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Why Parliaments? Part 3

The future of parliaments as watchdogs

By John Keane

This is the third part of a keynote address, delivered in the presence of King Felipe VI, at the conference to commemorate the International Day of Parliamentarism hosted by the Inter Pares: EU Global Project to Strengthen the Capacity of Parliaments (Cortes Generales, León, Spain, June 30, 2023).

The first part of the keynote on the invention of the cortes model can be read here and the second part discussing past and current threats to parliaments here.

European Parliament building in Strasbourg (European Parliament).

So what of the future of parliaments? Do they have a future? When thinking about these various decadent trends, it’s tempting to conclude that the post-1945 renaissance of parliaments is coming to an end. We may even think that we’re already entering the age of phantom parliaments in which legislatures in more than a few countries are simultaneously real and not real, form without much content. In these make-believe spaces, elected representatives claim to serve the people, even though they are of limited or no significance to the people in whose name they pass laws.

A shift to phantom parliaments and executive rule may be welcomed in some quarters, but before the cava is poured, let’s consider the countertrends, and the reasons why, in these years of the 21st century, the cortesmodel of government remains indispensable.

In politics, nothing is set in stone. To speak in quantum terms, contemporary parliaments are in a state of superposition. Just as the fate of Schrödinger’s cat in a box was undecidable, so are parliaments today suspended unpredictably between alternative outcomes. Fightbacks are possible. They are necessary. Remarkably, renewals are happening at multiple points on our planet.

Consider Denmark’s Folketinget: in meetings called consultations (samråd), its powerful European Affairs Committee regularly grills ministers in real-time during sessions of the Council of the European Union in Brussels and Luxembourg. The National Assembly of the Republic of Korea has signed off on the world’s first comprehensive laws against verbal abuse and bullying (‘gapjil’) by family-run conglomerates and other powerful organisations. Romania’s parliament is now digitally fed citizens’ suggestions and complaints with the help of ION, a smart robot, say the wags, designed to improve the ‘intelligence’ of politicians. Proposals are afoot in the German Bundestag to receive non-binding reports from lottery-selected citizens’ assemblies.

Parliaments are also heavily preoccupied with time past and time future. The Welsh legislature regularly consults with the world’s first Future Generations Commissioner. With eyes on the unmade future, the European Parliament has drafted the world’s first AI Act. New Zealand’s (Aotearoa’s) parliament has granted ecosystems ‘the rights, powers, duties and liabilities of a legal person’. The cross-border Nordic network of Sámi parliaments, the Sámediggi is a case of interparliamentary cooperation, featuring consultative bodies whose brief is to promote and preserve indigenous self-determination.

Norway’s Sámi Parliament, the representative body for people of Sámi heritage, opened in October 1989 (Sámediggi).
Watchdog parliaments

How are we to make good sense of this new wave of experiments? My suggestion is to see them as points on a larger canvas, single performances in a grand carnival of parliamentary efforts to rejuvenate the cortes spirit.

Shadows are certainly falling on too many of the world’s parliaments. But these innovations are the first signs of a dawn of renewal. They breathe new life into old institutions originally designed to make binding agreements by lawmakers acting on behalf of different social interests, in the name of the commonweal. More obviously, these parliamentary experiments are today doing what parliaments did for over eight centuries: representing the claims and interests of the represented – and they remind us that parliamentary representation is, by definition, tricky business.

Populists and demagogues be warned: representation isn’t a simple, face-to-face contract between a representative and an imaginary People or Nation. Representation isn’t mimesis. It has a vicarious, fiduciary quality, and this means that when voters choose a representative, representation is as much an ending as it is a beginning. Representation is an open-ended process contingent upon the assent, disappointment and displeasure of the represented. When representatives underperform, or fail on too many fronts, they are sent to hell in a handbasket.

These principles of representation, traceable to the León cortes convened by Alfonso IX, are most definitely alive and kicking in the new parliamentary experiments. That’s why textbooks still tell us that the prime task of parliaments is to represent the interests of citizens by means of free and fair elections. But there’s an error within the textbooks: if we look more closely at what today’s smart, activist parliaments are actually doing, we see a departure of great historical significance ignored by the textbooks.

Parliaments aren’t just chambers or ‘little rooms’ where elected politicians represent their constituents. In our age of monitory democracy, legislatures are becoming watchdog parliaments. In the name of the common good, they blow whistles, sound alarms, warn of wicked problems and pass laws to push back or ban arbitrary exercises of power.

The contrast with parliaments of yesteryear couldn’t be clearer. The first-ever cortes was born of military conquest. Parliaments of the more recent past were too often the castles of the aristocracy, bourgeois mansions, parlours of male privilege, and engines of empire. By contrast, today’s watchdog parliaments, when they work well, stand against conquest in all its various forms. Especially when generously resourced, watchdog parliaments specialise in the public scrutiny and restraint of predatory power. They stand against foolish governments that abuse their power.

Watchdog parliaments snap the chains of majority rule, the blind worship of numbers, by granting voices and rights to minorities excluded from high politics. These parliaments alter our shared sense of time. They extend the franchise to endangered species, wronged ancestors and future generations. In opposition, say, to predatory corporations, greedy banks and rogue mining companies, watchdog parliaments protect and promote the rules of the democratic game. Not to be underestimated is the way they strive to tackle long-term problems, currently sidelined by the short-term mentality of election cycles.

Watchdog parliaments are more than the guardians of electoral integrity. As champions of the public monitoring of power, they target complex, difficult, wicked problems. Their job is to find just solutions for matters such as artificial intelligence, tax havens, polluted environments, pestilences, the plight of stateless peoples, the unregulated arms trade and unending wars of attrition.

When performing these functions, paradoxically, watchdog parliaments push beyond the ‘parliamentary road’ and the fetish of periodic elections. They help redefine democracy and give it teeth. Electoral democracy becomes monitory democracy. Democracy comes to mean nothing less than free and fair elections, but also something much more: citizens’ freedom from predatory power in all its ugly forms, including our reckless relationship with the Earth on which we dwell.

True, the new watchdog parliaments are fragile. They function without much intellectual support. No grand political theories of the order of François Guizot’s lectures on the origins of representative government in the early 1820s, or John Stuart Mill’s Considerations on Representative Government (1861) have come to their defence. They lack guidebooks and operating manuals. This is to say that watchdog parliaments enjoy no scholarly fanfare and no historical guarantees of success. Except to future historians, their chances of survival are unknown.

The only thing that’s certain is that the spirit of these watchdog parliaments – the spirit of young King Alfonso IX – is the grit we humans are going to need as we struggle to deal wisely, equitably, democratically with the rich opportunities and cascading dangers of our troubled century.

About the author

John Keane is Professor of Politics at the University of Sydney and Professorial Fellow at the WZB (Berlin). His latest book is The Shortest History of Democracy (2022), which has already been published in more than 12 languages.

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The Butterfly Effect: Representation as Fractal Politics

What does a coastline have in common with effective rhetoric? Each component resembles something bigger, and bigger, and bigger. And what can this sort of fractal pattern show us about politics? To Alex Prior, fractals illustrate successful representation, and the impulses that drive it

‘As above, so below’

In launching the ‘Science of Democracy’ blog series, Jean-Paul Gagnon argues that democracy’s words require a new narrative. Agustín Goenaga credits Gagnon with a ‘living archive’ of stories. As I have argued previously, the best way of understanding narratives and stories – and their importance to democracy – is through their fractal nature.

Fractals are patterns; we see them constantly. They are in trees, lightning, coastlines. If you zoom in on any of those images, they still resemble themselves. This is self-similarity, a defining characteristic of fractals.

Self-similarity is a defining characteristic of fractals and of representation, which makes present what is not physically there

It is also a characteristic of representation (in its many forms): ‘making something present’, typically by acting on something or someone’s behalf. The notion that we can make present what is not physically there (a constituency, an idea, or anything else) is central to my research on parliamentary systems. Such systems depend on representatives making others’ voices and values present.

Fractal politics?

Self-similarity – and recursion (the repetition of a structure with continual reference, at each stage, to the structure itself) – is applicable to politics in many ways. For example, some advocate ‘fractal democracy’ as a practical model of governance. Says Jasper Sky: ‘Groups of seven people each choose one representative, and those seven representatives then meet to choose a representative, and so on, up several levels of representation…[with] the person at the top of the fractal hierarchy to be held fully accountable at every level.’

Fractals also give us a conceptual framework for politics. ‘Fractal politics’, writes Gordon Fletcher, ‘reflects the sociological sensibility that people seek out self-similarity in the form of opinions and worldviews that align with their own identity’. Fractals can help us understand not only political communication and support, but the ways in which we interact with our own social reality.

But how can we study (or even conceptualise) these opinions and those who ‘make’ them? And what does it really mean to seek out self-similarity (i.e., to seek ourselves) in the opinions and worldviews of others? The answer to both questions lies in representation.

A fractal reading of representation

Fractals can be read into theoretical works on representation, such as those of Derrida, who contends that ‘[e]verything begins by referring back (par le renvoi), that is to say, does not begin’. Derrida’s description centres around self-similarity and recursion (‘referring back’), as well as infinite replicability (‘does not begin’).

So far, so fractal. But fractals are even more relevant to contemporary representation theory. Saward’s theory of the representative claim identifies how ‘[m]akers of representative claims suggest to the potential audience: (1) you are/are part of this audience, (2) you should accept this view, this construction — this representation — of yourself, and (3) you should accept me as speaking and acting for you.’

Representation is a ‘claim’ made to an audience about the maker of the claim (a politician, for example), about what they ‘stand for’, and about that audience

Saward shows us how representation works. It is a ‘claim’ (or a series of claims) made to an audience about the maker of the claim (a politician, for example), about what they ‘stand for’, and about that audience.

A representative claim can be made at different scales (e.g., to a person, a group, a region), sometimes simultaneously. It is also accepted or rejected (i.e., interpreted) by audiences at many different scales (e.g., myself as an individual, as a citizen, as a person, etc). Fractals are invaluable in helping to conceptualise the way that representative claims in politics and beyond connect (or fail to connect) with their audience.

Effective (and ineffective) representative claims, in fractals

Consider Obama’s effective ‘yes we can’ 2008 slogan. People saw themselves within this slogan, at many (potentially infinite) scales:

Figure 1: An effective representative claim

Representative claim 'Yes we can' mapped out down to a fractal level, in a triangle figure

The left image resembles the right image at every scale. Effective representative claims resemble the audience at every level; audience members identify themselves within (with/in) the claim. We thereby read effective representative claims as successful appeals to self-similarity.

This process is not always successful. On 4 June 1958, against the backdrop of the Algerian War of Independence and the collapse of the Fourth Republic, Charles De Gaulle arrived in Algiers and uttered the famous words Je vous ai compris! [I understood you!]. To this day it is unclear who De Gaulle was addressing: Algerians? French Algeria? Colonists? The military?

Figure 2: An ineffective representative claim

Representative claim 'I understood you' mapped as a square figure, that is not fractal

The failure of this representative claim lies in a failed appeal to self-similarity. It failed to reflect (or even define) an audience at any scale.

Self-similarity matters for the maker of the representative claim, not just the audience. Obama included himself (‘we’) in a claim of common purpose, with/in which the audience recognised themselves. De Gaulle’s claim (‘I understood you’) lacks self-similarity. Audience members were left wondering who ‘they’ were, who De Gaulle was, and who/what he ‘stood for’.

Why fractals matter

The mathematician Edward Norton Lorenz is closely associated with chaos theory and the ‘butterfly effect’, by which small initial variations eventually yield drastic outcomes. For example – a person writes a short essay in Canberra; later, I see a broad and rich international academic debate. Fractals are a component of chaos, and a means of visualising it.

Studying representation in action (via fractals) clarifies the appeal of self-similarity, and why some statements are all-encompassing in their alienation

They also provide a means of studying narratives and stories within a ‘science of democracy’. Moreover, studying representation in action (via fractals) clarifies the appeal of self-similarity. We seek patterns, and we seek ourselves. This matters in terms of content and context. Alongside the political statements and patterns discussed earlier, consider that Obama reflected an audience (‘we’) descriptively and symbolically, in a way that De Gaulle could not, and arguably never claimed to (‘I…you’).

Fractals show us how ambiguous (but ostensibly all-encompassing) political and other statements are, in practice. They are all-encompassing only inasmuch as they alienate everyone at the same time. This mattered in 1958, it mattered in 2008, and it matters today.

By Alex Prior, Lecturer in Politics with International Relations, London South Bank University

Alex’s research focuses on public engagement with parliaments and other political institutions. His work also discusses the usefulness of narratives and storytelling in conceptualising, as well as strengthening, political engagement. He tweets @VoterEngagement

This post was originally posted on The Loop blog. See the original post here: https://theloop.ecpr.eu/the-butterfly-effect-representation-as-fractal-politics/

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Breaking the Glass Chamber: Women, Politics and Parliament, 1945-1997

By Anna Muggeridge

Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, women struggled to achieve political representation at the highest levels and at times, what progress and gains had been made could be lost. The number of women sitting in the House of Commons at any one time, for example, did not slowly but steadily increase. Fewer women were elected in the general election of 1951 than had been elected in 1950; fewer in 1966 than in 1964, and fewer in 1979 than (October) 1974. 1979 famously saw the first woman Prime Minister, but Margaret Thatcher’s relationship with feminism and the wider women’s movement is but one contentious aspect of her premiership. Notably, Thatcher only appointed one woman to a Cabinet position (Baroness Young, who served for just two years) and when Thatcher herself resigned and was replaced by John Major, the country had no women in Cabinet until 1992, when Gillian Shephard and Virginia Bottomley were appointed Education and Health Secretaries respectively. The first Black woman MP, Diane Abbott, was not elected until 1987, almost seven decades after the first white woman, Nancy Astor, took her seat in 1919. And in 1997, Labour’s landslide victory saw more than 100 women elected but this achievement was diminished and trivialised by labelling them ‘Blair’s Babes’. The story of women parliamentarians, and indeed women’s wider engagement with politics, through these years is therefore more nuanced and complex than an initial glance might suggest, and there is still much to be discovered about their experiences.

In September, the Mile End Institute at Queen Mary, University of London, will host a conference which seeks to bring together historians, political scientists, and sociologists to generate new conversations, relationships, and understandings of what politics meant to and for women in the second half of the twentieth century. In addition, the conference will play host to a number of current and former female members of both the House of Commons and the House of Lords, who will reflect on their own experiences, including Baroness Angela Browning, Dame Margaret Hodge, Baroness Estelle Morris, Baroness Emma Nicholson, Baroness Dawn Primarolo, Baroness Gillian Shephard, and Siân James. We will also hear from campaign groups including 50:50 Parliament and the Fawcett Society, who will lead discussions about the future of women in politics. Keynote lectures by historians, sociologists and political scientists – including Professor Laura Beers, Professor Julie Gottleib, Professor Khursheed Wadia, Professor Clarisse Berthèzene, and Professor Sarah Childs, will enable scholars to reflect on the different insights and perspectives from cutting edge research on women in political campaigns, parties and institutions.

It is only by drawing together those working in a range of disciplines, as well as those with direct experience of working in and with parliament, that a true picture of women’s experiences in politics in this period will start to emerge. More significantly, the conference offers the opportunity to develop new directions in research into women’s politics in the later twentieth century, shaping the questions and lines of enquiry of current and future researchers into this relatively understudied area of British political history.

Papers at the conference will address a variety of local, national and international themes. With talks by, for instance, Micaela Panes on women’s activism in South Wales before the 1970s; Tom Chidwick on women’s role in the campaign for a Scottish Assembly, and Charitini Ntini on women’s in the Provisional IRA during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, we ask how far national identities impacted on gendered politics in this period. Other papers explore women’s experiences on the international stage, something which has often been overlooked, such as Richard Johnson’s examination of women and Euroscepticism or Charlotte Lydia Riley’s analysis of women and British overseas development policy.

A number of talks will explore the experiences of women from minoritized backgrounds in this period. Farah Hussain’s timely keynote invites us to consider the role Muslim women play and have played within the Labour party. Beckie Rutherford asks how disabled women conceived of themselves as ‘political’, while Ashlee Christofferson will address the whiteness of ‘sex discrimination’ legislation. While there may, broadly speaking, have been progress in terms of the number of women sitting in Parliament between 1945 and 1997, there is still much opportunity to reflect on how other aspects of individuals’ identities—their race, class, sexuality or religion, for example—intersected with their gender within and outside the House of Commons.

Indeed, many of the papers at the conference will address campaigns which did not (necessarily) take place within parliament, such as Rose Debenham’s talk on the women of Greenham Common; Frances Galt’s research into women’s industrial disputes around the time of the 1970 Equal Pay Act, or Grace Heaton’s analysis of women’s roles in the campaign for the ordination of women. At the same time, other papers will consider how structures, institutions and cultures worked to exclude women: and how women sought to break down these barriers: with Emma Lundin providing a comparative perspective on gender quotas and gatekeeping strategies and Gillian Murphy reflecting on the post-war lobbying group Women for Westminster.

The conference therefore offers a unique opportunity for academics, politicians, policymakers and campaigners to come together to discuss the female political experience in the second half of the twentieth century, and, in so doing, open up new directions for current and future research. We very much hope that you will join us at the Mile End Institute at Queen Mary, University of London from Thursday 15 to Saturday 17 September. Details of how to watch the main sessions if you are not able to attend in person will be available nearer the time. You can view the full programme and sign up for tickets at the MEI website.

Dr Anna Muggeridge is Lecturer in History at the University of Worcester and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Mile End Institute.

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(Re)-connecting parliamentary engagement: how storytelling can strengthen public-parliament dynamics in the UK

Alex Prior (University of East Anglia) and Cristina Leston-Bandeira (Leeds) discuss the potential for parliamentary story-telling to reach new audiences and to promote wider public engagement.

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Bedding Down, Treading Water and Taking Two Steps Forward: Gender Equality and the 2019-20 House of Commons Select Committee Elections

Stephen Holden Bates (University of Birmingham, UK)

Stephen McKay (University of Lincoln, UK)

Mark Goodwin (Coventry University, UK)

The results of the elections for the UK House of Commons Select Committees are out[1]!

The 2010 Wright Reforms, designed to increase the standing of Parliament in the wake of the MPs’ expenses scandal, are now a decade old. One of the main reforms introduced was to alter the method of selection for House of Commons Select Committees[2] from one of appointment by party managers to one of election by the whole House (in the case of chairships) and by party caucuses (in the case of membership). This reform has been hailed by many as one of the reasons why select committees have become an ever more prominent and prestigious part of Parliament. There is also evidence that the reform has been good for some aspects of gender equality within the committee system, particularly in terms of female MPs becoming committee chairs[3]. Below we consider the outcomes of the latest round of select committee elections and argue that, in terms of female representation, they are a case of simultaneously bedding down, treading water and taking two steps forward.

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Standing up for parliament: how non-elected officials represent parliament as an institution

In a new Political Studies article David Judge and Cristina Leston-Bandeira identify non-elected officials rather than elected members as those who ‘speak for’ and ‘act for’ parliaments as institutions most often. In this post, originally posted on The Constitution Unit, they discuss this paradox and some of their key findings in relation to the UK parliament.

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Gender quotas – can they enhance women’s parliamentary representation?

Do legislative gender quotas enhance the representation of women in parliaments and legislatures? Dr Anna Gwiazda shares the findings of her new article on gender quotas in Poland.

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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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The Representativeness of the Australian Senate and Failures of Reform

By Richard Reid [1]

Prior to the 2016 federal election held on 2 July, the Australian Coalition government demonstrated a rare degree of collaboration with the Australian Greens and passed changes to reform the electoral process for the Senate. This post seeks to explain the reform and its intentions, and its complete failure in the wake of Australia’s double dissolution election. Further it argues that the debate about Senate reform should go much further than these changes, and the whole structure of the Senate’s composition should be opened up for debate in an effort to increase, rather than decrease, the representativeness of the Australian Senate.

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Do MPs need more support in understanding and writing legislation?

By Louise Thompson

The scrutiny of legislation is key to the role of MPs. It sounds relatively simple – asking lots of questions about what the government is planning to do and probing elements of bills to make sure that they will work properly, but the task facing them is a formidable one. Not only is the quantity of legislation increasing (particularly from delegated legislation), but the parliamentary timetable is busier than ever. Bills are also becoming much more complex, using terminology which can be tricky to understand. The language used facilitates the interpretation and implementation of the legislation. It is not written with Members of Parliament or the general public in mind. Yet, as this weekend’s discussions about whether the Scotland Act 2016 means that the Scottish Parliament can veto the UK’s decision to leave the EU show, the precise wording of legislation is important.

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