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This wide-ranging study, by one of the UK's leading scholars of British politics, presents a fascinating picture of the role of the MP during the last 150 years. The author examines the various roles of Members of Parliament since the middle of last century. Backbench MPs have three major roles-a partisan role, a constituency role, and a scrutiny role. They increasingly expect and are expected to support their parties; to help constituents with individual problems and look after their collective interests; and they are expected to keep a check on the government and its policies. These roles existed 150 years ago, but the balance between them has changed. The partisan role now dominates at Westminster, the constituency role has expanded beyond all recognition, and the scrutiny role is widely seen as the poor relation. Moreover, while constituency work has been virtually hived-off as a non-partisan role, the conflict between the partisan and the scrutiny role creates a dilemma at the heart of parliamentary government.
This is an account of the role of MPs with historical depth and multi-dimensional framework of analysis which uses accounts from memoirs and commentaries along with detailed analysis of participants in nine parliamentary sessions from 1871-1995.
This text examines parliamentary government in theory and practice, drawing widely on academic research and making extensive use of Parliament's own records. Themes and concepts are illustrated by historical, recent and contemporary examples. Where appropriate, comparisons are made with practice in other countries. Boxes set out themes and concepts, figures illustrate the physical layout and tables provide detailed information on Parliament's operation.
Lundberg critically examines the claim that party list-elected members of Britain's devolved assemblies, in Wales and Scotland, are somehow 'second-class' representatives. Although list-elected representatives in Britain have a different constituency role, these representatives add an important element of pluralism to Britain's politics.
Legislatures provides a democratic audit of Canada's provincial and national representative assemblies. It argues that the problem existing in these bodies is not a lack of talent so much as a lack of institutional freedom. Specifically, the problem is largely one of resources and rules. The move to a more multi-party system nationally and the increasing tendency to downsize provincial assemblies has placed additional hurdles in the path to good governance. Docherty uses the series' criteria of responsiveness, inclusiveness, and participation to evaluate critically the performance of legislatures in Canada, and makes recommendations for legislative reform in Canada.
Although we tend to use the terms "representative democracy" and "democracy" as synonyms, Michael Mezey maintains that they are not. Democracy means that the people govern; representative democracy means that the people elect others to govern for them. This raises the question of the extent to which representative government approximates democracy-a question that turns on the relationship between representatives and those whom they represent. Mezey reviews the literature on the meaning of representation and its relationship to issues of citizen control. In the empirical sections that follow, he draws on data from the United States Congress and from legislatures outside the United States to discuss the extent to which the composition of a legislature reflects the demography of its nation. The author also examines a legislature's various political and economic interests and the extent to which representatives are responsive to specific requests for assistance from their constituents and to constituent opinions on public policy questions. He further looks at the effect that interest groups, political parties, and election systems have on the relationship between representatives and their constituents. Finally, Mezey addresses the criticisms that have been leveled against representative institutions: that they are slow to act, inefficient and uninformed when they do act, that they are too inclined to do what is popular rather than what is necessary and, conversely, that their members are too removed from the opinions of their constituents and therefore unfaithful to their democratic obligation to respond to the wishes of those whom they represent. Rich in thoughtful analysis, Representative Democracy incorporates normative, empirical and comparative perspectives on representation. It is perfectly suited for use in an upper-level course on the legislative process or Congress.
Victorian Britain is often described as an age of dawning democracy and as an exemplar of the modern Liberal state; yet a hereditary monarchy, a hereditary House of Lords, and an established Anglican Church survived as influential aspects of national public life with traditional elites assuming redefined roles. After 1832, constitutional notions of 'mixed government' gradually gave way to the orthodoxy of 'parliamentary government', shaping the function and nature of political parties in Westminster and the constituencies, as well as the relations between them. Following the 1867-8 Reform Acts, national political parties began to replace the premises of 'parliamentary government'. The subsequent emergence of a mass male electorate in the 1880s and 1890s prompted politicians to adopt new language and methods by which to appeal to voters, while enduring public values associated with morality, community and evocations of the past continued to shape Britain's distinctive political culture. This gave a particularly conservative trajectory to the nation's entry into the twentieth century. This study of British political culture from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century examines the public values that informed perceptions of the constitution, electoral activity, party partisanship, and political organization. Its exploration of Victorian views of status, power, and authority as revealed in political language, speeches, and writing, as well as theology, literature, and science, shows how the development of moral communities rooted in readings of the past enabled politicians to manage far-reaching change. This presents a new over-arching perspective on the constitutional and political transformations of the Victorian age.
Time and Politics is the first cultural and transnational history of modern procedural reform in the Westminster parliamentary system. The study centres on the nineteenth-century emergence of a desire to modernise and make more efficient the procedural rules of parliamentary law-making. Contrary to existing interpretations, which see this as a product of transformations in political structure and practice, this volume demonstrates how the evolution of Parliament's rules was structured by transformations within the wider culture of time. Ryan Vieira argues that the spread of an increasingly rigorous time discipline in concert with a growing consciousness of being modern worked to progressively erode the legitimacy of the historically developed rules of parliamentary debate and law-making, while simultaneously implanting new ways of judging the effectiveness of parliamentary institutions. By the 1880s, this process had transformed efficiency into the ultimate criteria of parliamentary effectiveness. Using the conceptual framework of the British world, Time and Politics demonstrates how this new understanding of parliamentary effectiveness was exported to the colonies of settlement through a series of communicative networks and provided colonial parliamentarians with the ability to imagine the inefficiencies of their own legislatures as part of a larger transnational problem. In making these arguments, this volume lays the groundwork for a new type of parliamentary history.
This first book-length study of the socialisation of MPs uses questionnaire data gathered over two Parliaments (1992-97 and 1997-2001) to find out how MPs learn about, and what their attitudes are towards, their role as a Member of Parliament. It analyzes their participation in debates, the use of Parliamentary Questions and committee work.
This fully revised new edition includes expanded coverage of Parliament's relationship with the courts, devolved assemblies and the European Union. Distinctively, the book goes beyond the usual focus of Parliament-Government relations to encompass policy-makers beyond Whitehall and Parliament's broader relationship with citizens.