The Eclipse Of Parliament

This original and stimulating account offers the first major reassessment of twentieth-century British political history. It provides a lively and perceptive study of government and politics from Asquith to Major and a means of understanding key developments in party politics, parliament, cabinet government, the civil service, and the wider political arena.

The notion of 'representative democracy' seems unquestionably familiar today, but how did the Victorians understand democracy, parliamentary representation, and diversity?

Currently, parliament as a political institution does not enjoy the best reputation. This book aims to recover less known political resources of the parliamentary mode of proceeding. The parliamentary procedure relies on regulating debates in a fair way and on constructing opposed perspectives on the agenda items. The British House of Commons provides the closest historical approximation for the parliamentary ideal type of politics. This book deals with the formation and conceptual change in the Westminster procedure, based on the way they are interpreted in the tracts on procedure. The tracts illustrate the changing parliamentary self-understanding from the 1570s to the present and the growing political role of procedural disputes. The parliamentary style of politics, as discussed in the tracts, can be divided into two genres: the politics of agenda-setting and the politics of debate. The book analyses their formation and overall conceptual change as well as the procedural responses to the increasingly scarce parliamentary time from the period after the 1832 parliamentary reform. It insists that in spite of claims on urgency and on government’s leadership the procedural resources of the House of Commons contribute to maintaining the debate-centred parliamentary style of politics.

There is a great difficulty in the way of a writer who attempts to sketch a living Constitution-a Constitution that is in actual work and power. The difficulty is that the object is in constant change. An historical writer does not feel this difficulty: he deals only with the past; he can say definitely, the Constitution worked in such and such a manner in the year at which he begins, and in a manner in such and such respects different in the year at which he ends; he begins with a definite point of time and ends with one also. But a contemporary writer who tries to paint what is before him is puzzled and a perplexed: what he sees is changing daily. He must paint it as it stood at some one time, or else he will be putting side by side in his representations things which never were contemporaneous in reality.

Has there ever been a period in modern history when democratic politics seemed more unpredictable or unruly? In the face of a set of global challenges almost beyond control or comprehension, the old rules by which politics were once both ordered and understood have waned. Very few voices exist to help us comprehend these challenges--commentators who can run the gamut from democracy to disgust, from the micro to the macro, and from love to loathing. And yet this is exactly what Matt Flinders delivers in this book, expertly ranging across topics as diverse as architecture, art, mountain running, and fairy tales in his attempt to understand the emerging democratic landscape. Refreshing and stimulating, What Kind of Democracy Is This? is an engagingly written melding of political scholarship and popular culture that both informs and provokes.

The Canadian Senate in Bicameral Perspective is the first book-length scholarly study of the Senate in over a quarter century and the first such analysis of the upper house as one chamber of a bicameral legislature. David E. Smith's aim is to demonstrate the inter-relationship of the two chambers and the constraint this poses for Senate reform. He analyzes past literature on the Senate and current proposals for reform such as Triple-E Senate drawing detailed comparisons between Canada's upper chamber and the upper chambers of Australia, the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom. There is a revival of interest and literature abroad in upper chambers and also in bicameralism. Using Parliamentary debates and committee reports, as well as a broad reading of comparative literature, The Canadian Senate in Bicameral Perspective sets the Canadian Senate into this international milieu, contextualizing the debate and arguing for a renewed investigation into its future.