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Tag Archives: public engagement

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Standing up for parliament: how non-elected officials represent parliament as an institution

Posted on October 10, 2017 by The Constitution Unit

In a new article David Judge and Cristina Leston-Bandeira identify non-elected officials rather than elected members as those who ‘speak for’ and ‘act for’ parliaments as institutions most often. In this post they discuss this paradox and some of their key findings in relation to the UK parliament.

‘Unless someone stood up for parliament as an entity we might lose it. It wouldn’t be seen as precious’. (senior parliamentary official).

Are parliamentarians necessarily the best people to represent parliaments as institutions? To take the Westminster parliament as one example some of its members, such as Lord Norton, undoubtedly want MPs to ‘promote vigorously the institution of which they are members’. Others, however, such as Mhairi Black are only too eager to claim, repeatedly, that Westminster is ‘a totally defunct institution’. Still others, like Nick Clegg or Andy Burnham, before leaving the Commons in 2017, have willingly invoked the term ‘the Westminster bubble’ to denote a pathological institutional remoteness and disconnect from the public.

The fundamental question is: why would we expect parliamentarians to represent the institution of parliament, and what would they be representing anyway? Certainly, democratic linkage – of how parliaments engage with and inform citizens – has been of increasing concern for academics and parliaments alike. Yet, there has been relatively little attention paid to what is being communicated to citizens about parliaments and upon the nature of the parliamentary institutions that citizens are expected to engage with. This is the neglected institutional dimension of parliamentary representation: the representation of what parliaments ‘are’, what claims are made on their behalf and who the makers of these claims are. This second dimension is the focus of our recent article in Political Studies and we outline here some of the basic argument and key findings in relation to the UK parliament at Westminster. Our wider study examines claim-based notions of representation using interview data from 39 key actors in the Scottish, Westminster and European parliaments.

In terms of who is doing the representing, it is relatively easy to identify why MPs might not be the primary actors in representing the institution of parliament. Paradoxically, elected representatives, who are the prime makers of electoral representative claims, are at best tangential makers of institutional representative claims. In essence, MPs operating within the frame of electoral politics make a first-dimensional ‘person-to-person’ set of claims. In this dimension, the elected representative makes a claim to represent – to act for, speak for, or stand for – the represented, whether as individual voters or groups of individuals (most notably as members of geographical constituencies, political parties, or nations and/or states). And, equally the same representatives may also serve, as part of a two-way process, to represent the constructed claims – especially of parliamentary party, government or even the state itself – back to the represented. In this process elected representatives may be identified as the makers of claims about their parties or about governments (supportive or otherwise) or about the nation and/or state, but only tangentially about parliament as an institution. Whereas the other collective forms have some existence beyond parliament, parliament itself does not have an institutional representational existence other than as the sum of disparate, often contradictory, other ‘first-dimension’ forms of representation.

In this sense, the Westminster parliament takes on a ‘hollowed-out’ representative institutional form: it is populated by MPs – active person-to-person representative claim-makers – who do not primarily stand for, or necessarily make positive claims on behalf of, the institution itself. Yet, in times of decreased levels of citizen trust in parliamentary representatives, widespread public dissatisfaction with the competence of parliaments, and when the role of established parliamentary institutions has become subject to reappraisal and hence to contestation, then the requirement for institutional representation, for claims to be made about and on behalf of parliaments themselves, has become ever more pressing. In these circumstances, as one of us has pointed out, public engagement strategies have come to be elevated in the corporate priorities of the UK parliament. These are not simply educational or informational strategies. They are, more significantly, institutional representational strategies.

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Posted in Parliament | Tagged Cristina Leston-Bandeira, David Judge, House of Commons, House of Lords, public engagement, representation | 2 Comments

A year on, the new Petitions Committee has much to celebrate

Posted on July 20, 2016 by The Constitution Unit

CLB

The UK parliament’s collaborative e-petitions site celebrates its first birthday today. Over the last year over 18,000 petitions have been submitted, a level not seen since the 19th century. In this post Cristina Leston-Bandeira discusses how this has been achieved, pointing to the success of the new Petitions Committee and in particular the way that it has engaged with other parliamentary activities. The next challenge may be to consider how to maximise the number of petitions that can realistically lead to some sort of outcome.

The UK parliament’s new collaborative e-petitions site went live one year ago. Nine petitions were submitted and 60,580 signatures were added on that single first day, 20 July 2015. Twelve months on, a total of 18,767* petitions have been submitted and millions of people have signed at least one petition. This is a stark contrast with the story of decline the UK parliament’s petitions system had known since the 19 century. From a highly used tool in past centuries, namely from the 17th century to the beginning of 19th, a time when thousands of petitions were presented annually with the back-up of millions of signatures, the number of petitions submitted fell to about 35 yearly in 1970s, rising slightly in the 1980s and 1990s, but never to their previous glory. Move forward to the 21st century, and, in one year, we are back to early 19th century levels of support for petitions – not a mean feat. But are petitions achieving anything?

The key to answer this question lies in the new Petitions Committee, in place since June last year. Equipped with a small support team but oozing with enthusiasm and ideas, the committee has achieved much over the past year. The system established that petitions with a threshold of 100,000 signatures should be considered for a debate and those with 10,000 signatures should receive a response from government. The Petitions Committee has hosted 20 debates in Westminster Hall on petitions with over 100,000 signatures, and the government has responded to 257 petitions (with only 17 still waiting for a government response at the time of writing). In short, a very small proportion of the petitions submitted have led to a specific action. But this is a very simplistic summary of the work developed by the committee to support the dissemination and effectiveness of petitions, where three key elements have made a clear difference: cross-fertilisation with other ongoing parliamentary work, openness in working methods and a strong focus on public engagement.

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Posted in Parliament | Tagged Cristina Leston-Bandeira, e-petitions, Petitions Committee, public engagement | 2 Comments

The Petitions Committee’s first six months – paving the way for a new style of public engagement

Posted on December 10, 2015 by The Constitution Unit

CLB

The 2015 parliament has seen the establishment of a new Petitions Committee and e-petitions system. Cristina Leston-Bandeira discusses the committee’s initial activity, arguing that it has achieved much in the space of six months and has the potential to pave the way towards a new kind of public engagement with parliament.

One of the novelties of the 2015 parliament has been the establishment of a Petitions Committee, which has the potential to pave the way for a new style of public engagement for parliament.

Following the approval of a motion to create a new Petitions Committee last February, and still with no elected chair, the new Petitions Committee’s team set out to establish the foundations of what would become the UK government and parliament collaborative e-petitions system, integrating also the traditional paper public petitions presented through MPs. On 18 June the committee’s chair, Helen Jones, was elected and a month later, on 20 July, the new collaborative e-petitions site went live. At the same time the old Downing Street e-petitions site closed down. Nine e-petitions were submitted on that first day, collecting between them 60,580 signatures on that single day. Less than two months later the committee led its first debate on a petition that had achieved over 100,000 signatures, on contracts and conditions in the NHS.

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Posted in Parliament | Tagged Cristina Leston-Bandeira, House of Commons, parliament, Petitions Committee, public engagement | 1 Comment

Do citizens’ assemblies work in practice? Eight lessons from a pilot

Posted on November 23, 2015 by The Constitution Unit

me 2015 (large)

There has been growing interest in the idea of staging a ‘people’s’ constitutional convention in the UK over recent years, but little evidence for how one could work in practice. With this in mind a group of academics recently convened two pilot citizens’ assemblies in Sheffield and Southampton. The Unit’s own Alan Renwick, who was involved in running the Sheffield assembly, draws out eight lessons from two highly successful weekends.

Interest has been strong for over a year in the creation of a ‘people’s’ constitutional convention to examine some of the major questions of governance and democracy that face the UK today.  I have pushed the case myself, as have many other academics, politicians, and activists.

This debate has drawn so far mainly on examples from other countries.  Now, however, we have some home-grown evidence to learn from.  I am part of a group – including also academics from the Universities of Sheffield, Southampton, and Westminster and a team from the Electoral Reform Society, and funded by the Economic and Social Research Council – who recently convened two pilot citizens’ assemblies to test out how the model of a citizens’ assembly works in the UK.

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Posted in Constitutions and constitution making, Devolution, Public Engagement and Policy Making | Tagged Alan Renwick, citizens' assembly, constitutional convention, England, public engagement, Sheffield | 8 Comments

Beyond the European Elections: what can be done to increase engagement in Europe?

Posted on June 9, 2014 by The Constitution Unit

Chris Terry looks at the European election results and considers how UK voter engagement in Europe could be improved.

Last month’s European elections caused great consternation across Europe as populist Eurosceptic outsiders seemingly swept to victory across Europe. In reality the rise of these parties is not as extreme as has been made out and is principally concentrated in a few large states such as Britain and France. In some countries, such as the Netherlands, Bulgaria and Belgium, Eurosceptic parties actually fell back. In others they fell short of expectations, as was the case in Italy.

Turnout was slightly up on previous European elections, albeit by just 0.1% of the vote – hardly the ‘endorsement of the European project’ as the federalist Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe leader, Guy Verhofstadt, suggested during polling.

It has been argued that the rise of populist Eurosceptics and turnout effects are predominantly a response to the lack of importance voters attach to the European Parliament. Eligible voters use European elections as an apparently ‘risk free’ way to express their discontent. It is fair to say the Parliament can feel very distant from voters. In Britain polls regularly report that less than 10% of voters can name even one of their MEPs. MEPs themselves come in two broad types. The majority are federalists who express views more pro-European than voters. A small but growing minority are dedicated Eurosceptics. One therefore wonders the extent to which either of these types actually represents the median voter in Europe.

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Posted in Europe | Tagged Chris Terry, Europe, European Parliament, public engagement | Leave a comment

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Monitor 80: Defending Democracy

Front page of Monitor 80, a newsletter, displaying a fragment of the lead article, and an image of Prime Mniiser Borid Johnson meeing wih Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in a room. The two are sat in wooden chairs wih he flags of their respective countries in background

The latest edition of the Constitution Unit newsletter, Monitor, is now available to download.

What Kind of Democracy do we Want?

Taking Back Control

A picture of the front page of the Unit's report, Taking back control: why the House of Commons should govern its own time, including a picture of a clock

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