In a new blog from our Making Sense of Parliaments conference Nicole Nisbett and Cristina Leston-Bandeira discuss how digital public engagement is organised across different departments within the UK Parliament.
Tag: UK Parliament
Categories
The pastoral role of the party whips
Party whips are well-known for their role as enforcers in the Westminster Parliament, but a new blog by Andrew Defty, University of Lincoln, discusses a less well-known part of their role: offering pastoral care to MPs.
The power of parliamentary committees varies greatly, both between countries and over time. Thomas Fleming analyses committees in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, and the UK to argue that committee power is influenced by voters’ attachments to political parties.
In addition to their floor debates, a crucial role of legislatures is to scrutinise government law-making and policy implementation. The House of Commons looks at legislation via bill committees, and its select committees cover each of the Whitehall departments to scrutinise implementation. As part of the 2018 Audit of UK Democracy, Patrick Dunleavy and the Democratic Audit team consider how well current processes maintain parliamentary knowledge and scrutiny of the central state in the UK and England.
Sarah Childs, Professor of Politics and Gender, Birkbeck College University of London and Distinguished Visiting Researcher, University of Auckland, discusses progress on implementing the recommendations of her report The Good Parliament two years on from its publication.
Changes to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards’ investigation process won’t affect expenses investigations, writes Nick Dickinson. But the reason why reveals the deeper challenges in transforming Parliament into a modern workplace.
In evidence to the House of Commons Liaison Committee this week Theresa May discussed the Restoration and Renewal of the Palace of Westminster. Alexandra Meakin discusses the importance of government support for the R&R programme.
Labour recently announced that any new peers it nominates must commit to abolishing the House of Lords. In this post, Pete Dorey discusses Labour’s track record on Lords reform and why the party has failed to enact serious reforms when in government, arguing that the subject has suffered from a lack of intra-party consensus and a lack of serious interest in reform at ministerial level.
Scotland and Wales’ devolved political institutions, elected under proportional Additional Member electoral systems, were intended to produce a more consensual political culture. However, writes Felicity Matthews, although their electoral rules have increased the proportionality of representation, the structures of the Scottish Parliament and National Assembly for Wales have meant that a more consensual approach to policy-making has been more limited than might have been expected.
In February this year, Oxford University Press published Exploring Parliament, which aims to provide an accessible introduction to the workings of the UK parliament. In this post, the book’s editors, Louise Thompson and Cristina Leston-Bandeira, explain why the book is necessary and what it hopes to achieve.