How Parliament Works

Rogers, Robert D.; Walters, Rhodri

doi:10.4324/9781315730875

Cited by 48 publications

(45 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Committees are cross-party and -in the case of departmental and cross-cutting investigative committees -made up of usually 11 members (though this can vary between nine and 18). The party balance reflects that of the House of Commons, both within each committee and with respect to chairships allocated to committees as a whole (for a detailed summary, see Rogers and Walters (2015)).…”

Section: Conducting Scrutinymentioning

confidence: 99%

Committee Hearings of the UK Parliament: Who gives Evidence and does this Matter?

Geddes

2017

Parliamentary Affairs

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

While evidence hearings by House of Commons select committees have received increasing attention by the public and the media in recent years, academic research on this topic has remained rather thin. Drawing on both quantitative and qualitative methods, this article examines this topic. It begins by explaining why evidence is important: (i) it is fundamental to sustain detailed scrutiny; (ii) it builds individual-level and institutional-level expertise; and (iii) the range of evidence gathered is used by committees to engage with the public. The article then presents empirical data of the pool of witnesses on which committees rely, which arguably does not reflect the UK population, which raises important further questions over the representative claims of committees.

show abstract

Section: Conducting Scrutinymentioning

confidence: 99%

Committee Hearings of the UK Parliament: Who gives Evidence and does this Matter?

Geddes

2017

Parliamentary Affairs

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…This binary nature of parliamentary politics persists in the House of Commons despite the presence of other opposition parties. Parliamentary procedure and the very design of the House of Commons chamber serve to reinforce this notion (McKay et al, 2004: 247; Rogers and Walters, 2015: 91), privileging the role of the ‘Official’ Opposition party beyond all others who achieve representation. This means that, as Kaiser (2008: 21) writes, discussions of opposition at Westminster often proceed as though there are only two parties in Parliament.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding third parties at Westminster: The SNP in the 2015 parliament

Thompson

2017

Politics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Opposition politics in the British House of Commons is dominated by the ‘Official’ Opposition. However, other parties also carry out opposition roles in the chamber. This is particularly true of the third largest party, which is afforded some parliamentary privileges yet is overlooked in studies of Parliament. This article fills this gap, using a case study of the Scottish National Party (SNP) to analyse the challenges facing the third party in the Commons. It additionally contributes to the literature on regional nationalist parties, exploring the micro level variables affecting their agenda-setting capacities within a state level parliament. Drawing primarily on elite interviews with SNP members of parliaments (MPs) and staff, it finds that third party rights are not as significant as they may appear. Party size alone is not sufficient to guarantee impact in the Commons. Strategies to overcome the inherent procedural constraints of the chamber are also required. In the SNP case, this included incremental organisational change, a highly collegiate intra-party culture, and mentoring from existing MPs during the 2015 Parliament.

show abstract

“…Thanks to the digital channel, BBC Parliament, it is possible to check the audio-visual records of some -but not all -of England's parliamentary proceedings from 1989 onwards. BBC Parliament provides access to the House of Commons Chamber live, select coverage of the House of Lords, and unedited coverage of about ten committees each week(Rogers and Walters, 2015). Any recordings older than two years are deposited in the National Film Archive.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Mapping Hansard Impression Management Strategies through Time and Space

Archer¹

2017

Studia Neophilologica

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Impolite behaviour is thought to be easier to investigate than polite or politic behaviour in diachronic contexts, because of attracting more evaluative comment. But an approach based on such metapragmatic commentary can miss a lot of facework strategies in contexts such as the UK parliament (modern and historical). In this paper, I draw on Historic Hansard datasets (1812-2003) to demonstrate how a (semi)automatic method involving contiguous searches of two-to-four features can better reveal the nuances of these MPs' facework strategies than a focus on metapragmatic terms has afforded hitherto. The (semi) automatic method uses the recently created Historic Thesaurus Semantic Tagger (HTST) to search for meaning constellations (Archer and Malory 2017). Meaning constellations relating to facework are made up of sequences of semantic fields and/or parts-of-speech which, when organised in certain ways, achieve im/politeness, politic behaviour, strategic ambiguity, a combination of face enhancement and face threat, etc. This paper discusses a number of these meaning constellations, with a particular focus on those which engage in both face enhancement and face aggravation simultaneously (whilst nonetheless avoiding the label, "unparliamentary language").

show abstract

How Parliament Works

Cited by 48 publications

References 0 publications

Committee Hearings of the UK Parliament: Who gives Evidence and does this Matter?

Committee Hearings of the UK Parliament: Who gives Evidence and does this Matter?

Understanding third parties at Westminster: The SNP in the 2015 parliament

Mapping Hansard Impression Management Strategies through Time and Space

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About