Dr Philip Aylett builds on his previous contributions to this blog-site to provide historical insight into the role played by Commons Committees as the UK participated in the European Economic Community during the 1970s and 1980s.
Tag: legislative studies
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Parliament: You in Danger, Girl
PSA Parliaments Group Convenor Dr Marc Geddes considers the potential impact that the recent Conservative victory may have upon effective parliamentary scrutiny. The blog discusses the current government’s agenda for legislative reform and the changes that may be brought about by a shake-up in the staffing of key parliamentary roles.
We are pleased to announce the details of our panels at the PSA Conference, which will take place in Glasgow on 10-12 April 2017. Details about the conference can be found on the PSA website (click here).
Sam Power discusses how he uses a simulation of a Congressional Standing Committee to explain legislative complexity to students.
Politicians, the public, think-tanks, journalists and academics alike have increasingly focused in recent times on how parliaments and legislatures work and how to make them work better in terms of policy-making, representation, scrutiny and accountability. Yet, despite this focus, the evidence base for making judgments about the effectiveness of parliaments and legislatures is arguably not as extensive as it could be, perhaps partly because of methodological difficulties in assessing the influence, impact and power of these institutions.
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Get involved
Blogs
We publish blogs on parliaments or legislatures each week, and always welcome new posts addressing topical issues or sharing new research. We also welcome blog posts or ideas from practitioners working within a parliament or legislature (for example, the inside look at the House of Lords Library by Matthew Purvis). Our blog includes posts on legislatures from across the globe, at national, sub-national and supra-national levels of governance.
We are very keen to increase the diversity of contributions to our blog, in particular, the number of blogs we publish from women, or people of colour. Blog submissions from early career researchers are also especially welcome.
If you have an idea for a blog and would like to discuss it further, please get in touch with our blog editor, Gavin Hart, at: g.hart@hud.ac.uk
We also publish overviews of national parliaments. Check out our current list, and contact us if you would like to contribute.
If you’re on Twitter, you’ll know that we have a twitter account: @psa_parl. We are always happy to tweet/retweet news about our members’ work with parliament, so do copy us in, or use the hashtag #PSAParliaments, which we check regularly.
We welcome members tweeting from our own account for a day to cover specific events. If you (or one of your students) would like to cover a specific event through our Twitter account for a day, please get in touch with us. A few ideas: State Opening of Parliament, the new devolved legislatures, Prime Minister’s Questions, a specific select committee hearing, a specific debate/vote, a conference/workshop on parliaments and legislatures, etc., etc. – it’s whatever you would like to cover as long as it is relevant to the study and understanding of parliament(s). If you want to do this, please get in touch with us!
At our Annual General Meeting, we discussed the possibility of holding small workshops at a range of universities on methodological issues and training in legislative studies. Any of you could host one of these workshops, and we have funding available to help put these together. They do not need to be large workshops, and could comprise small groups of 6 or so people (or a larger group!). Similarly, it does not need to be a full day activity – a 1h30min workshop would be just as useful as a full day/afternoon one. The idea is that it explores a specific methodology issue in legislative studies. This is to build on the workshop we held last year (details here), and the feedback showed that it would be useful to do more of these but focused on specific approaches/techniques. Stephen Bates (Birmingham) has offered to run a workshop on quantitative analysis for legislative studies, for example.
If anyone else would like to run one in a different area, we would love to hear from you – just get in touch with us. As soon as we have details for workshops, including the one in Birmingham, we will circulate details.
Do get in touch, even if you just want more details about what we have organised so far and/or discuss a possible idea.
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Essay Competition 2016
Following the success of our Essay Competition 2015, we are pleased to announce the launch of our Essay Competition 2016! The winner will be presented with a prize of £150. Last year’s winner was presented the award in the House of Commons by the Clerk of the House.