Les Cortes et le Parlement au Portugal. 750e anniversaire des Cortes de Leiria de 1254: Congrès International, 26–28 novembre 2004—Leiria

SUMMARY

The Scottish Parliament, established in 1999, was to be a novel type of parliament and to herald a ‘new politics’. While it was inevitable that the Scottish parliamentary model would inherit some of the features of the Westminster system, one of the major parliamentary models in the world, Home Rulers insisted on the Scottish Parliament's need to adopt novel procedures and principles right from the start to keep it from becoming a ‘Westminister’. An analysis of Scottish Home Rule discourse in documents from the late 1980s and the 1990s shows that at the time, Westminster was constructed as an ‘anti-model’. This article establishes in what respects Westminster was an anti-model for the architects of the Scottish Parliament and describes the ideal parliamentary model which they defined. It then considers whether the Scottish model as it exists today conforms to their expectations. The case presented here is that the Scottish parliamentary system is indeed different from the British system in several fundamental respects, such as the fact that it is more committee-based and less executive-oriented, but that it is closer to the Westminster model than has been acknowledged, and that in some respects, the Scottish Parliament has moved towards that model by adopting typically British modes of functioning. Some characteristics of the Westminster system which it has integrated are the Presiding Officer's power to have a casting vote or, more controversially, the way the executive is held to account, through adversarial Question Times. The Scottish Parliament is thus neither a mini-Westminster nor an anti-Westminster: the Scottish parliamentary model is a hybrid of the West European and the Westminster models.