Benchmarking and Self-Assessment for Parliaments
Benchmarking and Self-Assessment for Parliaments

Author: Mitchell O'Brien

Publisher: World Bank Publications

Published: 2016-03-28

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 1464803285

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With international focus on good governance and parliamentary effectiveness, a standards-based approach involving benchmarks and assessment frameworks has emerged to evaluate parliament's performance and guide its reforms. The World Bank's has been a leader in the development of these frameworks, stewarding a global multi-stakeholder process aimed at enhancing consensus around parliamentary benchmarks and indicators with international organizations and parliaments across the world. The results so far, some of which are captured in this book, are encouraging: countries as diverse as Australia, Canada, Ghana, Sri Lanka, Tanzania and Zambia have used these frameworks for self-evaluation and to guide efficiency-driven reforms. Donors and practitioners, too, are finding the benchmarks useful as baselines against which they can assess the impact of their parliamentary strengthening programs. The World Bank itself is using these frameworks to surface the root causes of performance problems and explore how to engage with parliamentary institutions in order to achieve better results. The World Bank can identify opportunities to help improve the oversight function of parliament, thus holding governments to account, giving 'voice' to the poor and disenfranchised, and improving public policy formation in order to achieve a nation's development goals. In doing so, we are helping make parliaments themselves more accountable to citizens and more trusted by the public.

Parliamentary Oversight of the Executives
Parliamentary Oversight of the Executives

Author: Elena Griglio

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2020-10-01

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 1509925708

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Oversight of executives has always been a key function of parliaments and one that is central to developing the relationship between the executive and legislative branches of government. However, in reality governments are taking a more pronounced role in controlling legislation, diluting the influence of parliament. This book plots this trend in parliaments across Europe, to illustrate points of convergence and divergence. In so doing, it suggest tools and methods that parliaments can develop to bolster their crucial oversight role.

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

Author: Franklin de Vrieze

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-12-30

Total Pages: 150

ISBN-13: 100032625X

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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 Routledge Handbook of Parliamentary Administrations
The Routledge Handbook of Parliamentary Administrations

Author: Thomas Christiansen

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-05-31

Total Pages: 1072

ISBN-13: 1000843920

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The Routledge Handbook of Parliamentary Administrations brings together an international, multidisciplinary group of contributors providing a systematic and comprehensive analysis of parliamentary administrations. Including chapters on the administrations of national parliaments in every member state of the European Union, in most of the EU candidate countries and in key liberal democracies around the world, this book represents a uniquely broad-ranging resource. Each national system is treated in a consistent manner, with authors providing relevant facts, figures and critical analysis according to a common framework. Additionally, it provides coverage of transnational parliamentary administrations in different regions around the globe and includes a number of cross-cutting chapters, addressing key issues of relevance for a better understanding of parliamentary administrations such as the potential for politicisation, professionalisation, digitalisation or Europeanisation with the comparative analysis of different national experiences. This handbook will enable readers to better comprehend the role and influence of parliamentary administrations and in doing so will enhance our understanding of their importance for the effective functioning of representative democracy more generally. The Routledge Handbook of Parliamentary Administrations constitutes a unique tool and prime reference for any researcher, scholar or practitioner working in the area of parliamentary and legislative studies, governance, democracy, public policy and administration, as well as more widely to European studies, general political science and comparative politics.

Development Aid in Stable Democracies and Fragile States
Development Aid in Stable Democracies and Fragile States

Author: A. H. Monjurul Kabir

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-07-21

Total Pages: 251

ISBN-13: 3319921746

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This book is based on experience and reflections related to international support provided to parliaments and legislative bodies both in selected countries (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Ghana, Serbia, and Kyrgyzstan) and globally. The author intends to provide a critique of parliamentary support, as part of development assistance or foreign aid, for having been conceived in narrow terms of technical assistance and for failing to appreciate that aid effectiveness calls for a sound understanding of a country’s politics, culture, and history. The monograph examines the effectiveness of aid in both stable democracies, and fragile and transition countries. The project is ideal for audiences interested in regional politics, the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, Central Asia, and development/democracy studies.

Digital Political Communication Strategies
Digital Political Communication Strategies

Author: Berta García-Orosa

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-11-25

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 3030815684

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This book, with a foreword by Manuel Castells, explores the core strategies of digital political communication. It reviews the field’s evolution over the past 25 years and examines the coexistence of old and new actors (lobbyists, citizens, parliaments, political parties, media outlets, digital platforms, among others), as well as hybrid communication tactics. Topics covered include frames, fake news, filter bubbles, echo chambers, artificial intelligence, the significance of emotions, and engagement with citizens. As we find ourselves in the fourth wave of digital communication, and in the wake of a pandemic which has shaken the foundations of political communication, an evaluation of these topics is essential to the reinvention of democracy. The book is geared towards students and researchers who wish to delve into the latest trends in digital communication, political communication actors and journalists. It further aims to prepare citizens to effectively deal with messaging that blurs the line between truth and falsehood with increasingly powerful strategies supported by artificial intelligence.

Enhanced Parliamentary Oversight
Enhanced Parliamentary Oversight

Author: Frederick Stapenhurst

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-07-24

Total Pages: 150

ISBN-13: 1000915425

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Very little research has been conducted on how parliamentary oversight is undertaken in small countries and jurisdictions or across the southern African region (excluding South Africa). This groundbreaking book fills that void, providing rich insights into how oversight works in these countries. Featuring an expert group of scholars and practitioners, the book builds off previous research projects to offer detailed case study examinations of oversight across various global regions, including various Australian and Canadian jurisdictions, UK Crown and Overseas dependencies, Caribbean islands, autonomous Nordic territories, Southern Africa and several Pacific island states. Contributors present the most recent data on current developments in the world, including sub-national parliaments, drawing on primary research and first-hand experiences to offer greater theoretical and practical understanding into practices that could be adapted to improve oversight and governance, reduce corruption and boost economic development. Enhanced Parliamentary Oversight will be an important book for practitioners, governments and both scholars and students of legislative studies, international relations and public administration.

The Voice of the People?
The Voice of the People?

Author: Wim Blockmans

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-01-31

Total Pages: 441

ISBN-13: 1003830102

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Over the last two centuries, Europe has developed various forms of political representation from which democratic parliamentary systems gradually emerged. This book unravels the conditions, scale and impact under which political participation of common burghers and peasants emerged. Political participation in Europe before the Revolutions moved away from the traditional focus on ‘Three Estates’ which has often blurred the interpretation of popular participation’s role in societies. This book instead examines Europe’s key political variants such as high levels of commercialization and urbanization, combined with a balance of powers between competing categories of actors in society controlling relatively independent resources which lead to political participation forming across the continent. Instead of starting from any ideal type of political participation, this book focuses on the variation through time and space, its composition and activity, helps to explain the functions particular institutional settings fulfilled. The time frame 1100–1800 sheds light on the long-term evolutions such as institutional inertia and processes of oligarchizing. To reveal a correlation of economic and demographical growth with the claim of rising social classes to voice their interests. It also points to the opposite tendency: the formation of fiscalmilitary monarchical states. This book is essential reading for those interested in the formation of Europe’s political structures and students of premodern political history.