IPSA WORLD CONGRESS
MADRID 8-12 JULY 2012 RC 33 THE STUDY OF POLITICAL SCIENCE AS A DISCIPLINE PANEL THE FRAGMENTATION OF POLITICAL SCIENCE AS A DISCIPLINE
On the Fate of Parliamentary Studies in European Political Science: The post-war decline of intra-parliamentary topics in Britain and Sweden [draft, language not corrected]
Kari Palonen
Academy of Finland Professor
FI-40014 University of Jyväskylä, Finland
E-mail: [email protected]
ABSTRACT (September 2011)
Parliamentary politics was a core topic in the debates on political theory in the first half of twentieth century in different countries and independent of the disciplinary or academic background of scholars. Also for political science professors of the period, such as Harold J. Laski, Ernst Barker, Ivor Jennings, Karl Löwenstein, Ernst Fraenkel or Axel Brusewitz and his school the debates on the parliamentarism in general, and the questions of internal parliamentary practices were at the core of their scholarly agenda. After ca. 1960 the parliament seems to lose its central position and the fragmentation of studies is visible. Even the British journal Parliamentary Affairs turns in the course of 1960s from internal questions of parliament to electoral and partisan politics. The assumption behind this shift seems to be that the electoral results and the formation of government through negotiations between parties are more important than intra-parliamentary politics. This shift is not due to any general “crisis of parliamentarism”. In the paper I discuss two alternative interpretations of the shift, the one is the “party state” theory of parliamentarism advocated by Gerhard Leibholz, the other is US dependence of political science with a by-product a disinterest in the intra-parliamentary politics in the European sense. At the end the recovery of parliamentary studies since 1990s will be shortly discussed.
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The autobiographical background
Around 2003 I have added a parliamentary dimension to my academic profile. Quentin
Skinner’s ideas of renaissance rhetorical culture (1996), Reinhart Koselleck’s
temporalisation of concepts (1979, 2000) and attention to the link between Weber’s re-
thinking of the concept “objectivity” and his demands for the parliamentary control of
expert knowledge (Weber 1904, 1918) were behind this new interest (see Palonen 2004
and now Palonen 2010 in particular).
The origins of this paper can be traced to autumn 2006, when I was in Warburg-Haus in
Hamburg. I wanted learn the state of art in established parliamentary studies and went
through the contents of the British journals Political Quarterly (founded in 1930) and
Parliamentary Affairs (founded in 1947). In the first decades of both I found in a lot of
interest for studies on political theory of parliamentarism, on parliamentary government as
well as on parliamentary rhetoric and procedure. Since the 1960s intra-parliamentary
studies were more or less completely replaced by those on elections, parties and policy
issues, much less interesting from my point of view.
This strange disappearance of the intra-parliamentary politics from parliamentary studies,
in Britain and in other European parliamentary regimes is something worth discussing. My
initial guess was that this refers to trends in political science, in particular the emphasis of
the discipline to become more ”scientific”, but also other grounds might be imagined. This
was the basis for writing the Abstract for this paper.
In the present paper I shall depart from the prominence of parliamentary topics in the
study of politics on the first half of the twentieth century in two countries, Britain and
Sweden. For both a comparison of longer trends on the basis of the journal articles is
easily available. My discussion limits to their tables of content, to overview commentaries
or to short analyses of some of the articles. To discuss what is not thematised there is as
important point as what there is.
After World War I parliamentary studies were at the core of interest in writings about
politics. In Sweden they were closely connected to an already well-established academic
political science, which had a much weaker position in Britain. Implicit in both countries
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was a ”parliamentary theory of politics”, as a condition of advanced contemporary form of
politics as such. But what was “parliamentary”, was already controversial.
For discussing the study on the post-war continuation and relative decline in parliamentary
studies in the 1950s and 1960s I focus on the journals, Political Quarterly, Parliamentary
Affairs and Statsvetenskaplig tidskrift. Here I deviate from my initial ‘hypotheses’ by
noticing that the growring disinterest in parliamentary studies has a different profile and
calendar in Sweden and Britain.
When moving to speculate with reasons for the decline of the intra-parliamentary topics
from the political science agenda, I focus on the academic political science, although not
necessarily the most interesting reasons can be found there. However, what is remarkable
is that the growing academic disinterest was not due to any ‘crisis of parliamentarism’. On
the contrary, the two post-war decades illustrated a remarkable revival of parliamentary
government in Western Europe, except perhaps in France, but in my British and Swedish
sources this success was not linked to any active re-thinking of its principles either in
parliamentary studies or in political theorising in a broader, non-disciplinary sense.
In the final section I shall shortly discuss the recovery of parliamentary politics and
parliamentary studies during the recent decades, although largely outside the province of
political science. The ”rhetorical turn” (Rorty) has been slow to reach parliamentary
studies, but signs of that are in different fields.
Parliament at the core of the study of politics
Parliamentary studies were a central scholarly topic on the first half of twentieth century
Western Europe, although – I must say: of course – no history of parliamentary studies or
of the political theory of parliamentarism exist. For this perhaps the most obvious reason is
that parliament is no a priori construction, but rather a name for practices, conventions and
rules formed by political agents disputing with each other, who only slowly became
conscious of having to do with a new and distinctive type of acting politically.
In the literature on parliamentary government some ”classics” have been canonised:
Burke, Sieyès, Constant, Bentham, J.S. Mill, Bagehot in particular. Specialists could speak
also of Hatsell, Erskine May, (Henry Geoge) Grey, Chateubriand, Guizot, Duvergier de
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Hauranne, Mazzini, Mohl, Maitland or Dicey, perhaps on (William Gerard) Hamilton or
Cormenin. Also enemies of parliamentarism such as Carlyle, Donoso Cortes or Bucher
might be remembered, or they might remark that it was Victor Hugo, who adopted for
himself the term parlementarisme, coined by Louis Bonaparte for the purpose of
denunciation (Hugo 1852, 273-278). Of course, none of them were professors of political
science in the disciplinary sense.
In the twentieth century the theorising on parliamentarism has become academic but has
not necessarily taken place in political science. For example in Germany and Austria most
academics who wrote on parliamentarism in the Wilhelmine or Weimar era as well as in
the early Federal Republic were originally jurists. They include Georg Jellinek, Josef
Redlich, Max Weber, Hugo Preuß, Carl Schmitt, Rudolf Smend, Hans Kelsen, Richard
Thoma, Leo Wittmayer, Hermann Heller, Gerhard Leibholz, Ernst Fraenkel, Franz
Neumann and even younger scholars such as Wilhelm Hennis, although the three last
mentioned were political science professors in West Germany.
In Britain after World War I we can detect a shift of the catchword from ”parliamentary
government” to ”parliamentary democracy”. Although the older parliaments remained on
the agenda, the emphasis on the studies was on the parliaments after the realisation of
universal suffrage.
In this phase an institutionalisation of political science at the LSE and in Cambridge took
its first steps. Harold J. Laski and Ernst Barker got a Political Science chair already in the
1920s, whereas the author of the standard work Parliament, Ivor Jennings, was during the
war sent to found a university in Ceylon. Laski and Jennings were jurists, Barker a
philosopher by training. After World War II parliamentary scholars, such as R.B. Bassett or
Bernard Crick were already teaching political science, and parliamentary topics remained
prominent in the understanding of politics also for example for Michael Oakeshott, who
followed Laski in the LSE chair after his death in 1950 (on Oakeshott’s links to
parliamentary studies and differences to Laski see Soininen 2005 and 2008).
In the 1920s and 1930s the confrontation of parliamentary democracies with ”dictatorial”
tendencies was a major topic (see for example Llanque 2008). The parliamentary regime
was challenged even in Britain, by the former Labour politician Oswald Mosley and his
“New Party” in particular. Laski in Parliamentary Government of England was skeptical
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over the ”marriage between capitalism and democracy” (Laski 1938, 68) and saw socio-
economic reforms as a condition of a functioning parliamentary democracy that would not
be ”transformed into an organ of the registration of the will of the Cabinet” (ibid, 34).
Nonetheless, for Laski such a tendency ”is not a consequence of any inherent defect of
the system itself,” but he believed in the debating and discussing powers of the Parliament
as such (ibid.). He concluded: ”Parliamentary government, to retain its hold, must give the
promises of great results” (ibid, 35).
Swedish colleagues still sometimes boast that the Skytte professorship for Politices
eloquentiae, founded in 1622, would be the ”world eldest political science chair”. In fact, it
was for some 150 years rather a chair in Latin, but W.E. Swedelius in mid-nineteenth
century it turned into a chair of constitutional history of politics. With conservative MP
Rudolf Kjéllén (professor skytteanus 1915-1922) the chair got a geopolitical orientation. He
was followed by Axel Brusewitz (1881-1950, professor skytteanus 1923-1947), who broke
with everything Kjellén had stood for, politically and academically. Swedish constitutional
history still remained crucial for him, and parliamentary studies were also practised in the
Lund, Göteborg and later in Stockholm political science (statskunskap) chairs in as well as
in law and history. Uppsala under Brusewitz turned into a centre of parliamentary studies,
especially serving as a basis for numerous dissertations from the 1920s to 1940s.
From his inaugural lecture onwards Brusewitz with his typological perspective opted for a
research programme around the parliamentary government (Brusewitz 1923). He
discussed its alternatives and conducted comparative studies on the constitutional history
of parliamentary practices in different countries or in relation to different aspect of
parliamentary politics. Brusewitz sketched in Uppsala a real political science research
agenda for parliamentary studies. Besides numerous studies on Sweden it included
dissertations on Germany (Arrhén 1929), Finland (Lindman 1937, defended in Åbo
Akademi in Finland), France (Simonsson 1938), Norway (Björnberg 1939), Austria
(Skottsberg 1940) and Britain (N. Andrén 1947). Swedish parliamentary studies from
1920s to 1950s from the perspective of international debates on parliamentarism would
deserve closer study (for some aspects see Kurunmäki 2010 and Brandt 2008, 166-168).
In the research agenda of Uppsala parliamentary studies the point of departure is the
definition of the government’s responsibility to the parliament, in the minimum sense of the
absence of the stated non-confidence (Brusewitz 1929, 324-325). It includes comparative
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studies on different parliaments and comparisons between the ways of parliamentarisation
and democratisation. Brusewitz and his students tacitly assumed the parliamentary
democracy as a paradigm for the advanced political cultures. The pure typological
alternatives are complemented with the discussion of mixed cases such the Weimar
Germany or Finland with attempts to combine parliamentarism with presidential elements,
or Poland under Pilsudski attempting something that Brusewitz calls ”parliamentary
dictatorship” (Brusewitz 1928a, 1930). The successful parliamentary regimes in Western
Europe were also presented as those that managed to avoid the challenge of totalitarian
and authoritarian regimes – in most cases by creating a stronger executive power and
admitting the parliamentary initiative to the government.
Brusewitz and his students held the British type of parliamentary government with the
Bagehotian ”monistic” lines superior to the ”dualistic” theories à la Robert Redslob. The
dualist theories left a grey area between parliamentary and presidential powers, for
example in the Weimar Constitution. The efficiency of the parliamentary government was
implicitly set in opposition to the more ”deliberative” parliamentarism of mid-nineteenth
century Britain and the French Third Republic with their governmental instability.
Parliamentary studies in the journals
To get a rapid overview on the status of parliamentary studies, on the trends and fashions
among them or within the discipline in relation to them, I take a closer look at journals. My
concentration on the journals has nothing to do with the questionable present-day fashion
to regard journal articles as the main product of scholarship. This is a partisan project in
favour of the established journals over new one and of the mightiest province, the
Anglophone one, over all others. For me the journal articles are by-products of major
monograph projects, usually written on demand for some conferences or other occasions.
Statsvetenskaplig tidskrift and the Political Quarterly and Parliamentary Affairs are thus all
journals, in which parliamentary studies once played a prominent role. For all of them I
was able to find online the content of the issues and could also download articles. My uses
of these journals here is just illustrative: the titles and authors already allows us to date the
rise of new trends and the vanishing of old ones, without any deeper study of the content
and quality of the studies. The following analysis indicates the decline of the parliamentary
studies within the academic province of political science. Of course, the authors writing in
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these journals contained also other scholars, such as jurists and historians, as well as
journalists, politicians and parliamentary officials, engaged in parliamentary studies or
commenting current parliamentary phenomena.
Of course, the illustration of academic trends and fashions should be complemented by
detailed and substantial studies on the topics and of the period. My general point for using
the vocabulary of trends and fashions is to emphasise that also in the disciplinary histories
we should get rid of the narratives of ‘progress’. The rather sudden and groundless decline
of previously successful and interesting research practices also offers us an example of
the topic of this workshop, the fragmentation of political science.
Statsvetenskaplig tidskrift
The journal Statsvetenskaplig tidskrift was founded in 1897 and it is, after Political Science
Quarterly, the second-oldest ”political science journal” that continues its publication. In the
early years the journal had, like the most of the political scientists (statsvetare in Swedish)
a conservative bias against democratisation and parliamentarisation of Swedish politics.
The replacement of Kjellén by Brusewitz marks a turn of the tide also in the journal.
Brusewitz’s article from 1929 ”Vad menas med parlamentarismen? Ett försök till en
typologisk bestämning” [What is meant by parliamentarism. An attempt to a typological
determination], is a programmatic piece on the concept with implications for parliamentary
scholarship in Statsvetenskaplig tidskrift. His other studies and reviews also concentrate
on the typological discussion of political regimes in their relation to parliamentary politics in
different countries (Brusewitz 1928a,b,c, 1930,1937). The Lund professor Fredrik
Lagerroth, a great defender of the parliamentary powers of the Swedish estates in the
”Age of Liberty” (1718-1772), as well as the Göteborg professor Georg Andrén also
inspired parliamentary studies for their students.
The journal includes authors and reviewers from Denmark, Finland and Norway (see the
special issue 4/5, 1930 on parliamentarism in the four Nordic countries), occasionally also
translations from foreign authors, such as Hans Kelsen or Gerhard Leibholz. Besides
academic articles it published overviews on constitutional and parliamentary trends and
developments in different countries and book reviews, including books written in English,
German, French and Finnish. The overall profile of the journal was not bound to the
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discipline but – in accordance with the older Swedish concept of stat – the border was
relative to constitutional history and constitutional law, international relations and
international law, including the League of Nations, history of political thought as well as
more empirical studies in law, history, administration, finances and social sciences.
The Brusewitzian view (see also G. Andrén 1932) regards parliamentarism as a definite
type of political regime in opposition to others – absolute and constitutional monarchy,
presidentialism, semi-plebiscitarianism, dictatorship – with mixed forms possible. What
matters are the constitution and the party constellation in the parliament, and the divide
between majority and minority parliamentarism was a major topic in Nordic countries.
Missing are for example studies on the parliamentary control of the administration, which
remains prominent in the British studies and was strongly advocated in Max Weber’s
parliament pamphlet (see esp. Weber 1918, 235-248).
Equally missing is the interest in what the parliamentarians are doing, their speeches,
motions or legislative initiatives. Neither the parliamentary procedure for deliberation and
debate nor the rhetorical styles and practices of the parliamentary debate plays any role in
the Brusewitzian system or regime paradigm of parliamentarism. Nils Andrén’s review
article on the recent literature on the British parliament is the only exception. He deals with
the history of procedural tracts from Hakewill’s and Scobell’s seventeenth-century tracts
via John Hatsell and Thomas Erskine May to Gilbert Campion’s radical re-edition of May’s
Parliamentary Practice (first edition 1844) and the second edition of Campion’s own
Introduction to Parliamentary Procedure (N. Andrén 1949, esp. 265-271). Maybe Andrén
tacitly juxtaposes the narrow Swedish interpretation of parliamentarism as a type of regime
and the broader British understanding of the Parliament as a deliberative assembly and
the parliamentary government as a part of more comprehensive rhetorical culture debating
pro et contra. Laski’s above quoted worry about the fate of British parliamentary
government clearly includes this dimension. Perhaps Andrén’s contribution signals the end
of the Brusewitzian approach, which he followed in his study of the British acceptance of
the parliamentary government in the 1830s (N. Andrén 1947).
The Swedish bicameralism was a regular subject to reform proposals and remained a key
topic in Statsvetenskaplig tidskrift the 1950s and 1960s. Otherwise we can note a
remarkable decline of parliamentary themes after Brusewitz’s retirement and death. The
lack of comparative studies on the post-war recovery of West European parliamentarism
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marks the contrast to the inter-war profile of the journal. Party and election studies and the
US type of political science methodologies enter to the journal. However, the old domestic
tradition of political science resisted the enthusiasm for new fashions. Olle Nyman in
Parlamentarisk regeringssätt (1981) in a sense follows the Brusewitzian agenda by
offering an overview on Swedish parliamentarism, discusses competing definitions for the
regime type and presents the constitutional reform proposal from 1960s and 1970s.
Political Quarterly
The journal Political Quarterly was founded by Leonard Woolf in 1930. Its initial profile was
between an academic journal and a broad political periodical, similarly to the Edinburgh
Review or Westminster Review that had terminated their publication. Political science
professors, including Harold Laski, George Catlin, Carl J. Friedrich and most actively Ivor
Jennings, contributed to the Political Quarterly.
Parliamentary themes were prominent in the first decade of Political Quarterly. Unlike in
Sweden, in Britain the internal procedure and agenda questions are regularly discussed in
debates on the Parliament. The journalist Herbert Sidebothan in ”The Inefficiency of the
Parliament” evokes a common mood of time on the ”declining prestige of the Parliament”
(Sidebothan 1930, 351). While admitting that ”Parliament does not govern”, he insists on:
”For the proper discharge of its duties that Parliament must be independent of the
Government” (ibid, 352), and he demands an end to the government’s right to dissolve the
Parliament (ibid, 354), and links this reform to the Parliament’s procedure and agenda.
M.P. Walter Elliot (1930), however, in his reply defends the Parliament’ dependence on
the electorate. Following European trends to strengthen the executive powers, the ”New
Party” supporters J. Stratchey and C.M. Joad strongly want to transfer the legislative
initiative and the leadership of the parliamentary agenda to the government. ”Our
proposals are inspired throughout by the conviction that when a Government has been
elected, it should be permitted to govern” (Stratchey & Joad 1931, 356). For such views
the Parliament is no a deliberative assembly.
Ramsay MacDonald’s new ”National Government” provoked angry responses from
Jennings and Laski. In ”The Constitution under Strain” (1932) Jennings discusses the
powers of the Prime Minister to dissolve the Parliament independently of his position of
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party leader. He turns against Laski’s support of such interpretation (Jennings 1932, 196-
199) and parodies the new government’s relationship to the Parliament: ”from the point of
view of governments, Parliamentary debate is a waste of time” or even ”unbusinesslike”:
”Parliament is merely a nuisance” (ibid, 201). As contrast to such theses, Jennings insists:
”Parliamentary debate is valuable for the very reasons why it is obnoxious to governments.
It compels ministers to formulate reasons for their acts; it insists upon the examination of
motives; it makes government public and hinders if it does not prevent corruption.” (ibid.)
The Parliament’s ”power to criticise openly is the only method of securing the purity of
administration” (ibid, 202). Such insistence on the debate and the control of government
through it as the key elements of parliamentary politics are completely absent from the
agenda of Swedish parliamentary studies.
Laski puts the main emphasis on the value of the opposition and party conflict. The
National Government’s stress on the unity leads to a view that ”opposition to the
government is a crime, and party spirit a threat to well-being” (Laski 1934, 21). He
parodies the ”new, ‘scientific’ approach” to politics in favour of ”co-operation instead of
conflict”, for which the ”old function of opposition is obsolete” (ibid, 23). If the government
secures its own electoral majority, it tends to ”deprive the proceedings of the House of
Commons all reality and effectiveness” (ibid, 25). The contempt of debate in the name of
the huge parliamentary majority also tends to lead to ”scepticism of parliamentary
institutions” (ibid, 25-26).
Jennings four-part essay ”Parliament in wartime” (from April 1940 to January 1941) is,
despite its chronicle style, written in the course of events, of general interest for
parliamentary scholars. If we compare it with Fabienne Bock’s recent study Un
parlementarisme de guerre 1914-1919 (2002), some differences of the exemplary role of
the Parliament in British political culture, as compared with the seemingly omnipotent
Assemblée nationale of the Third Republic, become obvious. Bock insists for example that
the Assembly was not summoned from August 1914 to January 1915 and obliged its
members under conscription to military service, instead to the parliament.
Jennings’s first essay refers to the early months of the war, when Britain was only
marginally involved in the battles. He concluded: ”Parliament has performed its critical
function extremely well. There has been no suppression of opinion; indeed, when
questions war policy and war aims were under discussion the solitary Communist member
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was given more opportunity than anyone to put his point of view.” (Jennings 1940a, 193)
The failed British invasions to resist the Nazi occupation of Norway changed the situation.
With the vote of confidence on the 8th of May 1940 with 281 to 200, ”Mr. Chamberlain had
won, but he had also lost” (Jennings 1940b, 238). Labour Party joined the coalition
government under Churchill. Jennings makes an interesting remark on a major
Westminster principle, namely ”that if there was no an Opposition there was nevertheless
a ‘shadow opposition’ prepared to act for the purposes of parliamentary procedure” (ibid,
246). Instead of adapting the parliamentary procedure to the government without a real
opposition, the Westminster Parliament maintained its procedure as a methodological
principle to enable debating all items pro et contra, although in personal terms no
opposition worth the name was found in the House of Commons.
The regular meeting of the Parliament, its control of the government’s and administration
emergency measures etc. illustrate for Jennings that ”British democracy is far from being a
temporary dictatorship” (Jennings 1940c, 353). For him ”the parliamentary control of
ministers arises not from their fear of defeat but from their anxiety to maintain and increase
their popularity” (ibid, 354). After the fall of France in June 1940, the House of Commons
continued to defend civil liberties against emergency powers (ibid, 357-359). However,
Jennings blames the House for ”the strange and unconstitutional idea that representative
government can be carried on by secret session” (ibid, 363), as opposed to the principle of
publicity, as classically advocated in Jeremy Bentham’s Essay in Political Tactics (see
Bentham 1843). In his last article Jennings admitted that in the wartime Parliament ”there
have been no ‘politics’. The debates are no longer an oratorical contest between opposing
groups” (Jennings 1941, 55), and he blames the tendency to reduce the Parliament into an
information office: ”The purpose of the Parliament is to give not news but views” (ibid, 62).
Due to the secret sessions the House of Commons tended to lose its initiating and
focusing role in the public debate in the British political culture (ibid, 65).
In the post-war decades Political Quarterly soon lost its academic quality to the new
Parliamentary Affairs (1947) and Political Studies (1951). Occasionally scholarly articles
on parliamentary topics were still published. R.B. Bassett discusses in ”British
parliamentary government today” the volume of Campion and others, Parliament. A survey
as well as the relationshop of the Labour Party to parliamentary government (Bassett
1951). Peter Bromhead’s ”How should Parliament be Reformed” (1958) gives an overview
of the Westminster reform committees’ work. An unsigned article ”Decline of the
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Parliament” from 1963, at the end of the Macmillan era, is the last that I have picked up
from Political Quarterly before noticing that it turns uninteresting for my purposes. The
thesis of the article is: ”The signs are that Parliament is in decline – losing in popular
esteem, losing in the degree of control it should exercise over the government, failing to
adapt itself to the complexity of the tasks the quickened tempo of modern life had thrust
upon it. For this it has chiefly itself to blame.” (Decline, 1963, 233) The article has
interesting suggestions, such as the full professionalism of parliamentarians, whereas in
matters of debate it seems that the ”modernist” tense of the author has lost the point.
Parliamentary Affairs
The Parliamentary Affairs was founded by the Hansard Society, which also publishes the
debates of the Westminster Parliament. Its creation marks an academisation of research
by retaining the paradigmatic status of Westminster. ”Parliamentary”, not ”legislative” or
”representative” problematics in its title is a clear sign of this, although the British
Parliament is discussed in a comparative perspective (and a special issues of the US
congress was published in the issue 3:1, 1949). Still, Parliamentary Affairs it was not a
narrowly academic journal but for example parliamentary officials and parliamentarians
themselves were invited to contribute. For this journal I have both collected the tables of
content and discuss some articles that interest me.
The initial problematic of the journal follows close to the broader British concept of what is
”parliamentary”. The Clerk of the Parliament, Eric Taylor, present in a three-part article the
elementary concepts of parliamentary procedure and discusses their political uses (Taylor
1947, 1948a,b), and Thomas Lloyd Humberstone deals with the university representation,
that the Labour government was abolishing in Britain (Humberstone 1947, 1948a,b). The
legislative buildings and parliamentary library refer to topics not on the agenda of
Statsvetenskaplig tidskrift, probably not even the question of the payment of members.
The role of ”women in the legislature” also long time remained a non-question for the
Swedish colleagues, despite a few female members in the Riksdag since the early 1920s.
In the 1950s the intra-parliamentary themes as well as the general institutional and
constitutional questions of Westminster remain central in the journal. At the same time the
parliamentary institutions and practices in Commonwealth and other non-European
countries rise to the agenda of the journal, together with the voting and election topics as
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well as the parties separated from their parliamentary groups. Starting in the 1950s but
increasingly in the 1960s, we can identify questions of the ”Parliament and-X” type, the ”X”
referring to the press and other media, trade unions or other interest groups, civil service,
public enterprises or science and so on. Here ”Parliament” no longer stand as a procedural
model of politics, but is one ”power factor” among others, the relations of which are
analysed frequently with a social science modernisation paradigm. After mid-sixties the
procedural questions and intra-parliamentary concepts receive less and less attention,
although the never vanish completely from a journal still published by the Hansard Society.
As an example of the broader British type of parliamentary problematic we can mention
Gilbert Campion’s article ”European parliamentary procedure” (1953), based on the
volume that he co-edited for the Inter-Parliamentary Union. Campion presents a short and
useful comparison between the British and French type of parliamentary practices, the
latter serving also as a prototype for the most other continental parliaments. He discusses
topics such as the inclusion of cabinet ministers to parliament vs. their exclusion from it,
the government formation in two- and multi-party system, the parliamentary agenda-
setting and the committee systems in a manner that illustrates the continued relevance of
the two historical paradigms of parliament. The article can also be read as a warning
against too simple theorising or generalising about parliaments.
The parliamentary scholars frequently criticised, restricted or straightforwardly rejected the
thesis of the decline of parliament. J.G.S. Shearer’s review (1953) on G.W. Keeton’s book
The Passing of Parliament is a good example of this. The author argues from the insider
perspective and judges from Keeton’s thesis on the loss of the power to the ministerial
administration in Whitehall as exaggerated or even misunderstanding how the Parliament
exercises its power. A similar tone, although toward a different ”loss” of power can be seen
in David Mitrany’s article ”Parliamentary Democracy and Poll Democracy” (1955).
The sanctioning of the ”unparliamentary language and conduct” of members is a practice
known to the British parliamentary procedure since the early seventeenth-century. In
Westminster the context-dependence of unparliamentary expressions has always been
recognised. Commonwealth parliaments, however, have made lists unparliamentary
expressions, and they serve as the basis for the article ”Expressions in Parliament 1955”
collects allowed and disallowed expressions. The expressions include both everyday
words, such as ”liar” or ”dishonest” and metonymical disqualifications, such as ”mango
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diplomacy” or ”mimicking Molotov”, but no discussion of criteria for disallowing or
comparing different parliament’s degree of ”toleration” of them is included.
A more general comparison is included in Lionel Laing’s ”The Transplantation of the
Parliament” on the adoption of the Westminster parliamentary procedure abroad. Despite
some mechanical imitations, such as the use of the name ”Hansard”, the author concludes
that the parliamentary level is not lower in new parliaments: ”Conscious effort is made to
retain the sense of dignity which seems an inherent quality of parliamentary institutions
and nowhere is this conscious effort better exemplified than in those new countries where
British rule is giving way to autonomous legislatures” (Laing 1957, 407).
Articles on the reform of parliament are occasionally discussed in the fifties (Viseman
1958, 1959), sixties Hill & Wichelow 1965 and seventies (Walkland 1976). Perhaps more
interesting are two articles on parliamentary procedure, namely Richard A. Chapman’s
”The Significance of Parliamentary Procedure” (1962) and C.J. Boulton’s ”Recent
Developments in House of Commons Procedure” (1969). Chapman offers a pedagogical
reminder of the historical significance of the procedure as a background for the analysis of
the Parliament’s contemporary role that combines its services to the government to enable
and orderly organising of the parliamentary agenda and the protection of parliamentary
minorities against the arbitrary use of the majority rule. Boulton’s work is connected to the
committees on the procedural reform in the 1960s. The character and power of standing
and select committees, the financial procedure and the emergency debates as discussed
in the committees are presented without further questions of their parliamentary
significance in general. However, the nineteenth-century problematic of how to combine
the increased parliamentary power due to the growing agenda of items with the ever-
diminishing time to debate single items remains also here at the core of both papers.
Why was the parliament lost from political science?
As we can see from the abstract, I originally assumed two reasons for the decline of
parliaments in political science of the 1960s. The first is the professionalisation of political
science and the ambition to “apply theories” used in the neighbouring and allegedly more
advanced fields. In parliamentary studies the specific reason for the decline of intra-
parliamentary questions could perhaps refer to the quantitatively leading position of the US
15
political science in comparison to the European disciplines in the first post-war decades.
And the US Congress rather identifies itself as a ”legislature” than as a ”parliament”.
My second initial guess refers to the subordination of parliaments to parties and elections.
The German constitutional lawyer Gerhard Leibholz developed a theory of Parteienstaat,
supporting an interpretation of the West German 1949 Grundgesetz that gives to the
parliamentary parties an extraordinary position and marginalises the free mandate of
members (Leibholz 1951). The parties have played a decisive role in the continental multi-
party regimes in order to render a ”parliamentary diplomacy” to the formation of coalition
governments possible. In such situations the emphasis on the free mandate, intra-
parliamentary procedural regulations and rhetorical practices has declined.
Leibholz’s thesis does not play any role for the Swedish and British periodicals. The party
mandate of members and of the marginalisation of the their freedom are not on their
agenda. In a broader sense, nonetheless, we can speak of a metonymic identification of
politics with party politics for the entire post-war Western Europe. From this perspective
the parliament was judged as only one arena of party politics among others, which even
tended to be secondary to both election campaigns and party conferences. The Kautskyan
idea (1911) of the Social Democratic parliamentarian as the delegate of the party tempted
also the bourgeois parties, which built their electoral and organisational apparatus after
World War II, especially when, as in Sweden, the elections were organised along strict
party lists. To this trend corresponds also the rise of the parties to the core of the
international political science agenda in the 1950s and 1960s.
In countries with old parliamentary and parliament studies traditions, such as Sweden and
Britain, the scientistic pathos did not fully dominate in academic political science of the first
post-war decades. A specialist journal such as Parliamentary Affairs had also resources to
resist academic fashions: scientistic articles were there, but they neither gained hegemony
nor suppressed the other modes of discussing parliamentary politics in Britain. The point
was, rather, a disinterest or an inability to re-think the parliamentary politics from within.
Here a discrepancy between the Swedish and British parliamentary studies is obvious.
The Brusewitzian look at parliaments as a part of a regime typology was hardly continued
by his students and successors. It could also be speculated that the very post-war
recovery of parliamentary regimes in the face of the dictatorial threats, while the old
16
constitutionalist remnants vanished, made this constellation obsolete for Swedish
scholars, although the reform of the bi-cameral Riksdag still was on the Swedish political
and scholarly agenda. The Bagehotian (1867) momentum opposing presidential and
parliamentary regimes, which Brusewitz still followed, was equally de-thematised under
the recognition of the US ”leadership” of the western world.
Laski, Jennings and post-war British parliamentary studies discussed the late nineteenth-
century dilemma between the ideal of thorough deliberation and scarce parliamentary
time. The ”Parliament and-X” type of studies might have hoped to overcome this dilemma
by subordinating the parliament to a ‘broader’ political culture and to sociological
approaches for its analysis. In such a context the scarcity of time or the loss of the
possibilities to debate appeared as an inevitable part in the process of socio-cultural
”modernisation” of politics. It was less a scientistic theory of parliaments than the loss of
the insight into the paradigmatic singularity of the Parliament for the entire political culture
that made British scholars disinterested in parliamentary studies.
Ivor Jennings formulated the old paradigm as follows: ”The democratic process is a
process of constant argument over different opinions. The House of Commons begins the
public debate which is carried on by the weekly journals of opinion and the monthly
reviews. From there it percolated into the leading articles and thence into the railway
carriage, the factory and the office.” (Jennings 1941, 65) He admitted that this scheme did
not work during the wartime: ”Parliament, for ordinary people, is not only not in news; it is
also out of the war.” (ibid.) In the post-war era the paradigm of the Parliament as an
initiator of public debates was still farther away from the experiences of citizens, due both
to the media changes and to the governmental politics. The singularity of a parliamentary
type of political culture, with its emphasis on the procedure and on inherent value of the
debating pro et contra was no longer identified or was judged as obsolete, not only to the
public but also to the parliamentary scholars.
For the political sociologists conducting “Parliament and X” type of studies this loss was
inevitable. They regarded Parliament as merely one ”social institution” among others, not
as a rhetorical model for a debating political culture. Such type of research could no longer
understand the perspective of older parliamentary studies, parliamentary officials or many
parliamentarians themselves. Political theorists, who still insisted on the singularity of the
17
Westminster Parliament for politics in general, such as Michael Oakeshott or Bernard
Crick, were marginalised in the British political science profession.
A recovery of parliamentary studies
Parliamentary studies never vanished completely. On the contrary, besides Parliamentary
Affairs, also new journals, such as Parliamentary History, Parliaments, Estates &
Representation, Journal of Legislative Studies or Zeitschrift für Parlamentsfragen were
founded, and established national and international institutions allowed the specialists to
write on these topics. However, the studies in these specialist publications, so far as they
concern the contemporary period at all, rather resembled those of Brusewitz in their
concentration on parliamentarism as a regime type or to the “Parliament and X” type of
political sociology. Parliamentary studies also faced with new adversaries after 1968, such
as different attempts to reactivate direct democracy, and this confrontation appears to be
for example behind the founding of Zeitschrift für Parlamentsfragen. The link to older
British type of studies on the parliamentary procedure and political cultures of debating pro
et contra have been largely missing from these specialist publications.
The wake of ”rhetorical turn” in the human sciences, on the way since the 1980s (see
Nelson et al. 1987) or the different versions of “new rhetoric” could have offered link to
older layers of parliamentary eloquence. However, it lasted long time for them to reach
parliamentary problematics, at least regarding the contemporary period.
Sweden, indeed, has had a lively vague of rhetorical studies since the 1980s. The main
authors, such as Kurt Johannesson or Göran Hägg (see Johannesson et al. 1987,
Johannesson 2000; Hägg 1998, 2002) are literary scholars and do not discuss the specific
parliamentary genre rhetoric when they make excursions to politics.
In Britain in particular Quentin Skinner’s Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes
(1996) has inspired rhetorical studies on the Parliament in the sixteenth and seventeenth
century Westminster (see Mack 2002, Colclough 2005, Peltonen 2012). For the
contemporary period also a new interest in analysing rhetoric and political speeches can
be detected within in British political science (see for example Finlayson and Martin 2008).
The links to the distinct parliamentary genre of rhetoric, including the older British tracts on
18
parliamentary eloquence and parliamentary procedure (discussed in Palonen 2008a and
2008b) are, however, hardly thematised in these studies.
For the new interest in parliamentary rhetoric and discourse the linguists have played a
pioneering role (see for example Bailey ed. 2004, Ilie ed. 2010). With some exceptions,
such as Cornelia Ilie, an immigrant to Sweden, they neither have any interest in older
practices of parliamentary rhetoric or on the role of parliamentary procedure for the
rhetorical political culture.
Today an inter-disciplinary cooperation of parliamentary studies has gained ground, and
within it a new emphasis on concepts, rhetoric and procedure has become visible (see the
EuParlNet website, http://euparl.net/). All this has been supported by such factors as the
online publication of parliamentary debates, both for the contemporary and past ones.
Such electronic corpora greatly facilitate the use for example of conceptual historical
approaches in the longitudinal and comparative studies of political concepts in general and
intra-parliamentary concepts in particular (see Ihalainen & Palonen 2009).
Similarly the older documents and studies on parliamentary rhetoric and parliamentary
procedure are now largely availably online. For recovering ”lost treasures” (Skinner 1998,
112) for the understanding of parliamentary politics the research is now better equipped
than a half-century ago. In other words, we do have better chances than to distinguish the
parliamentary character of politics from mere politics in parliaments.
Finally, in both political and academic debates an insight into the contingent and
controversial character of politics is, despite strong populist reactions and technocratic
illusions, more widespread than ever. What is needed is the clear recognition that the
parliament is the political institution, in which the fair dealing with opposed points of view
and the debating them pro et contra has built in to its procedure. For a study of politics that
recognises the contingent and controversial character of politics, the study of
parliamentary procedures, practices and concepts becomes as first rank subject matter.
19
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