Best Laid Plans … The Institutionalisation of Public Deliberation in Scotland

Despite increasing support for participatory and deliberative principles amongst academics, practitioners and parliamentarians alike, efforts to infuse political systems with more inclusive and consensual forms of debate often founder. This article explores this conundrum by examining institutional reforms through the lens of deliberative democracy. More specifically, we scrutinise attempts to institutionalise forms of civic deliberation within the Scottish political system via the Scottish Civic Forum and the Scottish Parliament's committee system. Our analysis tells the story of how these two types of institutional reform, both designed to facilitate the move towards a more participatory and deliberative model of democracy in Scotland, have fared over a ten‐year period. In turn, this analysis allows us to comment on the ways in which deliberative and parliamentary democracy may be integrated.     

Coalition Government and Committee Power

Recent research suggests that committees in parliamentary democracies may, at least partly, be endogenous to the prevalence of coalition government. In this article, I examine the conditions under which parliamentary majorities reform legislative rules to expand or reduce committee power. I expect that, ceteris paribus, the greater the conflict inside the governing coalition, the higher the probability that parties in government will adopt reforms expanding committee power and the lower the chance that they will implement changes reducing such power. These expectations are tested using original new data on the reforms of committee agenda powers undertaken in eight European states within 20 years from democratic transition. I find some evidence to support the endogeneity of committee power to the ideological heterogeneity of parliamentary government.     

The Voting Motivations of Conservative Parliamentarians in the Conservative Party Leadership Election of 2001

This article examines the voting motivations of Conservative parliamentarians in the final parliamentary ballot of the Conservative party leadership election of 2001. By constructing a data set of the voting behaviour of Conservative parliamentarians in the final parliamentary party ballot, this article seeks to test a series of hypotheses relating to the ideological disposition and political characteristics of the candidates vis-à-vis their electorate. The article examines how and why the eliminative parliamentary ballot ensured that the party membership was presented with a face-off between the europhile, Kenneth Clarke, and the eurosceptic, Iain Duncan Smith, and why the modernising and socially liberal Michael Portillo was rejected. It will demonstrate that while arguments based on ideological factors are valid, the political characteristics of age and career status were also significant motivational influences that contributed to the rejection of Portillo and the delaying of the modernisation of the Conservative party.     

How Michael Foot Won the Labour Party Leadership

This paper examines the voting motivations of Labour parliamentarians in the final parliamentary ballot of the Labour party leadership election of 1980. By constructing a data set of the voting behaviour of Labour parliamentarians and by determining the ideological disposition of the 1980 parliamentary Labour party (PLP) this paper examines the ideological disposition of the candidates' vis‐à‐vis their electorate, and offers a challenge to traditional interpretations of how and why Foot was elected. The traditional interpretation has sought for explanations as to how a right‐wing dominated PLP elected a left‐wing candidate. Whilst citing the traditional interpretations of the impact of the impending Electoral College, mandatory reselection and the assumed weaknesses of the Healey campaign, this paper argues that there was considerably more left‐wing sentiment within the 1980 PLP in terms of economic management, defence and the Common Market, than previously considered. As such this paper suggests that, taken with the impact of the other factors, the victory of Foot should not be seen as that surprising.     

Personalised parliamentary behaviour without electoral incentives: the case of the Netherlands

Most theories of legislative behaviour explain the behaviour of MPs through electoral incentives. However, they fail to explain variation in parliamentary activity when individual electoral incentives are largely absent. This article studies MPs’ activity in such a parliament: the Dutch Tweede Kamer. It examines four clusters of incentives that may drive parliamentarians to be active. Party and committee environments provide the best explanation for the level of activity of individual MPs. Reselection and promotion prospects explain MPs’ behaviour, but only under more particular specifications. Re-election prospects were not found to affect activity levels.     

The Accountability Priorities of Australian Parliamentarians

Managerialist reforms to the public service, as part of the drive for improved efficiency and effectiveness, sought to reorient the accountability priorities of parliamentarians away from a supposedly excessive concern with process and results and more towards results (outputs and outcomes). To what extent, if any, have the accountability priorities of parliamentarians changed over the last two decades? Content analysis of a sample of estimates committee hearings dealing with six departments over three selected years (1986, 1992 and 2003) reveals a marked increase in attention to outputs and a correspondingly decreased focus on inputs (with little change in concern for process), thus confirming a managerialist trend. At the same time, Senators' explicit references to departments' budget documentation and annual reports fell away noticeably with the introduction of the outcomes and outputs framework which is therefore failing their accountability needs.     

Eurosceptic Challenger Parties and Political Opposition in European Union Politics: Part of the Problem or Part of the Solution?

Despite extensive research on Eurosceptic challenger parties, our knowledge of their influence on political opposition has so far been sparse. In this article we make an in‐depth assessment of parliamentary EU opposition, based on 4,264 statements made by national parliamentarians in the European Affairs Committees (EACs) of Denmark and Sweden. Our analysis shows that the presence of Eurosceptic challenger parties in the national parliamentary arena impacts patterns and practices of EU opposition significantly. A greater presence of ‘hard’ Eurosceptic parties in parliament is associated with more opposition in EU politics. These parties deliver a vast majority of the polity‐oriented opposition towards the EU and present more policy alternatives than mainstream parties. The findings presented have implications for our understanding of national parliamentary EU opposition as well as for the assessment of the impact of Eurosceptic challenger parties on the process of European integration.     

Assessing the Impact of Parliamentary Design: The Case of the Danish Committee on Gender Equality

This article contributes to the literature on parliamentary design in general and the pioneer literature on parliamentary bodies specialized in gender equality in particular. It does so by establishing a frame for the critical assessment of the impacts of such an institutional design. Moreover, by using interviews and data on the behavior of committee members, it demonstrates the advantages of applying a mixed method within a field that has mostly relied on participant interviews. A systematic analysis of the impact of the Danish Committee on Gender Equality shows that although this particular committee has not succeeded in adding the perspective of gender equality to legislation, it has increased parliamentary control with the government. Furthermore, it has enabled much better interaction between parliament and civil society organizations.     

Shifting Dimensions of Citizen Control1

European politics is still dominated by representative and parliamentary national systems of policy making. These systems can be seen as chains of political delegation from citizens through parliamentarians and executive office holders to civil servants. In these chains, a major trend for the past thirty years, and more strongly during the second half of that period, is a strengthening of agents' accountability to the principals. But, simultaneously, citizens' ability to exercise accountability through parliamentary democracy is eroding because of a decline in political party cohesion. Concurrently, constraints external to both the constitutional chain and political parties are growing stronger.
The changes along these three dimensions lead to a situation in which democratic principals commonly decide more about less. Thus, while reforms have strengthened the constitutional parliamentary chain of governance, there is also an ongoing de-parliamentarisation of modern politics. The main motivation for this special issue is to investigate this general phenomenon through a set of focused case studies of the Nordic (here known as 'Scandinavian') countries. These analyses show important differences in how these trends have been manifest. In one country, Finland, the parliamentary chain has actually grown in strength and importance in the last decade.     

France’s reluctant parliamentarisation of military deployments: the 2008 constitutional reform in practice

Abstract

This paper investigates changes in the French parliament’s role in the control of military missions, introduced by the 2008 constitutional reform, and examines their effects on practices of parliamentary control and legislative?executive interactions. The paper analyses how the constitutional changes have developed; the attitudes of parliamentarians towards control; the knowledges they relate to legislative-executive relations; and the post-reform practice of parliamentary control of French military missions. Although legislative?executive relations with regard to military missions have been recalibrated and formalised, they have not fundamentally challenged the executive’s lead. Reasons include a strong belief in the need for effectiveness, acceptance of the institutional order, and a foreign policy culture of executive leadership. French parliamentarians value their new powers, but mostly do not seek their further extension.     

Transcending Thatcherism? Ideology and the Conservative Party Leadership Mandate of David Cameron

This paper examines the voting motivations of Conservative parliamentarians in the final parliamentary ballot of the Conservative Party leadership election of 2005. By constructing a data set of the voting behaviour of Conservative parliamentarians in the final parliamentary party ballot, and by determining the ideological disposition of the 2005 PCP this paper examines the ideological disposition of the candidates' vis-à-vis their electorate. The paper identifies the increasing Thatcherite nature of the PCP across three dominant ideological divides of contemporary British Conservatism-economic, European, and social, sexual and moral policy. Through such an analysis the paper demonstrates how the modernising David Cameron, who came first in the final parliamentary ballot and then won the membership ballot, transcended the traditional ideological voting motivations of candidates' vis-à-vis their electorate. Most significantly, the paper demonstrates that the European ideological policy divide was not a factor in the succession contest, unlike the succession contests of 1990, 1997 and 2001.     

Masters of their fate? Explaining MPs’ re-candidacy in the long run: The case of Italy (1987–2013)

Why are certain Members of Parliament (MPs) more likely to get re-candidacy for national legislative elections, therefore having the possibility to continue their career? This article answers this question by comparing political elites' long-debated explanations with more legislative behaviour-related factors. By focusing on more than 25 years of the Italian Lower House's history, we have built a novel dataset on the legislative behaviour and career patterns of more than 3500 Italian MPs. A multilevel logistic regression analysis shows that, with the exception of party switching, legislative behaviour does not seem to exert a significant impact on MPs' re-candidacy. On the contrary, the career status of parliamentarians, i.e., their parliamentary position or their ministerial historical record, strongly influences their chances of obtaining re-candidacy.     

Public Preferences for Parliamentary Representation in the UK: An Overlooked Link?

Representation, both as a normative concept and a political process, has generated a rich literature across several national contexts. To develop our understanding of representational systems, scholars tend to assess the degree of policy congruence between parliamentarians and constituents as well as the role orientations adopted by elected parliamentarians and legislators. This paper contends that in order to have a complete understanding of representational systems, we must consider not only the representational roles adopted by parliamentarians, but also the publics' preferences regarding parliamentary representation. Specifically, I posit that individuals have attitudes about the type and degree of relationship that they believe should exist between elected parliamentarians, parties and constituents. Using data from a 2003 survey of the British public, I test the related hypotheses that individuals have meaningful and predictable preferences for the representational relationship they share with their members of parliament (MPs) and that these representational preferences in turn influence how individuals evaluate MPs. Finding support for both hypotheses, I argue that developing an understanding of normative public preferences for political representation is an important and overlooked component in advancing models of public support of both elected officials and governing institutions.     

De facto Veto? The Parliamentary Liberal Democrats

The parliamentary party of the Liberal Democrats is a symbol of the third party's growth in recent years. As a result of successful election targeting and an improvement in electoral reach, the party has seen its number of MPs at Westminster more than triple since 1992. It has been claimed that the increase in size of the parliamentary party has been accompanied by an increase in its power, so that the parliamentarians now have a de facto power of veto over policy despite the official policy-making structures as laid out in the Liberal Democrat constitution. This article investigates the make-up of the parliamentary Liberal Democrats and their contemporary influence over policy formation, and the parliamentary party's relationship with the conference and the party leader—and especially the events leading to the change of Liberal Democrat leader in 2006—to establish the veracity of this claim.     

Explaining interest group access to parliamentary committees

This article explains why parliamentary groups invite interest groups to the parliamentary arena. It argues that interest groups’ access to committees not only reflects policy-makers’ need for information and expertise but also party preferences and institutional factors such as the type of government, parliamentary committee structure and committee agenda capacity. Results show that interest groups’ access to the parliamentary arena increases under minority governments, in the case of highly conflictual issues, and when the number of permanent committees increases. Also, results demonstrate that parliamentary groups invite interest organisations following different logics – problem-solving or confrontation logic – depending on the type of functions they have to perform – legislative and oversight activities. The article uses a novel, comprehensive database with information on the appearances of all interest groups in the Spanish parliament from 1996 to 2015.     

Australian Democracy and Priveleged Parliamentary Speech

This article responds to recent cases of parliamentary speech which reflect the ascendancy of a totalising 'mainstream' approach to public discourse and a political leadership that may, at times, be overly attentive to the majority-rule dimension of democracy. These developments spark a more general discussion of the phenomenology of privileged parliamentary speech, the role of speech freedoms in liberal democratic orders and the duties of parliamentary representatives within them. I make two general conclusions. First, the ways in which we normally argue and think about free speech will not generally apply to the speech of parliamentarians because their speech rights cannot be universalised. Secondly, even if parliamentary speech could be treated as standard speech there would be no legitimate defence (from a liberal democratic point of view) for a strictly populist approach to its use since this could undermine the deliberative function of parliament and lead to the violation of other important liberal democratic principles.     

‘Going institutional’ to overcome obstruction: Explaining the suppression of minority rights in Western European parliaments, 1945−2010

When and why do parliamentary majorities in Europe suppress parliamentary minority rights? This article argues that such reforms are driven by substantive policy conflict in interaction with existing minority rights. Government parties curb minority rights if they fear minority obstruction due to increased policy conflict and a minority-friendly institutional status quo. Empirical support is found for this claim using comparative data on all reforms in 13 Western European parliaments since 1945. A curbing of minority rights is significantly more likely under conditions of heightened policy conflict and these effects are stronger the more the institutional status quo favours opposition parties. Contrary to frequent claims of consensual rule changes from single-country studies in Europe, these findings demonstrate the importance of competitive strategies in explaining institutional reform in European parliaments. The conditional impact of the status quo provides interesting theoretical links to historical institutionalist arguments on path dependence.     

Explaining Reforms of Parliamentary Minority Rights: A Theoretical Framework with Case Study Application

How can we explain institutional reforms that redistribute institutional power between the parliamentary majority and minority? This paper proposes an informal theoretical model to explain such reforms in European parliaments based on congressional literature and inductive explanations from case studies. The article argues that political parties as the relevant actors pursue institutional reforms based on their substantive goals, their current and expected future government status, transaction and audience costs of reforms, second-order institutions that regulate the relative influence of actors in changing parliamentary rules, and the institutional status quo. Hypotheses derived from this model are tested with a qualitative case study of all standing order reforms in the Austrian parliament from 1945 to 2014. The empirical analysis finds support for various hypotheses and their underlying causal mechanisms. As Austria constitutes a least-likely case, the evidence provides strong support for the theoretical model.     

Party animals,career changers and other pathways into parliament

Research on parliamentary careers has paid little attention to variations in pre-parliamentary career patterns and their value in explaining legislators’ parliamentary success. Using sequence and cluster analysis, this article identifies typical career tracks taken by Party Animals, Local Heroes, Late Bloomers, Land Legislators, High-Flyers and Career Changers based on a comprehensive dataset of German parliamentarians’ biographies (1998–2014). The analysis confirms the role of the party as the primary career facilitator before and within parliament. Nonetheless both Career Changers and High-Flyers climb the greasy pole all the way to the national parliament without much service to the party. The former type, however, suffers from a lack of networks and experience, which is reflected in the limited career success within parliament. This article demonstrates that the use of sequence analysis on career paths offers a promising approach in distinguishing and explaining the opportunities, choices and obstacles MPs face in parliament.     

Sweden: Democratic Reforms and Partisan Decline in an Emerging Separation-of-Powers System1

Early in the twentieth century, parliamentary democracy developed within an 1809 constitution based on separation of powers. By the mid-1970s, the last remnants of this constitution had disappeared. After that, measures such as more openness in candidate nominations, positive preference voting and more scrutiny by parliamentarians were introduced to strengthen the democratic chain. But a weakening of political parties and an increased importance of external constraints are again moving Sweden towards a de facto separation-of-powers system. There is once again a considerable discrepancy between the written constitutional framework and the 'working constitution'. In particular, local and supranational constraints on national policy making provide reason for a reconsideration of the constitutional framework.