Acts Of Parliament Research Articles

War and the rise of parliaments

We study European political institutions between 1350 and 1700 AD. Our model links (i) the calling of parliament and (ii) the transition to Rule by Parliament with the risks associated with wars and battles, and with the underlying economic relationship between monarchs and the commercial elites. We compile a dataset for England, Castile, France, and Portugal that includes yearly parliamentary activity, battles, war years, and measures of economic activity. In support of the model, parliaments are more likely to be called when (a) the country suffers a territorial defeat; and (b) agriculture output is relatively low. The causal relation between a territorial defeat and parliament being called is supported by an event-study comparing the impact of defeat relative to a win. We find evidence of a short-term (one year) impact, but no long-term effects. Transitions to Rule by Parliament require specific goldilocks parameters according to the model (moderate military strength and moderate alignment between monarch and the commercial elites) and are only feasible during a window of opportunity, i.e., while a sitting monarch is facing an existential threat.

Inferior: The Challenges of Gender Parity in the Artificial Intelligence Ecosystem-A Case for Canada.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems are gaining momentum in complementing and/or replacing performing tasks typically done with the aid of human ability. AI systems, inherently human creations, are, however, beset by, wittingly or unwittingly, so-called male chauvinism, despite all the advancements made in the progress of civilization to make inroads for women's equitable participation in the labor force, particularly in relation to the digital economy, and more importantly, AI. In regards to the Canadian context, this perspective has examined the evidence to find research highlighting gender representation in the Canadian AI ecosystem. We found a lack of studies on women and their contribution to AI-related activities. Canadian women's participation in their country's AI sector therefore should go beyond mere instruments such as the Montreal Declaration for a Responsible Development of AI, and disjointed interests. On a more general level, the paucity in a paradigm shift toward AI-female friendly policies from design phase to implementation omits the female voice for adequate representation for action. Advocating for Canadian women in the AI sector requires a voice of unison best achieved through parliamentary action. This perspective is thus issuing a clarion call to attaining gender fairness and equity, global principles under the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals, to which the Government of Canada is committed.

THE PARLIAMENTARY ELITE IN MOROCCO: AN ATTEMPT TO DETERMINE THE PARLIAMENTARY ACTION OF THE ELITES OF THE NATIONAL CONSTITUENCY (2016-2021)

The Study of Parliamentary elites is characterized by its special character, as It relates to a set of political determinants, variables and factors related to the political field. Therefore, the Paper Will present the functions and role of a class of parliamentary elites. This Paper Will also attempt to define the functions and role of elites in some organs of the House of Representatives, as well as aspects of parliamentary action, especially some mechanisms of control gouvernements work, such as the mechanism of oral and written questions and exploratory mission. This will enable elites to exercise their constitutional functions and perform them in comparison with the rest of the elites and the parliamentary group elected from local districts.

CSR as an Elixir for Enhanced Corporate Image: Experiences from the University for Development Studies, Tamale and C.K. Tedam University of Technology and Applied Sciences, Navrongo, Ghana

This paper is centered on the ramifications of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives on the corporate image of public universities in Ghana. It focuses on CSR activities of the C. K. Tedam University of Technology and Applied Sciences (CKT-UTAS) and the University for Development Studies (UDS), taking cognizance of the likely consequences of socially irresponsible behaviour. The proponents relied heavily on relevant previous studies, Acts of Parliament establishing the selected universities, information provided in technical reports, web pages of selected universities, and in-house journals of same. It recognizes CSR as a strategic tool for enhancing the corporate image of a given organization and thus set out to investigate benchmarks within the higher education sub-sector and the sustainability or otherwise of CSR initiatives undertaken by the Management of UDS and CKT-UTAS. The findings revealed that per their respective mandates as enshrined in the Acts/Legislation establishing them, the UDS and the CKT-UTAS have a community development and/or poverty reduction focus. Invariably, they have been involved in several forms of community engagement or CSR activities especially within the universities’ catchment areas. However, the two universities like most public universities in Ghana do not have a deliberate Policy Document on Corporate Social Responsibility. Consequently, the study recommends the formulation of a CSR Policy to provide the framework for university-wide CSR programmes and activities as well as the incorporation of CSR as a course of study within the universities’ mainstream curricular.

Continuing Formalization of Coalition Formation with a New “Sound”

Getting a new government together in Germany requires building a coalition. The process for doing so has evolved, becoming more institutionalized but remaining part of informal politics. Looking closely at the coalition building in 2021 shows that its organizational structure was vertically slimmer and horizontally more differentiated than in previous years. The role of parliamentary actors was more pronounced than before, and parliamentary organization was mirrored throughout it. Yet the strong inclusion of the Länder (party) perspectives prevailed, making coalition building a multi-level task. While the process in 2021 had more procedural transparency than before, its content remained largely out of public sight. At defined steps, party approval was gathered through formal votes. Whether the established account of better personal trust among the involved partners is more than a nice narrative remains to be seen in the analysis of the coalition’s governing practice.

Transnational Parliamentary Activities in EU Foreign Policy: The Role of Parliamentarians in the Establishment of the EU's Global Human Rights Sanctions Regime

Although the literature is increasingly interested in the parliamentary dimension of EU foreign policy, to this point no research has covered the role of parliamentarians in EU sanctions policy. This article argues that parliamentarians were successful in keeping the issue of a human rights sanctions regime on the EU's agenda and used all the tools at their disposal to push the EU foreign policy‐making machinery in the direction of adopting a new sanctions regime. This article does not limit itself to the study of the European Parliament but argues that parliamentary assemblies of different levels (national, cross‐level and European) are interconnected and worked together intensively on the adoption of the EU's human rights sanctions regime.

An examination of the role played by Ghana’s legislature in the management of the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT In the wake of the recently emerged COVID-19 pandemic, legislatures were regarded as one of the important government institutions that can help cushion nations against the economic and social disruptions inflicted by the health crises, given the important roles they play in policymaking within political systems. This paper examines the roles played by Ghana's legislative institution in the management of the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper further explores some of the challenges to legislative activities during the height of the pandemic. From a content analysis of a variety of literature drawn from Parliamentary Proceedings, online journal articles, official documents, and news from credible media outlets, we found that Ghana's legislative institution was crucial to the country's management of the pandemic as they played important roles such as passing COVID-19 related laws, financial oversight, and providing a check on Executive actions. The main challenge to Parliamentary activities was the demand for rapid legislation, which weakened Parliamentary oversight and scrutiny functions. The study makes some recommendations to strengthen legislative responses to future pandemics.

Party Control and Responsiveness

Different parliamentary activities allow Members of Parliament (MPs) varying amounts of autonomy. Previous studies have shown that, in parliamentary systems with strong parties and party-centered electoral rules, MPs have limited room for crossing the party line in the legislature both in voting and speech. Further, party-centered systems limit MP’s ability to address electoral concerns of their constituency; they are less responsive. In this paper, I combine these findings by showing that even within system variation in party control over institutions affects the levels of responsiveness in parliamentary questions. By linking MP’s constituency mentions with different types of questions, my results show that the institutional design in the Norwegian Storting affects the level of MP constituency signaling. Specifically, I show that questions with low levels of party control and public attention (written questions and question time) give MPs far more opportunity to raise constituency specific issues than the more party controlled activities (interpellations and question hours). Consequently, I argue that responsiveness does not disappear in party-centered systems; it is located at lower-level institutions. Particularly, some types of questions, where shirking from the party line is less consequential and the party organizations have less control over its members, allow for constituency signaling.

Evaluating the Performance of Parliamentary Committees

Assessing parliamentary committees’ performance is important as it can ensure good governance. This has prompted various scholars and practitioners to devise several evaluation methods over the past two decades. Some of the methods include measuring the number of important bills that committees pass, measuring the number of important issues that committees address and measuring the number of unimportant bills, which committees block. While all these methods are important in advancing the knowledge of assessing committees’ performance, they are not very useful to parliamentary actors such as parliamentarians as they lack the sense of contemporaneousness in their measurements. It is in this context that using documentary review and data from reliable sources such as World Governance Indicators, this paper innovatively presents a rule of thumb proposing that parliamentary committees’ performance should instantaneously, be measured by the extent to which actions of a particular committee are consistent with three E’s namely, economy, effectiveness and efficiency.

Part-time parliamentarians? Evidence from outside earnings and parliamentary activities

I examine how outside earnings relate to absence rates and parliamentary activities using new data for members of seven German state parliaments. The setting is compelling because reforms of disclosure requirements for outside earnings provide finer-grained data, tackling challenges of previous studies. The full sample results do not suggest that outside earnings were overall correlated with absence rates, speeches, interpellations, or group initiatives. I also examine heterogeneity across age cohorts, government and opposition parties, and modes of entry into parliament. MPs who entered parliament via party lists reduce their parliamentary activities the most when they receive higher outside earnings, suggesting that electoral accountability matters for the relationship between outside earnings and MPs’ efforts in parliament. Results for subgroups of MPs also point to an increase in parliamentary activities when certain MPs receive higher outside earnings, indicating that high-performing MPs reconcile their side jobs with their parliamentary duties. Outside earnings may therefore give rise to a shift in the focus of MPs’ parliamentary work.

The evolution and development of the principle of free, prior and informed consent in South Africa

This article traces the evolution of the principle of free, prior and informed consent within the South African developmental context. Internationally, free prior and informed consent presupposes that communities have the right to give or withhold consent to proposed development projects on the lands that they own, occupy or otherwise use. Specific to South Africa, research reveals that although the country has not formally adopted the free, prior and informed consent principle within its development system, the spirit of the principle has permeated the development discourse in the country through development policies, legislation and case law. All major development policies in South Africa embody the public participation element, which is a precursor to free, prior and informed consent. Several Acts of parliament specifically require that communities’ consent must be sought and obtained before any development may take place in their territories. This sentiment has recently been augmented by court cases, both at High Court and Constitutional Court levels.

Parliamentary Activity and Political Views of the British Minister of War S. Herbert during the Crimean War

Parliamentary Activity and Political Views of the British Minister of War S. Herbert during the Crimean War

Feminist Institutional Change: The Case of the UK Women and Equalities Committee

Abstract The UK Government’s decision to establish the Women and Equalities Committee in 2015 redressed an institutional deficit at Westminster—the lack of a Departmental Select Committee holding the Women’s Minister and Government Equalities Office to account. This ‘effective’ reform was by no means a foregone conclusion, however. A feminist institutionalist (FI) approach demonstrates the limitations of traditional accounts of institutional change in accounting for this reform. With greater analytical space given to women’s agency and introducing the concept of gendered parliamentarianism, FI captures the gendered constraints and conducive conditions that marked this moment of parliamentary re-gendering: identifying the critical role of women MPs; the new relations between them and women parliamentary Clerks and officials and the wider—crucially gendered—(extra) parliamentary actors and dynamics in play.

Foreword: Early Printed Responses to the Closing of London's Playhouses, 1641–43

ForewordEarly Printed Responses to the Closing of London's Playhouses, 1641–43 Christopher Highley (bio) in one of early modern england's most unlikely volte-faces, the notorious antitheatricalist William Prynne penned a tract defending the public stage. Published in 1649, Mr William Prynn His Defence of Stage-Plays reversed the same author's landmark denunciation of theater in his Histrio-mastix. The Players Scourge, or, Actors Tragædie (1633).1 Prynne's reference in the earlier work to "Women-Actors, notorious whores"2 was widely seen as glancing at Henrietta Maria's participation in court plays; as a result, he was quickly condemned by the court of Star Chamber to stand in the pillory and have his ears "trimmed." Prynne's outrage in the 1630s at what he considered the growing authoritarianism of the king, and the threats from bishops and a Catholic queen, had turned by 1649 into alarm at "a Tyrannical, abominable, lewd, schismatical [and] hæretical Army"3 that not only held the king captive but also controlled Parliament following Pride's Purge of its moderate members in December 1648. The specific occasion for Prynne's defense of the stage was the removal of the "Players from their Houses"4 by groups of overzealous soldiers. For [End Page 11] Prynne, this was a violation of the king's prerogative, an attempt to silence Charles I's allies in the theater and to deny him a form of royal solace. From the beginning of hostilities in 1642, Prynne had upheld royal authority and worked for a reconciliation of king and commons in defiance of more radical voices, many of which emerged from the army. In retrospect, Prynne regretted his earlier comparison of Charles I to Nero for "loving of Stage-playes," as well as his attack on Henrietta Maria "with the bitter and cruell words of whore and strumpet" for performing in plays. He now recognized that "Playes are lawfull things, and are to be allowed as recreations for honest men." Prynne claimed that when he wrote Histrio-mastix, he was unaware of the nature of the plays "as were written and acted in England of late, for the Recreation of our most gracious King and Queen, and many of their best friends."5 Although Prynne remained hostile to "lewd" plays, he recognized that "honest Playes may be tolerated," and he even disavowed his earlier objections to cross-dressing on stage.6 By 1649, then, Prynne had come to the startling conclusion that, as Sir William Davenant later put it, "they that would have no King, would have no Play."7 Mr William Prynn His Defence of Stage-Plays is one of a few printed defenses of the stage in the years between 1642 and 1660. In this essay, I examine defenses of the stage in the years immediately after the playhouses were shut, a period when we might expect a flurry of protests to this unprecedented parliamentary action. Here again, defenses of the stage are rare, although The Actors Remonstrance, or Complaint: For the silencing of their profession is one notable and well-known exception (January 1643). In particular, I want to suggest that in order to gauge resistance to the closure, we need to look beyond formal defenses of the stage. I will argue that the republication in 1643 of Thomas Randolph's play The Muses Looking-Glasse is part of a counteroffensive against the ban on plays that also reveals something about the role of local politics in motivating the parliamentary prohibition.8 There are several possible reasons why no printed defenses of playing appeared before The Actors Remonstrance of January 1643. This absence is all the stranger when [End Page 12] we recall that a tract called The Stage-Players Complaint, published in 1641 shortly before the official closure, offered a precedent and template of sorts for theater supporters and personnel. The Stage-Players Complaint is a "pleasant Dialogue between Cane of the Fortune, and Reed of the Friers" in which the two actors lament "the sad and solitary conditions for want of Imployment . . . [during] this heavie and Contagious time of the Plague in London." Whereas Cane, the pessimist, thinks that public...

PARLIAMENTARISM IN THE SYSTEM OF ENSURING THE NATIONAL SECURITY OF MODERN RUSSIA

The article is devoted to the definition of the role and importance of parliamentarism in ensuring the national security of modern Russia. The identified problems involve the consideration of such key points as the definition of possible directions of the parliament’s activities to ensure national security, including through the prism of the legitimacy of the parliamentary institution itself, as well as the analysis of the features of the formation and functioning of the parliamentary system, creating difficulties in the implementation of the global task of ensuring national security. On the basis of various approaches, factors that reduce the effectiveness of parliamentary activity are analyzed, key features of institutionalization and functioning that negatively affect the perception of parliamentary institutions by society are identified. A set of measures to increase the legitimacy of parliamentarism and the effectiveness of its institutions is proposed. Attention is also paid to the problems of political responsibility of the ruling elite, concrete measures and mechanisms are proposed to improve the institution of political responsibility, which ultimately should lead to the activation of the activities of parliamentary institutions to ensure national security.

The power of the loser: Evidence on an agenda‐setting model of opposition policy influence

AbstractThe policy influence of political parties is a classic subject of investigation in political science research. The typical conclusion is that parties influence policy only through government: The government controls the legislative process and has the parliamentary majority to legislate; the opposition is shut out. Yet the legislative process is merely the final part of a much longer policy process starting with an agenda‐setting phase that decides the issues of political conflict in the first place. This study proposes an agenda‐setting model of opposition policy influence which hypothesises sizable opposition policy influence through agenda‐setting: A government is likely to adopt legislation covering the opposition's position in order to silence opposition agenda‐setting. The model is tested on the manual coding of 316 Acts of Parliament adopted by the government and 26,533 Prime Minister's Questions from the Opposition across six issues in Britain (1979‒2015). The results have important implications for minority representation.

Norm under fire: support for and opposition to the European Union’s ratification of the Istanbul Convention in the European Parliament

ABSTRACT The Istanbul Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence is contested across Europe by a strong anti-gender rhetoric, posing a direct threat to gender equality progress. Together with opposition to gender equality, attacks on the Convention have the effect of delegitimizing the norm that it embodies – namely, ending gender violence. Opposition is also visible in the European Parliament and shapes the discourse concerning possible ratification by the European Union (EU). Initially perceived by supporters in the European Parliament as a milestone for the advancement of women’s rights and gender equality, the Convention soon became a norm “under fire” as the target of vehement anti-gender contestations. Using a unique set of interview data with key parliamentary actors and Members of the European Parliament, this article analyzes the discursive politics of contestation between norm promoters and norm “antipreneurs” regarding the EU’s ratification of the Convention. The analysis shows how ratification is constructed in oppositional terms, with the findings illuminating direct and indirect forms of opposition to gender equality.

‘How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Autocracy’: Kais Saied’s “Constitutional Self-Coup” in Tunisia

The president of Tunisia, Kais Saied, recurred to Article 80 of the constitution on 25 July 2021 to proclaim the “state of exception,” freezing parliamentary activities, removing the representatives’ immunity, and dissolving the government headed by Prime Minister Hichem Mechichi. The following presidential decree 2021-117 on 22 September granted him legislative powers by decree, dismantling the constitution of 2014, which was the cornerstone of the result of the “Jasmine Revolution” of 2011. This article will analyze the constitutionality of the presidential decrees and shed light on the juridical, socioeconomical, and political circumstances that allowed Saied to perform what can be described as a constitutional coup or a self-coup, which reshaped the future of Tunisia.

UK Withdrawal from the EU: Supremacy, Indirect Effect and Retained EU Law

AbstractThe UK has left the EU and its withdrawal is managed by the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 (EUWA). The EUWA domesticates a snapshot of EU law as ‘retained EU law’. The supremacy principle is also domesticated, and benefits retained EU law in its interaction with prior (pre‐IP completion day) domestic law. The domesticated supremacy principle's explicit confinement in this backward‐facing way is designed to maintain continuity with the previous state of affairs, during EU membership, while also allowing for future regulatory divergence. In spite of this, however, this article argues that retained EU law has important ramifications vis‐à‐vis future UK Acts of Parliament through the forward‐facing operation of the domesticated doctrine of indirect effect which the EUWA does not confine. The upshot is that the capacity to diverge in future from retained EU law is legally more constrained than might otherwise have been anticipated.

North Atlantic mandates in the Danish Parliament, the Folketing

Although the history and the future of the Danish Realm are currently questions of great political concern, and the Danish Folketing is an important arena for political life in the Realm, we know little about the North Atlantic mandates in the Danish Folketing. Most notably, we have no knowledge about the difference between the mandates from the Faroe Islands and Greenland: Do they participate in similar ways? Although North Atlantic MPs have acted quite similarly in relation to Danish government formation and have generally been most concerned with parliamentary affairs of specific interest to their homeland, there are important differences. Most notably, Greenlandic members have engaged almost twice as much in most parliamentary activities and they take much less leave.