Parliamentary Record Research Articles

Processing Large‐Scale Archival Records: The Case of the Swiss Parliamentary Records

AbstractLegislative bodies generally keep records of their activities. While the digitization wave spurred the availability of archival documents, their processing remains a challenge. The Swiss parliamentary records are no exception.In this paper we present a supervised pipeline for extracting and structuring of content of archival records. Our pipeline consists of five steps, starting with an assessment of which elements need extraction and how they relate to each other. Step two involves general pre‐processing to prepare the PDF documents and is followed by an element classification step. Step four involves post‐processing and the final step is a validation of the extracted information. With our supervised approach, we are able to process over 200,000 pages of Swiss parliamentary records (spanning the years 1891–1995), a feat that would exceed the budget of most projects using manual curation. We discuss validation of individual steps and offer guidance to researchers engaged in similar data processing efforts.

Perfecting the Union: National and State Authority in the US Constitution by Max M. Edling

Reviewed by: Perfecting the Union: National and State Authority in the US Constitution by Max M. Edling Donald F. Johnson (bio) U.S. Constitution, Constitutional history, Legal history Perfecting the Union: National and State Authority in the US Constitution. By Max M. Edling. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 208. Cloth, $29.95.) Americans have never fully agreed on the nature of the U.S. Constitution. As jurists and legal scholars have debated and re-interpreted concepts like originalism and the extent of executive power, historians have long argued over the ideological and economic motivations of the framers as well as their racial and gender politics, imperial ambitions, and countless other considerations. Recent scholarship has demonstrated just how long a genealogy these debates have had, tracing their origins to the first decades after ratification as the framers themselves changed their positions and revised their interpretations of the document they drafted to reflect [End Page 173] changing political realities.1 From James Madison to Samuel Alito, then, interpretation of the founding has had as much of an eye on the present as the past. In Perfecting the Union, Max M. Edling seeks to strip out two centuries of forward-looking interpretation and place the Constitution in both the larger context of late eighteenth-century Euro–American statecraft and the narrower context of relations between the American states in the 1770s and 1780s. What results is a refreshing new analysis of the framers' Constitution as a fundamentally "Unionist" national charter, intended neither to entrench revolutionary values—however defined—nor to empower republican elites. Rather, the leaders of the early republic sought to create a more effective alliance between the states by clearly dividing areas of sovereignty between states and the new Federal government in ways that improved upon but did not fundamentally change the conceptions of government and authority that triggered the break with Britain and underpinned the earlier Articles of Confederation. In short and to-the-point chapters, Edling takes the reader through the framers' concept of a constitution as "federal treaty" or "compact of union between the states," and of their concept of such a union as "the means whereby weak states could safeguard their sovereignty" and "a political organization meant to further the interests of the states"—concepts that largely held for both the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution (11, 36). The author then turns to "internal police"—a term just emerging in the eighteenth century referring to a sphere of sovereignty with control over crime and punishment, infrastructure, economic development, poor relief; areas of government found in modern ministries of the interior or contained in domestic policy portfolios. While in the 1780s the concept had "an elastic and imprecise meaning," strong internal policing was nevertheless considered essential by late-eighteenth-century Anglophone political thinkers to "the refined, well-ordered, and opulent society" (81, 89). Through close readings of how these ideas functioned from the 1760s through the 1790s, Edling makes a persuasive case that a majority at least of the framers saw the Constitution not as a national charter supplanting state authority but rather strengthening the compact so that a more powerful [End Page 174] union could better protect the sovereignty of each state over its own internal affairs. As a result, the success of the unionist Constitution should be judged not on "the federal government's regulation of domestic affairs but its regulation of the western borderlands and the Atlantic marketplace" (14). To further the unionist interpretation, the book's intriguing final chapter uses legislative records at the Federal and state levels to demonstrate that, at least initially, the framers followed through on their promises of an outward-looking Congress and inward-looking states. Compiling an impressive quantitative analysis of legislation in Congress and the Pennsylvania legislature from 1789 through 1796—a time period in which national politicians "did their best to implement the political program that had propelled the framers to Philadelphia" (13). Using Great Britain's eighteenth-century Parliamentary record as a control, Edling demonstrates persuasively that, with a few splashy exceptions such as the Bill of Rights, the first Federal Congresses largely limited itself to "regulat[ing] relations between the United States...

Fierce Loves and Faithless Wars: Bruce, Byron and the Man of Feeling

Lord Byron’s epic poems, and more pointedly his parliamentary record as exhibited by his speeches, express a rare communion with the plight of the working man and a singular opposition to unjust war. These sentiments, hilariously and cuttingly explored in Don Juan and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, set him apart from the archetypal, systemically controlled male of his time. His work shares intriguing connections with the songs and expostulations of Bruce Springsteen, whose musical efforts against the Vietnam war, including Born in the USA and Your Hometown, are marked by outright tragedy and winking irony as well as the kind of subversive rhetorical melodies found in Byron’s work.
 Additionally, Springsteen’s vast library of songs espousing the real, abstract and enduring challenges of working-class Americans (particularly men) parallels Byron’s open parliamentary support for the society of Luddites. Drawing from Ildiko Csengei’s essay The Fever of Vain Longing, which posits that Canto III of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage sees the transformation of the Byronic Hero into The Man of Feeling, I argue that while the unstirred Byronic Hero often stands in opulent contrast to the socially isolated, margin dwelling male trope that peppers Springsteen’s songs, this transformation aligns the two poets’ transgressive archetypes.

A proxy geopolitics of poppies, peasants, and national sovereignty: Turkey’s rhetorical resistance to America’s war on drugs

Nixon's self-declared war on drugs has been underway for over five decades. Not all aspects are well known, and many voices of those touched by the campaign were and remain unheard. In the early 1970s, the Turkish republic faced a political crisis. The military installed a post-coup leadership that acquiesced to longstanding American demands to halt all cultivation of the opium poppy. This was the first sustained battle in Nixon's war, and it had socio-economically devastating consequences for Anatolian peasants who had for generations farmed the crop for licit and illicit markets. To many Turkish citizens, the ban was the result of a new stage in Western imperialism and a direct consequence of their own leaders' failure to protect the country's rural poor majority, on the one hand, and their surrender of national sovereignty, on the other hand. Farmers' voices were rarely heard on this issue, apart from brief quotes in newspapers and in domestic and foreign governmental studies, but their plight attracted sustained popular attention due in part to the proxy geopolitics articulated on their behalf. Before the recently disenfranchised parliament that did not permit sustained discussion or debate of the poppy question, MPs nonetheless rendered impromptu testimonies protesting the ban, its impacts on farmers, the suppression of democracy, and nation's loss of sovereignty. Through an analysis of Turkey's parliamentary record and other contemporary sources, I approach this crucial episode in the histories of intoxicants and the war on drugs. In so doing, I demonstrate the potential and seeming success of proxy geopolitics echoed on behalf of a marginalized people and why engagement with such sources is essential in the wider practice of critical geopolitics.

The Market as a Concept in Swedish Parliamentary Records from 1867 to 1970

This paper presents a study of the market concept in the records of the Swedish bicameral parliament from 1867 to 1970. The study, and an underlying project, adapt a theoretical and methodological combination of history of concepts, discourse analysis and computer linguistic methods. The theoretical and methodological framework is described and discussed, including a tool for investigating linguistic representations of the market concept in the records. Results from the dimensions of productivity and agency are presented, based on working hypotheses about a change of meaning towards a more abstract and complex understanding of market over time, which also is partially supported by the findings.

Reassessing the Scottish Parliamentary Records, 1528–48: Manuscript, Print, Bureaucracy and Royal Authority*

AbstractThis article for the first time correctly identifies a manuscript previously identified as an ‘official record of parliament’ as a draft of the first printed statutes of the Scottish Parliament, the Actis and Constitutionis of 1542. This discovery has a number of implications for our study of parliament in the period 1528 to 1548, encompassing the personal rule of James V and the beginning of his daughter, Mary Queen of Scots's, minority, which the original manuscript covered. Careful attention to these materials exposes a sophisticated administrative culture, characterised by reviewing and repromulgating statutes, as well as revealing the ghosts of further, now lost, records. Considering the printed text, meanwhile, suggests that parliament and the law played as important a role as history and ceremonial in the assertion of James V's kingship in the years 1540–2: indeed, this should not surprise us given that James's administrators were also his poets. While the Actis of 1542 have hitherto provoked little interest from among historians, they emerge as an important influence on the much better known publication of Scottish statutes from James I to Mary in 1567. The administrators who produced this later volume evidently saw themselves as working within the same tradition as their predecessors of 1542: an increased appreciation of the administrative expertise, careful record‐keeping, attention to the dissemination of statute and the ways in which this bolstered the power of the crown suggests that we ought to do likewise.

Encoding Interruptions in Parliamentary Data: From Applause to Interjections and Laughter

Parliamentary data, especially parliamentary discourse, is of interest to researchers from various fields in the humanities and social sciences. The growing number of machine-readable and annotated parliamentary text corpora opens up this field for computer-based quantitative analysis. In this paper I aim to give an overview of how parliamentary interruptions are recorded in official parliamentary records and how they are modeled and encoded in currently available machine-readable parliamentary corpora. Furthermore, I will discuss whether these encodings are suitable for computer-based quantitative analysis of parliamentary interruptions. I will suggest detailed encodings of parliamentary interruptions in TEI as an extension to the Parla-CLARIN recommendations, to enable the extraction of parliamentary interruptions and to facilitate computerized quantitative analysis based on these encodings. As an example, I will use the encoding of interruptions in the Austrian Parliamentary Records.

Writing Scottish Parliamentary History, c.1500–1707

AbstractIn the 19th and 20th centuries, scholarship on the Scottish parliament was heavily informed by a narrative of ‘failure’, directed at explaining why its members voted it out of existence in 1707. Part of the problem was the tendency to see any deviation from the practices of the Westminster parliament as weakness. By reappraising parliament in terms of its utility to those who comprised its membership, notably the titled peerage and the monarch, historians have revealed its adaptability and inventiveness, especially in times of crisis. This essay considers how fresh approaches both to what constituted the parliamentary record and what can – and cannot – be found within it have exerted a transformative influence on our understanding of parliament's evolving role in Scottish political life. Although the Reformation crisis of 1560 and the accession of the ruling house of Stewart to the English throne in 1603 effected profound changes on parliamentary culture, this essay emphasises how parliament sustained its legitimacy and relevance, in part, by drawing on past practices and ideas. Historians have become more attentive in recent years to the means by which social groupings ordinarily excluded from formal parliamentary activity were nonetheless able to engage with, and influence, its proceedings. Gaps remain in our knowledge, however. Some periods have been more intensively studied than others, while certain aspects of parliamentary culture are understudied. The writing of Scottish parliamentary history will continue to offer rich possibilities in future.

The Reinvention of Immigration Detention in Italy in the Aftermath of the “Refugee Crisis”: A Study of Parliamentary Records (2013–2018)

Abstract The aim of this article is to explore the peculiarity of Italian policies on immigration detention and their evolution over time. This will be done by highlighting the main factors that might explain the apparent political disinvestment in immigration detention in Italy, in particular in the years between 2013 and 2015, and account for the turnaround in approach announced and then implemented by the two Interior Ministers in charge between 2017 and 2019. The article uses the Italian case as an opportunity to explore the functions that are assigned to immigration detention in destination countries. In particular, it considers whether or not it can be argued that immigration detention in Italy has been “reinvented” (meaning that its functions have somewhat changed) as a consequence of the so-called “refugee crisis” and in light of Italy’s specific position in the contemporary geopolitics of the EU’s border control regime.

Investigating colloquialization in the British parliamentary record in the late 19th and early 20th century

In this paper, we explore how sociocultural changes were reflected in the parliamentary record, a genre that combines elements of spoken, written and written-to-be-spoken discourses. Our main interests are in the processes of linguistic colloquialization and democratization, understood broadly as tendencies towards greater informality and equality in language use. Previous diachronic studies have established that written language has increasingly adopted features associated with spoken language, although genre and register differences are considerable. Our starting point is that as Parliament has become more demographically representative and as prescriptive norms have loosened in society on the whole, the relative frequency of informal features in parliamentary language may have increased. At the same time, profound changes took place in the practices of recording parliamentary proceedings, most importantly the introduction of the official report in 1909.Our data on British parliamentary debates come from the Hansard Corpus (Alexander and Davies, 2015). We investigate the 60-year-period 1870–1930, which includes reports of parliamentary debates and, after 1909, verbatim reports (in total ca. 40 million words). Adopting a pattern-driven approach, we focus on n-gram frequencies. The analysis first identifies major shifts in the language of the reports using unsupervised grouping methods, and then investigates in more detail the frequency trends of individual n-grams associated with spoken language, as well as their function in parliamentary debates. The findings indicate that the introduction of the official report resulted in clear changes in n-gram frequencies, which can be linked to democratization and colloquialization.

A Narrative Approach to Creating Instruments with Unstructured and Voluminous Text: An Application to Policy Uncertainty

We quantify the effects of policy uncertainty on the economy using a proxy structural vector autoregression (SVAR). Our instrument in the proxy SVAR is a set of exogenous uncertainty events constructed using a text-based narrative approach. Usually the narrative approach involves manually reading texts, which is difficult in our application as our text—the parliamentary record—is unstructured and lengthy. To deal with such circumstances, we develop a procedure using a natural language technique, latent Dirichlet analysis. Our procedure extends the possible application of the narrative identification approach. We find the effects of policy uncertainty are significant, and are underestimated using alternative identification methods.

Women’s Political Representation in Dáil Éireann in Revolutionary and Post-Revolutionary Ireland

This chapter outlines and assesses women’s political representation in Dail Eireann, the lower house of the Irish Parliament, in both revolutionary and post-revolutionary Ireland. It argues that the establishment of the Irish Free State and the onset of Civil War in 1922 represent a shift in the opportunities available for women to enter parliamentary politics. Although the first woman MP ever elected was from Ireland and six women TDs were returned in the 1921 general election, Dail Eireann following independence was a ‘colder house’ for women’s representation. The outright opposition of women TDs (and Republican women more generally) to the terms of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1922 was a crucial factor in the decline of women’s representation, as was the influence of various political, legislative and socio-cultural changes in the Irish Free State. Drawing on the parliamentary record and secondary sources, this chapter aims to reveal political women’s agency as activists and politicians in the decades that followed the establishment of the Irish Free State and considers the gendered obstacles the first women TDs faced in their roles. In doing so, the chapter assists with an important reappraisal of women in politics over this period.

Addressing the Corruption of Foreign Public Officials: Developments and Challenges within the Canadian Legal Landscape

AbstractWith 2018 marking the twentieth anniversary of Canada’s Corruption of Foreign Public Officials Act, an opportunity presents itself to take stock of both developments and challenges for the legislative scheme. As demonstrated by a review of the parliamentary record, the desire to enact legislation to criminalize the offering of an inducement to a foreign public official to secure a business advantage was decidedly international in nature, with Canada aiming to bolster the efforts of others to create a level playing field for companies operating abroad. Yet, despite good intentions, as well as amendments to strengthen the Act in 2013 and the passage of additional transparency obligations in 2014, Canada’s legislative scheme has not kept pace with the international and multi-jurisdictional realities of the problem to be addressed. Renewed interest needs to be paid to the demand side of a foreign bribery transaction. In addition, the confiscation or forfeiture of any ill-gotten gains must become a priority, with the touting of success in securing the voluntary payment of sizeable fines failing to provide for a sufficient accounting for the wrongs done, particularly if the victims of corruption, even as a class that needs clearer definition, are to be made a true concern of the Act. The challenges posed by matters of immunity and the need to improve matters of multi-jurisdictional cooperation also need further attention.

The Prohibition against Torture: Why the UK Government is Falling Short and the Risks that Remain

AbstractWhile the UK's official position is that it neither uses nor condones torture or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment (CIDT), it is now a matter of public and parliamentary record that UK security services and military personnel colluded in rendition, torture, and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, both as part of the CIA's Rendition, Detention and Interrogation (RDI) programme, at military detention facilities in Afghanistan and Iraq, and through involvement in the detention and interrogation of prisoners by allied security forces. This paper will explain why the government is falling short of its obligations under international law, and why considerable risks remain that UK intelligence and security services will continue to collude in torture and CIDT.

Scottish parliamentary record scholarship in the devolution era

ABSTRACT In 1707 Scotland’s parliament ceased to exist. Yet it has since been the subject of two monumental acts of record scholarship; the Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland (1814-1875) in the nineteenth century and the Records of the Parliaments of Scotland (2007) in the twenty-first. Using the first of these as a touchstone, this article examines the ways in which the records of the pre-1707 parliament are presented, positioned and interpreted in the second. Unlike the nineteenth-century edition, which was produced in an era when adherence to the 1707 Act of Union with England went all but unquestioned, the twenty-first-century version was created during a period of constitutional devolution amidst a national debate over the question of independence from the United Kingdom. Approaching this new edition of parliamentary records as a cultural product, shaped and informed by the context in which it was created, therefore enables us to learn much about how the relationship between history and national identity in Scotland has changed since its predecessor was published. From there, the article questions the assumption that present-day understandings of Scottish identity are primarily civic and forward-looking, and argues that they are in fact partly based on claims which, whether secessionist or devolutionist, are fundamentally historical.

Nuclear Energy as a Hegemonic Discourse in Turkey

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the revival of the nuclear energy initiatives in Turkey and the associated ‘economic growth’ and ‘competitiveness’ discourse of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) as a function of the neoliberal transformation of the Turkish political economy since the 1980s. Based on an engagement between the neo-Gramscian approach and the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), this paper shows how the nuclear project in Turkey is historically situated and discursively constructed. Analysing the Parliamentary Records and statements of state officials, the paper has highlighted how the AKP exercises power through hegemonic discourses in terms of the legitimization of the nuclear energy in Turkey.

Stakeholder Framing of Advertising Legislation: An Analysis of Media and Parliamentary Representations of the Loi Évin in the United Kingdom

The Loi Évin legislation restricts alcohol advertising in France and is more comprehensive than the self-regulation-based U.K. approach. Through contributions to news media and parliamentary processes, stakeholders can play an important role in framing the debate around public policy. This project therefore aimed to analyze how the Loi Évin has been represented since its inception in U.K. media and Parliament by the advertising and alcohol industries, politicians, and nongovernmental organizations. Qualitative analysis of media and parliamentary documents using the hermeneutic method, analyzing contexts in which the Loi Évin was mentioned by stakeholders in the media and in Parliament. Print and trade media articles referencing the Loi Évin were retrieved from the ProQuest media archive [from 1985 to 2016]. U.K. parliamentary representations referencing the Loi Évin were obtained from the parliamentary database for publications and the Hansard parliamentary record. A total of 109 documents referencing the Loi Évin were identified, of which 71 met the inclusion criteria and were included for analysis. The alcohol and advertising industries have framed the Loi Évin as incompatible with European Union principles, irrational and ineffective, with arguments changing over time in response to landmark events and rulings. Supporters of Loi Évin-style legislation failed to counter industry framing of advertising as not contributing to increased consumption. The portrayal of the Loi Évin by industry in the United Kingdom is an important example of policy framing and provides evidence of the synergy between advertising and alcohol industry representatives in combatting legislation that could harm profits.

The Fall of Thomas Howard, 1st Earl of Suffolk and the Revival of Impeachment in the Parliament of 1621

AbstractThe revival of impeachment in 1621 has tended to be viewed exclusively through the prism of parliament. However, this article, which builds on the work of Professor Allen Horstman, suggests that a key factor in impeachment's revival was the dismissal of Lord Treasurer Suffolk for corruption in 1618. Suffolk's removal caused widespread disquiet, since it was assumed that senior officials held office for life. In order to silence these criticisms it proved necessary for the king not only to put Suffolk on trial but also to justify by precedent the lord treasurer's removal. This latter task was performed by the former lord chief justice, Sir Edward Coke, himself not long disgraced, whose researches in the medieval parliamentary record revealed the following year that errant crown ministers had hitherto been held to account by means of impeachment. Coke subsequently put this discovery to good effect when parliament met in 1621. Against the backdrop of mounting criticism against his hated rival, the lord chancellor, Francis Bacon, Coke revealed the existence of impeachment to the house of commons, whose attention was then focused on finding a way to punish the monopolists, Sir Giles Mompesson and Sir Francis Michell. In so doing, Coke not only aided the lower House, which had been struggling since 1610 to find a way of punishing non‐members, but also sought to settle an old score.

Homophobic Nationalism: The Development of Sodomy Legislation in Uganda

Literature on sexuality and citizenship has demonstrated the myriad of ways that states use legislation to produce, regulate, and protect a sexually and racially “pure” citizen. In the context of the European imperial powers, this citizen is heterosexual, monogamous, and white. In the postcolonial Ugandan context, the development of sodomy legislation shows that this ideal citizen is heterosexual, monogamous, and yet untarnished by contemporary Western ideals (which is undoubtedly paradoxical). This work engages with colonial legislative texts, most notably the Ugandan Penal Code Act of 1950. The author then triangulates this with an analysis of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill and Act and parliamentary record from 1999-2013. With this data, it is argued that the Ugandan construct of an ideal citizen is not only a reactionary result of colonialism, but that it is also demonstrative of the anti-globalization ideology that has heightened in the wake of rapidngoization of the globallgbtirights movement.

The Legislative Process and Judicial Review: Royal Functions and Their Justiciability

This paper looks at three procedural functions of the Crown in the legislative process (Royal Recommendation, Royal Consent and Royal Assent) and considers how they fit with the roles of the other branches of the State, particularly judicial review legislative action. The paper begins by describing the three procedural functions in general terms. It then looks at how these functions have been considered by the courts, both in terms of their review of legislative action as well as their application of legislation itself. The paper focuses on the concept of justiciability and argues that the courts have no role in relation to the Royal Recommendation and Royal Consent and have only a very limited role in terms of satisfying themselves that the parliamentary record shows that Royal Assent has been given.