The view that Westminster is not functioning as it should, and that reform would be beneficial, has become increasingly widespread in recent years. Greg Power argues that it is not sufficient to focus on technical details and process: reform efforts must instead understand what politicians believe to be important and offer them ways of dealing with those issues better.

There have been a number of good books in the last couple of years about what is wrong with Westminster and what needs to change. They all set out a compelling case and numerous ideas for reform. But most tend to focus more on the ‘why’ and the ‘what’, than on the ‘how’. There remains very little on which reformers can draw as to how we might engineer these sorts of sensible changes and how parliaments actually get overhauled.

This question of how to reform complex parliamentary institutions is at the heart of my new book, Inside the Political Mind, which draws partly on my own personal experience of working on such change: initially at Westminster as a Special Adviser to successive Leaders of the Commons, Robin Cook and Peter Hain, and since 2005 with parliaments and MPs in more than 60 countries around the world.

Every one of those institutions is different, and they each have their own peculiar problems. But there are common themes to the challenge of reform everywhere. And one of them is that parliamentary reform is hard. Really hard.

There are three standout reasons for this – all to do with the very way in which parliaments are composed and constructed.

In the first place, and unlike almost any other type of organisation, there is never one person in sole charge of a parliament or responsible for implementing change. Parliaments are deliberately designed around the dispersal of power, so that no one has absolute control – rather, it is divided between different office holders, with the Speaker, the Clerk, the Leader of the House, the Chief Whip, government ministers and their shadows, along with senior backbenchers and committee chairs, all exercising significant influence on the process.

Second, because any change will directly affect every politician in parliament, they will all have strong opinions on the merits of what is being proposed. When Robin Cook was chairing the Modernisation Committee in 2002, we thought it would be a good idea to consult MPs about the sorts of reforms they wanted to see. We got 219 separate replies. All had carefully drafted recommendations as to how parliament should be reformed, and all of them suggested entirely different things.

Third, not only will every MP have an opinion on the proposals, they will also have a say. Changes to the formal rules of parliament – and often to its informal working practices and conventions – will usually be put to a vote on the floor of the House. It means every MP has the ability to shape the reform process.

When combined, these three factors make orderly reform almost impossible. When a company embarks on a change initiative, it is usually designed, decided and delivered by a small group at the top of the organisation, and implemented under the authority of the Chief Executive. In contrast, the structure and composition of parliaments means that more people have the ability, opportunity and incentive to dilute, smother and frustrate change than in any other type of organisation.

As a result, political reform rarely, if ever, works out as originally planned. Whilst the initial reforms might be designed as rational responses to current problems, they invariably get amended, distorted and bent out of shape once MPs get their hands on them. The competing motives and vying interests at work mean that compromise and negotiation is inevitable, and the eventual changes tend not to conform to any rational strategy, but are instead the outcome of political opportunism and argument. As Eric Schickler, in his analysis of the US Congress puts it, reform has to be understood as a process of bricolage, with new arrangements simply placed on top of the remnants of existing structures, resulting ‘in institutions that appear more haphazard than the product of some overarching masterplan’ and where nobody gets exactly what they want.

It is this human side of political change that I and my organisation, Global Partners Governance Practice, have been wrestling with over the last couple of decades in places as diverse as Iraq, Malawi, Nepal and Albania. Although the contours of reform vary hugely in such countries, four principles have emerged which underpin the process of making reform happen in places where it really matters, and which offer lessons elsewhere.

First, focus on individuals over institutions. There is a tendency in many places for reformers to get so involved in the intricacies of institutional design and procedural cleanliness, that they forget about the people who will have to make the reforms work.

This is especially the case when it comes to the international development agencies promoting democracy in other countries. They frequently get so hung up on the constitutional principles at stake, they lose sight of what the reforms are for. As a result, you get outcomes like Afghanistan: the international community was highly successful in designing new constitutional architecture and institutional structures. It is just that they forgot to take the people inside those new buildings with them. As a result, the politics of the country stayed the same.

Second, reforms should seek to align the personal interests of politicians with political principle. To take one example from Westminster, the creation of the Departmental Select Committees in 1979 is generally regarded as one of the most important and principled steps in improving government accountability to parliament. But the reason it enjoyed cross-party support is because it also played to MPs’ own interests. It was during the 1970s that being an MP started to be thought of as a full-time job. MPs increasingly wanted something useful to do at Westminster, which would allow them to develop some expertise, build a profile and give them a way of explaining their work to their voters. The new committees gave them that role. The reforms also appealed to the interests of the whips, providing them with new forms of patronage to reward loyal MPs, as well as ways to occupy potentially troublesome MPs by sticking them on certain committees.

Over the last few decades all of the most significant reforms at Westminster have conformed to this general pattern of personal interest backed up by political principle – from the creation of the MPs’ office allowance in 1969 through to the Wright reforms in 2010. And the book highlights this dynamic at the heart of reforms in numerous other parliaments across Europe, Africa and Asia.

Third, reform depends on reciprocity. The complexity of parliaments and the diversity of opinion within, means that change is invariably the result of compromise. In Bismarck’s famous words, ‘politics is the art of the possible, the attainable, the next best.’ Effective politicians tend to excel in these arts: trading favours, swapping concessions and aligning their interests to find a mutually acceptable outcome.

It is also integral to the process of reform: any strategy needs to create enough space for those compromises to take place. It is for this reason successful reform is often built around packages that combine several reforms at once. Taking one reform at a time tends to maximise the number of opponents and minimise possible support. But when several are bundled together, the elements that some MPs dislike can be counterbalanced by reforms that that they support. It allows MPs to feel they have traded off some of their interests in return for others. The key, as Seamus Brennan, the Irish government’s Chief Whip, told me in 2001 – after the Dáil Éireann implemented its own set of reforms – is that ‘you have to make sure that everybody gets something.’

Fourth, and finally, think big, act small. Whilst a grand strategic vision for the reform of parliament is important as a motivating tool, change needs to look manageable to those who will have to implement it. Otherwise, the gap between rhetoric and reality will seem too great, the possibility of upsetting the current distribution of power will create influential opponents, and the risks of reform will outweigh any potential benefits in the minds of most MPs.

Whilst the old political adage that ‘you should never let a good crisis go to waste’ might open possibilities to radical reform, the fact is that most political change – the sort that improves the calibre of institutions and the quality of peoples’ lives – tends to happen at walking pace rather than in great leaps and bounds.

All four of these themes are underpinned by one other that runs throughout the whole book, namely, that political institutions only get stronger when politicians want to make them stronger. The truth is that in many places though, that desire does not exist. Reforms based solely on constitutional principle have no appeal to politicians on a personal, professional, political or practical level. Reform needs to be built around an understanding of what politicians currently believe to be important and offer them ways of dealing with those issues better.

In other words, any plans for reform have to start inside the political mind, and work outwards from there.

If you are interested in further debate of the subjects covered in this post, Greg will be appearing alongside Unit Director Meg Russell on an IfG panel dedicated to discussion of his book and its themes. The event is at 17:30 GMT on Wednesday 21 February and you can register to watch online.

About the author

Greg Power is the Founder and Chair of Global Partners Governance Practice. His new book, Inside the Political Mind: The Human Side of Politics and How It Shapes Development is published by Hurst.