Convener, Louise Thompson.
Dr James Strong looks to history to understand the influence of the House of Commons over the UK’s use of military force abroad, in a blog from our recent Making Sense of Parliaments conference.
In their nearly-eponymous 1995 hit, Reverend Black Grape, I’m a Celebrity runners-up and Bargain Hunt cheats, Black Grape, asked ‘Can I get a witness?’ In 2019, why is it that some select committees seemingly find it difficult to get female witnesses to give evidence at their sessions? Some of the answer may well be found in the gendered make-up of the committees themselves.
At a time of significant structural change, the UK’s constitutional and political arrangements face unprecedented challenges. There are strong arguments to be made for increasing the level of scrutiny of constitutional reform by accountable bodies, particularly through the vehicle of the Parliamentary Select Committee. Yet, the number of Committees tasked with examining constitutional matters has decreased; in particular, the Commons Political and Constitutional Reform Committee was not re-appointed following the 2015 General Election. Drawing on a detailed case study of the work of this unique committee, Dr Eloise Ellis examines the implications of its dissolution for the parliamentary scrutiny of constitutional reform more broadly.
How can we judge success or failure in relation to e-petitions to Parliament? Dr Catherine Bochel discusses a framework for assessing e-petitions, drawn from research in the National Assembly for Wales and Scottish Parliament.
Drawing on the History of Parliament’s oral history project, Emmeline Ledgerwood discusses the thought processes and critical influences that drove or inhibited their political aspirations of women who served as MPs in the 1970s, 80s and 90s.
On Tuesday 4 December the UK Government was found to be in contempt of Parliament. Dr Andrew Defty explains how this unprecedented situation occurred.
In a new blog from our Making Sense of Parliaments conference, Lawrence McKay investigates the effects of how MPs communicate on constituents’ awareness of their MPs.
In the first blog from our Making Sense of Parliaments conference, Matt Williams, Jonathan Jones and Ruth Dixon draw on computer-assisted methods of analysis adapted from biological sciences and natural language processing to show how the text of the EU (Withdrawal) Bill was altered through its parliamentary passage; how government and non-government amendments to the Bill differentially changed the text, and how the Bill’s language compares to other contemporary legislation.