Enhancing the Backbench MP's Role As a Legislator: The Case for Urgent Reform of Private Members Bills

Brazier, Alex; Fox, Ruth

doi:10.1093/pa/gsp053

Cited by 16 publications

(8 citation statements)

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“…Through legislation and legislative speech in parliament, they are able to send credible signals to their constituents about what they stand for and what they can do to substantiate those claims. Furthermore, even if their bills are defeated in parliament, their proposals may have a chance of being incorporated into later government bills (Brazier and Fox, 2010;Oyama, 1997). Although many private members' bills may not pass into law, legislators are able to attract media attention and enhance their public visibility by raising issues in the form of legislation.…”

Section: Theory and Hypothesesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Although many private members’ bills may not pass into law, legislators are able to attract media attention and enhance their public visibility by raising issues in the form of legislation. Furthermore, even if their bills are defeated in parliament, their proposals may have a chance of being incorporated into later government bills (Brazier and Fox, 2010; Oyama, 1997). More importantly, however, in addition to these benefits, legislators can inform their constituents that they are seriously concerned about local issues, regardless of whether their bills actually become laws (Hyson, 1974).…”

Section: Theory and Hypothesesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Personal Attributes of Legislators and Parliamentary Behavior: An Analysis of Parliamentary Activities among Japanese Legislators

Ono¹

2015

Japanese Journal of Political Science

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This study explores the individual-level activities of legislators in parliament, which have been largely ignored in the literature on parliamentary democracies. Individual legislators are extensively involved in parliamentary activities such as drafting private members' bills and posing questions, even though these activities have only been considered to play marginal roles in parliamentary democracies. Moreover, their engagement varies significantly. By using unique data from Japan, this study demonstrates that the personal attributes of legislators affect their choice of parliamentary activities. Under electoral systems with intra-party competition, legislators use parliamentary activities as an important means to inform their constituents about what they can do for them and how they differ from other legislators. In elections, candidates cultivate personal votes by exploiting the image drawn from their personal attributes and, once elected, they behave in accordance with their attributes in order to maintain their electoral ground. Thus, they devote themselves to different activities in parliament. The data analyzed here support this argument. The results of empirical analyses show that legislators with local-level political experience engage in particularistic pork-barrel activities that will benefit their local interests, while legislators with legal-work experience allocate their time and energy to general policy-making activities that will enhance their public image and visibility as legal experts.

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Section: Theory and Hypothesesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Theory and Hypothesesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Personal Attributes of Legislators and Parliamentary Behavior: An Analysis of Parliamentary Activities among Japanese Legislators

Ono¹

2015

Japanese Journal of Political Science

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“…(2004) show that bills initiated by individual legislators reflect personal vote‐seeking incentives in terms of their focus on national versus local public goods, the number of co‐sponsors and their adoption as laws. Work on private members bills in parliamentary democracies, on the other hand, is largely descriptive (Marsh & Read 1988; Mattson 1995; Arter 2006; Brazier & Fox 2010). There is widespread agreement that these bills also serve as tools for signalling and position‐taking (Bräuninger & Debus 2009), but there is practically no empirical test of these arguments.…”

Section: Personal Vote‐seeking Incentives and Parliamentary Behaviourmentioning

confidence: 99%

Personal vote‐seeking in flexible list systems: How electoral incentives shape Belgian MPs' bill initiation behaviour

Bräuninger

Brunner

Däubler

2011

European J Political Res

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It is well known that different types of electoral systems create different incentives to cultivate a personal vote and that there may be variation in intra‐party competition within an electoral system. This article demonstrates that flexible list systems – where voters can choose to cast a vote for the list as ordered by the party or express preference votes for candidates – create another type of variation in personal vote‐seeking incentives within the system. This variation arises because the flexibility of party‐in‐a‐district lists results from voters' actual inclination to use preference votes and the formal weight of preference votes in changing the original list order. Hypotheses are tested which are linked to this logic for the case of Belgium, where party‐in‐a‐district constituencies vary in their use of preference votes and the electoral reform of 2001 adds interesting institutional variation in the formal impact of preference votes on intra‐party seat allocation. Since formal rules grant Belgian MPs considerable leeway in terms of bill initiation, personal vote‐seeking strategies are inferred by examining the use of legislative activity as signalling tool in the period between 1999 and 2007. The results establish that personal vote‐seeking incentives vary with the extent to which voters use preference votes and that this variable interacts with the weight of preference votes as defined by institutional rules. In addition, the article confirms the effect of intra‐party competition on personal vote‐seeking incentives and illustrates that such incentives can underlie the initiation of private members bills in a European parliamentary system.

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“…55 However, the fact that this path was not chosen may reveal the Supreme Court's misgivings about that process; indeed, Lady Hale stated, extra-judicially, that she had been 'rather hoping that Parliament would solve matters for us'. 56 Despite Lord Kerr noting that ongoing parliamentary consideration was no 'inevitable contraindication to a declaration of incompatibility', it is arguable that a declaration was issued since the Court knew that, as a Private Member's Bill, it had limited chances of success 57 and, at that time, it had been watered down merely to compel a review, as opposed to an textual amendment of the Civil Partnership Act 2004, as originally planned. Third, the Supreme Court was clearly mindful of the fact that there was at the time of the hearing no indication of an end point in sight in terms of the removal of the asymmetry of access to civil partnerships.…”

Section: Issuing a Declaration Of Incompatibilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Equal Civil Partnerships, Discrimination and the Indulgence of Time: R (on the application of Steinfeld and Keidan) v Secretary of State for International Development

Hayward

2019

Modern Law Review

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In R (on the application of Steinfeld and Keidan) v Secretary of State for International Development the Supreme Court unanimously declared that the ban on different‐sex civil partnerships was incompatible with Articles 8 and 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights. In a strikingly robust and, at times, acerbic manner, the Court systematically dismantled the Secretary of State's request for tolerance of a discriminatory and unsustainable legal position. The decision represents a clear victory for those campaigning for reform and the issuing of a declaration of incompatibility by the Court is likely to have influenced the later announcement by Prime Minister Theresa May in October 2018 that different‐sex civil partnerships will ultimately be introduced in England and Wales.

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Enhancing the Backbench MP's Role As a Legislator: The Case for Urgent Reform of Private Members Bills

Cited by 16 publications

References 0 publications

Personal Attributes of Legislators and Parliamentary Behavior: An Analysis of Parliamentary Activities among Japanese Legislators

Personal Attributes of Legislators and Parliamentary Behavior: An Analysis of Parliamentary Activities among Japanese Legislators

Personal vote‐seeking in flexible list systems: How electoral incentives shape Belgian MPs' bill initiation behaviour

Equal Civil Partnerships, Discrimination and the Indulgence of Time: R (on the application of Steinfeld and Keidan) v Secretary of State for International Development

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