Cristina Leston-Bandeira and Louise Thompson examine the impact of a stage of the legislative process piloted by the House of Commons in 2013, during which the public were invited to comment on a bill undergoing parliamentary scrutiny. They explain why, despite an impressive response, the Public Reading Stage failed to make much of an impact.
Tag: public engagement
In its early days, some considered the internet to be the silver bullet that could deal with the deficits of representative democracy. Others had been less optimistic vis-à-vis its potential to foster democracy. In a blog originally posted on LSE British Politics and Policy, Hartwig Pautz looks at whether the e-democracy tool WriteToThem allows for meaningful communication between citizens and their elected representatives.
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.
By Kevin Davies and Cristina Leston-Bandeira
Over the last decade, public engagement has become a key role for parliaments. This is shown in the reinforcement of a wide range of types of activity, from expanding the scope of visits to parliament, developing educational resources about the institution, to introducing out-facing programmes actively seeking to engage communities with the work of parliament. Whilst this has represented a clear shift in the way parliaments engage with the public, most of this activity has tended to develop in parallel to actual parliamentary business – as an aside activity.
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Why do we blog, anyway?
By Marc Geddes
I have been Communications Officer for the PSA Specialist Group on Parliaments for almost two years, and I have loved it. It has allowed me to engage with a range of academics, researchers, students and practitioners to help disseminate their research whilst also promoting the study of parliaments and legislatures across the UK. The main way that I have sought to do this is through our website, and especially through our blogs, which cover topical issues or overviews of legislatures. But why does this even matter? Why should parliamentary and legislative scholars be blogging? There are at least three reasons, and each relates to the audience that we are trying to engage: the public, practitioners, and academics.
By Isabele Mitozo
Over the last two decades, the web has become a facilitator for information access. Institutions, especially representative ones, have used that means to communicate with citizens. Parliaments, more specifically, have tried to improve the use of digital platforms to go further and open up the process of law construction.
By Tom Caygill
Last year I was one of the lucky two applicants to be offered one of the PSA/House of Commons Committee Office placements. The placement was a great opportunity: to utilise the skills I use in my PhD in a different context, while developing new ones; to better understand the ethos of select committees; and to discuss my doctoral research with parliamentary staff, which has gone on to help shape my final research design.
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The Consequences of Anti-Politics
Please note that this blog piece was originally published on the Crick Centre blog, and is available here. This piece has been re-published with permission from the author.
By Marc Geddes
The killing of Jo Cox on Thursday was a horrific attack on British democracy, which happened in the context of an increasingly bitter and hostile referendum campaign on UK membership of the European Union. Today, this attack overshadows every aspect of British politics, but more broadly it is arguably the extreme tip of an ‘anti-politics’ iceberg that is extending across the western world.
By Cristina Leston-Bandeira and Viktoria Spaiser
Hashtag conversations over Twitter are common place. They are used to comment on TV programmes, conferences, general themes and now petitions. The new Petitions Committee of the House of Commons has been using hashtags to support the development of discussions associated with the themes of the petitions being debated in parliament. Are these discussions on Twitter just a lot of hot air, come and gone, or can they help us understand the different purposes of petitioning? In this blog piece, we find that, instead of just noise, these Twitter discussions help to identify themes linked to petitions, different levels of sentiment associated to petitions, varying levels of polarisation, but also those petitions that despite achieving very high numbers of signatures, actually have little traction.
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.