Political Parties, Parliaments and Legislative Speechmaking
Political Parties, Parliaments and Legislative Speechmaking

Author: H. Bäck

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Published: 2016-03-24

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781137484543

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In analysing speeches made by legislators, this book provides theoretical and empirical answers to questions such as: Why do some Members of Parliament (MPs) take the parliamentary floor and speak more than others, and why do some MPs deviate more than others from the ideological position of their party? The authors evaluate their hypotheses on legislative speechmaking by considering parliamentary debates in seven European democracies: Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Norway and Sweden. Assuming that MPs are concerned with policy-making, career advancement, and re-election, the book discusses various incentives to taking the floor, and elaborates on the role of gender and psychological incentives in speechmaking. The authors test our expectations on a novel dataset that covers information on the number of speeches held by MPs and on the ideological positions MPs adopted when delivering a speech.

The Autocratic Parliament
The Autocratic Parliament

Author: Irene Weipert-Fenner

Publisher: Syracuse University Press

Published: 2020-03-23

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 0815655010

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When protests erupted in response to the 2010 Egyptian parliament elections that were widely viewed as fraudulent, many wondered. Why now? Voters had never witnessed free and fair elections in the past, so why did these elicit such an outcry? To answer this question, Weipert-Fenner conducted the first study of politics in modern Egypt from a parliamentary perspective. Contrary to the prevailing opinion that autocratic parliaments are meaningless, token institutions, Weipert-Fenner’s long-term analysis shows that parliament can be an indicator, catalyst, and agent of change in an authoritarian regime. Comparing parliamentary dynamics over decades, Weipert-Fenner demonstrates that autocratic parliaments can grow stronger within a given political system. They can also become contentious when norms regarding policies, political actors, and institutions are violated on a large scale and/or at a fast pace. Most importantly, a parliament can even turn against the executive when parliamentary rights are withdrawn or when widely shared norms are violated. These and other recurrent patterns of institutional relations identified in The Autocratic Parliament help explain long spans of stable, yet never stagnant, authoritarian rule in colonial and postcolonial periods alike, as well as the different types of regime change that Egypt has witnessed: those brought about by external intervention, by revolution, or by military coup.

Parliaments and Post-Legislative Scrutiny
Parliaments and Post-Legislative Scrutiny

Author: Franklin de Vrieze

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-12-18

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 1000326292

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To what extent have parliaments a responsibility to monitor how laws are implemented as intended and have the expected impact? Is the practice of Post-Legislative Scrutiny emerging as a new dimension within the oversight role of parliament? What approach do parliaments apply in assessing the implementation and impact of legislation? These are the fascinating questions guiding this book. Case studies offer an in-depth look at how particular countries and the European Union conduct Post-Legislative Scrutiny. The analysis puts Post-Legislative Scrutiny in the context of parliamentary oversight and parliaments’ engagement in the legislative cycle. The purpose of this book is to demonstrate the value of Post-Legislative Scrutiny as a public good, benefiting the executive, legislature and the people in ensuring that law delivers what is expected of it, as well as to respond to the need for greater clarity as to what is meant by the term. In this way, the publication can assist legislatures to think more clearly as to what precisely they understand, and seek to achieve, by Post-Legislative Scrutiny. This book is the result of the co-operation between the Centre for Legislative Studies at the University of Hull and the Westminster Foundation for Democracy. The chapters were originally published as a special issue of The Journal of Legislative Studies.

The Principles of Gender-Sensitive Parliaments
The Principles of Gender-Sensitive Parliaments

Author: Lena Wängnerud

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-04-10

Total Pages: 175

ISBN-13: 1317623053

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Gender serves as a lens that makes visible important issues in the field of representation: Whom do elected politicians represent? What is at stake in the parliamentary process? What do we know about the interplay between parliaments and the everyday lives of citizens? It is widely understood that women’s presence in government matters but we need to understand the conditions under which it matters more clearly. Using Sweden as a case study, a country where the number of women elected to the national parliament has steadily risen since the 1970s, Lena Wängnerud presents a novel approach on which characteristics inside a parliament help translate physical representation into substantive representation for women. Using three guiding principles: (i) the implementation of equal opportunities for women and men to influence internal parliamentary working procedures; (ii) the creation of room for women’s interests and concerns on the political agenda; and (iii) the production of gender-sensitive legislation, Wängnerud shows what are the necessary conditions for women’s needs, interests, and concerns to be adequately integrated into parliamentary processes. The Principles of Gender-Sensitive Parliaments book adds fuel to all these classical debates within the field of political representation and will bring attention to a wider audience on why electing women matters.

The Anthropology of Parliaments
The Anthropology of Parliaments

Author: Emma Crewe

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-05-13

Total Pages: 187

ISBN-13: 1000182312

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The Anthropology of Parliaments offers a fresh, comparative approach to analysing parliaments and democratic politics, drawing together rare ethnographic work by anthropologists and politics scholars from around the world. Crewe’s insights deepen our understanding of the complexity of political institutions. She reveals how elected politicians navigate relationships by forging alliances and thwarting opponents; how parliamentary buildings are constructed as sites of work, debate and the nation in miniature; and how politicians and officials engage with hierarchies, continuity and change. This book also proposes how to study parliaments through an anthropological lens while in conversation with other disciplines. The dive into ethnographies from across Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and the Pacific Region demolishes hackneyed geo-political categories and culminates in a new comparative theory about the contradictions in everyday political work. This important book will be of interest to anyone studying parliaments but especially those in the disciplines of anthropology and sociology; politics, legal and development studies; and international relations.

When Parliaments Ruled the Middle East
When Parliaments Ruled the Middle East

Author: Matthieu Rey

Publisher: American University in Cairo Press

Published: 2022-02-02

Total Pages: 184

ISBN-13: 1649031173

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An essential study of parliamentary politics in postwar Iraq and Syria, before the consolidation of authoritarian rule under the Ba’th Party When Parliaments Ruled the Middle East explores three main interrelated issues to clarify what happened between 1946 and 1963 in Iraq and Syria: how and why a parliamentary system prevailed in both countries in the aftermath of the Second World War; what social effects this system triggered, and, in turn, how these changes affected the system; and finally, why the elites in both countries were unable to overcome the unrest that brought an end to both a liberal era and to a certain kind of political game. Drawing on a vast array of sources and rich archival research in French, English, and Arabic, Matthieu Rey highlights the processes of the parliamentary system in the modern era, which are very common to post-independence countries and to any representative regime. He tackles the intersection of multifaceted political phenomena that were present in that moment in Iraq and Syria, including regular elections, the implementation of emergency law, the freedom of the press, the open expression of opinions, the formation of new political parties, frequent military coups, and the joint exercise of power by members of the old classes and reformist newcomers. Treating this period as neither an epilogue of the liberal order nor a prelude to authoritarianism, and stressing the contingent, improvisatory aspects of political history, Rey fundamentally questions the transitional nature of the period and in doing so proposes new ways and tools of examining it.