Yesterday, Calixte Bloquet and Ruxandra Serban published a post explaining why the French National Assembly decided to trial a weekly session of Prime Minister’s Questions. Here they explain how the experiment fared and why it failed.
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Why the French parliament tried to introduce Prime Minister’s Questions
In 2024 the French National Assembly initiated a trial period during which the country’s prime minister would answer questions in parliament alone, rather than together with their ministers, in a format similar to Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) in the House of Commons. In this post, Calixte Bloquet and Ruxandra Serban explain why French politicians decided to go ahead with the experiment, and how the format of the French version of PMQs compares to similar procedures in other parliaments. A second post will then discuss how the trial went, and what can be learned from it.
Continue readingHeatwave risk and election safety: does it make sense to hold elections in July?
The UK is about to hold a July general election for the first time in almost 80 years. Sarah Birch, Erik Asplund, Madeline Harty and Ferran Martinez i Coma discuss why the risk posed by extreme heat could affect the conduct and outcome of the voting process.
It was a chilly start to the summer, and if this trend continues, a brisk walk to the polling station on 4 July could be a welcome means of warming up. But the mercury is slowing rising and a heatwave could be just around the corner. Many will have vivid recollections of sweltering in the 40-degree temperatures experienced in the UK for the first time in July 2022, resulting in a red alert for ‘extreme heat’ from the Met Office and ‘do not travel’ advice from Network Rail. Late July is historically the hottest time of the year, with the early part of the month not far off. The average high in July was 19 degrees a generation ago; it is now over 20 and rising, as shown in this Met Office graph:
The above image contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
So when Prime Minister Rishi Sunak called an election on 22 May, people may have wondered what was in store, especially as news was just coming out of temperatures nudging 50 degrees during polling in India, with dozens of poll workers dying as a result.
This is not the only recent election that has been hit by scorching weather. Campaigning in the US presidential election has recently been affected by heatwaves in the south-west, and unusually high temperatures shaped the June Mexican elections, the European Parliament election in Romania, the April election in the Maldives, last year’s snap parliamentary election in Spain, and the 2022 legislative elections in France, among others.
Continue readingRiding the populist wave: the UK Conservatives and the constitution
At a recent Constitution Unit event (available in video and podcast form), Tim Bale discussed the challenges posed to mainstream conservatism by the recent rise in successful populist politicians. Here, he sets out those challenges, how conservatives have traditionally faced them, and concludes that the UK Conservative Party is so determined to ‘unite the right’ and supress support for a challenger party that it risks transmogrifying into a populist radical right party.
A few weeks ago I was diagnosed with costochondritis – a minor and surprisingly common condition involving the cartilage that joins your ribs to your sternum but which produces chest pains that make some people suffering from it worry they’re having a heart attack.
The standard treatment is to take non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs such as ibuprofen. For me this presented a bit of a dilemma. Like many other people, I don’t tolerate ibuprofen: it irritates my gastrointestinal tract – something I’m wise to avoid doing because I also suffer from something called Barrett’s oesophagus, which, if you’re unlucky, can turn cancerous. So, on the assumption that the costochondritis would eventually resolve itself, and given the fact that the discomfort involved was irritating but far from overwhelming, I decided just to put up with it.
I’m sharing this bit of my recent medical history not because I particularly enjoy talking about it but because it produces a useful analogy for a question that I want to ask – namely, are politicians on the mainstream right so concerned about countering the rise of populist radical right parties that they end up proposing things that risk doing more harm to society and to the polity than if they were simply to admit that those parties are now a normal rather than a pathological feature of contemporary politics?
The background to this is the book I’ve recently co-edited with Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, called Riding the Populist Wave: Europe’s Mainstream Right in Crisis. We look at how mainstream right parties – which aren’t written about anywhere near as much as their counterparts on the left or, indeed, on the far right – have handled (or in some cases failed to handle) some of the challenges that they’ve been facing for the last three or four decades. Over that time, they’ve suffered significant electoral decline, although, as we show in the book, the extent of that decline varies not just between countries but between party families, with Christian democratic parties suffering more than conservative parties, which, in turn, have suffered more than (market) liberal parties, which have actually managed to hold pretty steady.
We argue that the difficulties they’ve faced are partly down to their having to cope with something of a double whammy.
Continue readingThe momentum behind climate assemblies
Following an increase in the use of citizens’ assemblies to aid policymakers in seeking solutions to the problems posed by climate change, Robert Liao asks why this particular subject is so commonly the theme of citizens’ assemblies, before analysing whether such processes produce recommendations that genuinely inform policymaking.
The so-called ‘deliberative wave’ of recent years and months has seen citizens’ assemblies convened by a number of national and local or regional governments. Of these assemblies, climate change is the most popular topic. In the past year, high-profile climate assemblies in the UK, France, Scotland, Denmark and Germany have made recommendations for policymakers, while further assemblies have been convened or announced in Austria and Spain. Local democracy is seeing a similar surge in climate assemblies: a January post on the Unit’s blog found that nine out of 13 recent local citizens’ assemblies in the UK focused on climate change or air quality.
This post explores two questions: Why, exactly, is climate change so popular as a topic for citizens’ assemblies? And do these deliberative mini-publics actually produce recommendations which inform green policymaking?
Why Climate Change?
The most obvious answer to this question is that climate change is, arguably, the biggest threat facing humanity, and we are already feeling its devastating effects. The climate plays an ever-bigger role in global politics: over 100 countries have pledged to reach net zero emissions by 2050. Given this, it is to be expected that green policy would be an important issue to put to citizens’ assemblies.
But citizens’ assemblies may be especially well–suited to finding solutions on an issue such as climate change. In an age of unprecedented division and polarisation, it is increasingly difficult to reach a political consensus. This is particularly true for what are sometimes called ‘wicked problems’: multi-faceted dilemmas[DB1] that resist solution through conventional channels. It is precisely these problems that cause politicians greatest difficulty: politicians know that action is needed, but they fear being punished at the polls for whatever actions they opt for. Rebecca Willis, one of the expert leads for Climate Assembly UK, has identified a ‘dual reality’, in which most politicians acknowledge the growing danger of climate change but carry on with politics as usual. In a study following a series of interviews with MPs, she determined that climate action is still seen as an issue outside the political mainstream, and so few MPs consider it in their interest to act decisively on the climate.
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