It is two years since the Intelligence and Security Committee published its report into UK lethal drone strikes in Syria. Despite a commitment to ‘respond substantively to any report by the ISC within 60 days’ the government has yet to produce a detailed reply to this report. Andrew Defty examines the government’s record in responding to ISC reports and the changing nature of its commitment to doing so. This blog was originally posted on Democratic Audit and is reposted with permission.
Tag: parliament
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Governing under pressure?
Is the psychological strain on MPs not only damaging to their health, but also threatening the health of our democracy? Dr James Weinberg discusses new research, with colleagues from political science and psychology, into the pressures on mental health and wellbeing that accompany political office
What’s happened to the Intelligence and Security Committee? In a new blog, based on his paper at our Legislatures in Uncertain Times conference, Andrew Defty, University of Lincoln, discusses delays, a reduced public presence, and decreasing powers, and questions whether the ISC is in decline.
David Judge and Cristina Leston-Bandeira discuss the symbolic importance of parliamentary buildings, in a blog originally posted by the Crick Centre at the University of Sheffield.
By Dr Catherine Bochel, Reader in Policy Studies, University of Lincoln
In a post-Brexit world, the way Parliament works and engages with the public is more important than ever.
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Promoting Gender Equality in Parliaments
By Jacqui Smith and Kristen Sample
Women account for half of the global population, yet represent less than a quarter of the world’s parliamentarians. The causes behind this imbalance are myriad and multi-faceted, based on culturally rooted gender norms, political institutions, and economic disparities. In other words, a woman who is elected to parliament has beaten the odds.
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2016 in Parliament
Please note that this blog piece was originally published on the Crick Centre blog, and has been re-posted here with the author’s permission.
As 2016 comes to an end, we await the Supreme Court’s verdict on whether the Government can invoke Article 50 without the authority of Parliament. Having the UK’s highest court consider the constitutional role of Parliament has been one consequence of a referendum which hadn’t even been scheduled at the start of 2016, but dominated a turbulent year in the Palace of Westminster.
Reporting on new research that looks at the way parliamentary staff wish academics would engage with Parliament, Katharine Dommett argues that researchers would benefit from not only rethinking where and how they target research, but also the very form academic research should take.
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One-day conference: a great success!
Thank you to everyone that attended and participated in our first one-day conference (we hope the first of many!). It was a fantastic event with a range of academic panels, a practitioner roundtable, a poster exhibition, and our annual lecture from the Clerk of the House of Commons, David Natzler. You can see a full summary by following the Twitter hashtag: #ParlConf. We also have a summary of the paper and poster abstracts available here.
By Alex Prior
I’m a symbol. I’m a symbol of the human ability to be able to suppress the selfish and hateful tendencies that rule the major part of our lives.
Kris Kringle – Miracle on 34th Street
I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
Roy Batty – Blade Runner
Taking into account the growing individualisation among the UK population (particularly younger generations) and the accusations of self-interest that are often directed towards mainstream politics, there is a vital role to be played by institutions and concepts that facilitate affective connections. The affective relates to the presence of personal feelings; it is distinct from ‘emotions’ in that the latter is more causal and immediate, and typically a response to direct stimuli. The affective is a broader umbrella term for the ‘irrational’ mindset that encompasses emotions, attitudes and moods, acting as an alternative lens to ‘rationality’ when interpreting political actions and motives. ‘Narratives’ are an area of key interest for me; specifically the ways in which humans establish patterns across isolated data (even where no patterns may exist) and interpret that information as a narrative. In relation to parliamentary studies, narratives are a means for organisations such as Parliamentary Outreach to engage people in democratic participation. In emphasising the importance of narratives as a topic of study, I will demonstrate their relevance to democratic participation by showing their appeal to affect, and their prospective links to symbolic representation.