32. Conclusion: The Future of Parliamentary Politics

Author(s):  
David Judge ◽  
Cristina Leston-Bandeira ◽  
Louise Thompson

This concluding chapter reflects on the future of parliamentary politics by identifying key puzzles implicit in previous discussions which raise fundamental questions about what Parliament is and why it exists. The goal is to determine the ‘predictable unknowns’ as starting points for exploring the future. Three principal puzzles that need ‘hard thinking’ in order to understand legislatures are considered: representation, collective decision-making, and their role in the political system. The chapter also examines the difficulties in reconciling ideas about popular sovereignty and direct public participation with notions of parliamentary sovereignty and indirect public participation in decision-making; the implications of the legislative task of disentangling UK law from EU law in the wake of Brexit for Parliament's recent strengthened scrutiny capacity; and how Parliament has integrated the core principles of representation, consent, and authorization into the legitimation of state policy-making processes and their outputs.

2021 ◽  
pp. 109-128
Author(s):  
Michael K. MacKenzie

This chapter makes three arguments in support of the claim that we need inclusive deliberative processes to shape the future in collectively intentional, mutually accommodating ways. First, inclusive collective decision-making processes are needed to avoid futures that favour the interests of some groups of people over others. Second, deliberative processes are needed to shape our shared futures in collectively intentional ways: we need to be able to talk to ourselves about what we are doing and where we want to get to in the future. Third, deliberative exchanges are needed to help collectivities avoid the policy oscillations that are (or may be) associated with the political dynamics of short electoral cycles. Effective processes of reciprocal reason giving can help collectivities maintain policy continuity over the long term—when continuity is justified—even as governments and generations change.


2017 ◽  

Politics is about conflict, struggle, decision-making, power and influence. But not every conflict and not every situation in which power is exercised is widely regarded as politics. A football coach who decides to leave a player on the bench because he has given him a bit of lip, is exerting power, and there is conflict here, too. However, few people would consider this a political issue. The same applies to a mother who quarrels with her adolescent daughter about going to a house party, a schoolteacher who gives a student detention, and so on. But if we were to limit our understanding of politics to official decisions that are taken by governments, in parliaments or on municipal councils, we would fail to recognise the political meaning of trade unions, lobbyists, protest groups, corporations and other more-or-less organised groups that influence collective decision-making.


2020 ◽  
Vol 214 ◽  
pp. 01016
Author(s):  
Gao Wei ◽  
Xinjuan He ◽  
Huan Wang ◽  
Li Rui ◽  
Luo Jialing ◽  
...  

In recent years, the fresh food e-commerce platforms have been developing rapidly with facing increasingly fierce market competition. From the perspective of value co-creation, the core competitive advantage of enterprises in the future lies in creating unique values with customers. Starting from the perspective of innovation, this study explores the relationship fresh food e-commerce consumption experience and customer fit, so as to provide decision-making reference for the management of the platforms.


Author(s):  
Bethany Moreton

This brief and synthetic epilogue argues that the South’s history lays bare the ways that antidemocratic governance has been used in this country to protect unfree labor arrangements and to blunt collective decision-making about the conditions of wealth production and distribution of wealth. That history helps sharpen our analysis of the current concern over the future of work. More than half a century ago, labor and black freedom advocates teamed up with analysts of the cybernetics revolution to ask “Are there other proper claims on goods and services besides a job?” The epilogue argues that the question is as pertinent now as when it was formulated, and that the South is where it will have to be answered.


Author(s):  
Liesbet Hooghe ◽  
Tobias Lenz ◽  
Gary Marks

Chapter 1 sets out the core puzzle of international governance, introduces postfunctionalist theory, and situates it in relation to realism, liberal institutionalism, and constructivism. Postfunctionalism theorizes how conceptions of community constrain the functional provision of public goods across territorial scale. It hypothesizes that international organization is social as well as functional and provides a precise and falsifiable explanation of the institutional set-up of an IO, including its membership, contractual basis, policy portfolio, and the extent to which an IO pools authority in collective decision making and delegates authority to independent actors.


Author(s):  
Emad Abu-Shanab ◽  
Raya Al-Dalou'

The relationship between citizens and governments is the core of e-government. E-participation is one of the political dimensions of e-government which focuses on informing, consulting, involving, collaborating, and empowering citizens to take part of the decision making process. This study adopted a framework for the five levels of e-participation and tried to test such model empirically using 400 responses from Jordanians. The study tried to measure Jordanian perceptions towards e-participation initiatives and practices in Jordan, and to measure the achievements on each level as perceived and reported by subjects. Results indicated that the highest perceived level was e-involving, and the lowest was e-consulting. Also, the CFA results indicated a distorted distribution of items between the major levels. Results of other issues explored are discussed further in this study.


2014 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandru V. Roman

The last two decades have witnessed a tremendous growth in the body of literature addressing the importance and the impact of contracting and public procurement within the context of devolution of government. The austere budgetary and financial outlooks of the future suggest that the significance of the area will only continue to grow. As such, generating explanatory frameworks, within dimensions such as decisionmaking and accountability in public procurement, becomes crucial. Drawing from original research this article suggests one possible frame for understanding administrative decision-making in complex environments. Based on semi-structured interviews with public procurement specialists, the study identifies two decision-making patterns− broker and purist. It is asserted that the decision-making dynamics exhibited by administrators are contingent on their perceptions regarding environmental instability, in particular the political volatility surrounding their work.


2018 ◽  
Vol 36 (8) ◽  
pp. 1458-1479 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iain Docherty ◽  
Jon Shaw ◽  
Greg Marsden ◽  
Jillian Anable

This article analyses the transport policy record of the 2010–2015 Conservative–Liberal Democrat Coalition and 2015–2016 Conservative majority UK governments. We argue that the style of policy making under these administrations departed significantly from that of previous decades, which had been characterised by the ascendancy of specific technical disciplines and decision-making norms about how transport planning should be carried out. Our key contention is that despite abandoning the idea of a single, overall narrative for transport policy, these governments (perhaps unwittingly) gave new life to broader debates about what transport investment is actually for and how investment decisions should be made. We interpret this as a shift away from the longstanding idea of a ‘deliberate’ strategy of intervention to a more ‘emergent’ approach, which raises important new questions about the future of transport policy both in terms of the objectives it seeks to realise and the relative influence of professional/technical and political actors in the policy process.


2003 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 219-222 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. D. Handscombe

This paper reviews the UK government's Science Enterprise Challenge (SEC) initiative, giving particular emphasis to the SEC objective of achieving cultural change. A ‘cultural web’ framework is applied to characterize the political, symbolic and structural issues that need to be addressed if change is to be effected. The author suggests that, if the vision of the future ‘enterprising university’ causes concern, there is a need to analyse assumptions and if necessary change activities. If the vision is acceptable, then the cultural web analysis assists in developing an understanding of the target and enables faster and better decision making on the way.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher George Torres

This dissertation analyzes three participatory technology assessment (pTA) projects conducted within United States federal agencies between 2014 and 2018. The field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) argues that a lack of public participation in addressing issues of science and technology in society has produced undemocratic processes of decision-making with outcomes insensitive to the daily lives of the public. There has been little work in STS, however, examining what the political pressures and administrative challenges are to improving public participation in U.S. agency decision-making processes. Following a three-essay format, this dissertation aims to fill this gap. Drawing on qualitative interviews with key personnel, and bringing STS, policy studies, and public administration scholarship into conversation, this dissertation argues for the significance of “policy entrepreneurs” who from within U.S. agencies advocate for pTA and navigate the political controls on innovative forms of participation. The first essay explores how the political culture and administrative structures of the American federal bureaucracy shape the bureaucratic contexts of public participation in science and technology decision-making. The second essay is an in-depth case study of the role political controls and policy entrepreneurs played in adopting, designing, and implementing pTA in NASA’s Asteroid Initiative. The third essay is a comparative analysis of how eight political and administrative conditions informed pTA design and implementation for NASA’s Asteroid Initiative, DOE’s consent-based nuclear waste siting program, and NOAA’s Environmental Literacy Program. The results of this dissertation highlight how important the political and administrative contexts of federal government programs are to understanding how pTA is designed and implemented in agency science and technology decision-making processes, and the key role agency policy entrepreneurs play in facilitating pTA through these political and administrative contexts. This research can aid STS scholars and practitioners better anticipate and mitigate the barriers to embedding innovative forms of public participation in U.S. federal government science and technology program design and decision-making processes.


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