Parliament and the War Prerogative in the United Kingdom and Canada: Explaining Variations in Institutional Change and Legislative Control

Abstract

The British and Canadian Parliaments have no legal control over military deployment decisions. Recently, however, governments in both countries have held votes in the House of Commons on expeditionary missions involving combat. In the United Kingdom, this has led to a convention of legislative control of the executive’s prerogative to deploy the armed forces. In Canada, the votes have benefited and enabled the executive, rather than strengthening legislative control. Using Mahoney and Thelen’s (2010) theory of gradual institutional change, this article analyses how and why war prerogative reforms in the United Kingdom and Canada have resulted in different outcomes.

Parliamentary involvement, party ideology and majority-opposition bargaining: Belgian participation in multinational military operations

“…They particularly shed new light on the cardinal question whether increased parliamentary involvement necessarily implies a victory for parliament. The mixed findings in this article raise the importance of investigating opposite tendencies of executivedriven attempts to legitimise military interventions (see also Lagassé, 2017;Fonck and Reykers, 2018), whereby parliamentary consultation reflects an orchestration rather than a democratization. This remains a key issue to be addressed, both in future research which seeks to establish the determinants of genuine democratic control on the use of military force, and in policy debates about changing parliamentary war powers.…”

The unintended consequences of parliamentary involvement: Elite collusion and Afghanistan deployments in Canada and Germany

“…A new strand of literature on ‘parliamentary war powers’ shows that democracies are characterised by substantial variance in the formal institutional legislative control and oversight of military deployments (Born and Hänggi, 2005; Ku and Jacobson, 2003; Mello and Peters, 2018; Peters and Wagner, 2011). Moreover, some countries have seen a trend towards legislative votes on military deployments, despite the absence of formal requirements (Lagassé, 2017; Mello, 2017; Strong, 2015, 2018). These studies provide a critical insight into democratic foreign policy processes and identify sources of variation among democracies neglected in previous work.…”

National restrictions in multinational military operations: A conceptual framework

“…Clearly, there is a need for further systematic-comparative work to broaden the basis of our understanding of the politics of MMOs. For example, recent empirical studies indicate that parliamentary veto power has only a modest effect on conflict participation (Wagner, 2018) and that parliamentary involvement can yield unintended consequences that run counter to normative aims (Lagassé & Mello, 2018). Moreover, several Central and Eastern European states adapted their constitutional frameworks during their NATO accession.…”