The Parliamentary Labor Party in Great Britain

1950 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 855-871
Author(s):  
James Macgregor Burns
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
The Political ◽  
British Politics ◽  
Political Scientist ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
Labor Party ◽  
The Past ◽  
Members Of Parliament ◽  
Formal Power ◽  
Equal Power

Who rules Britain? For the political scientist hunting out the real core of power, the question is hard to answer. Students of British politics have variously concluded that the Cabinet, or Parliament, or the party in power, or the administrative class of civil servants, or the “Big Three” (or Four, or Five)—or some combination of these—actually held the reins of authority. Constitutionally, however, the question is an easy one. Formal power rests with a majority of the Members of Parliament. This majority can pass laws and raise money, can bring down governments and make new ones, can change the Constitution itself.Those who have ruled Britain in this sense during the past five years have been a few hundred Labor Members of the House of Commons, organized in the Parliamentary Labor Party. Constitutionally, this is the ruling group, every member of which has equal power. In fact, a small minority of Labor Members, grouped in or about the Cabinet, actually make the great decisions of state. At the same time, the large majority of Labor Members not only lack real power but even in their very name —Backbenchers—they appear as the symbols of impotence.

4. Supporting Members and Peers

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Geddes ◽  
Jessica Mulley
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
Digital Service ◽  
The Past ◽  
Members Of Parliament ◽  
House Of Lords ◽  
Political Sources ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
Sources Of Support ◽  
The Uk

This chapter examines the way the UK Parliament is administered and organized in terms of the support offered by the institution to Members of Parliament (MPs) and peers to fulfil their parliamentary, political, and policy functions. The House of Commons employs roughly 2,500 and the House of Lords around 500 members of staff, in addition to staff in the bicameral Parliamentary Digital Service. These staff provide invaluable and impartial support to Parliament. This chapter considers the political and non-political sources of support provided to MPs and peers in carrying out their role and how the resources available to parliamentarians have increased over the past two decades through a range of parliamentary reforms. It also discusses key issues and debates arising from the support given to MPs and peers, including the issue over whether staff exist to serve the institution of Parliament or to support parliamentarians.

22. Women in the House of Commons

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosie Campbell ◽  
Sarah Childs ◽  
Elizabeth Hunt
Keyword(s):  
Supply And Demand ◽  
Descriptive Representation ◽  
The Political ◽  
Demand Model ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
Substantive Representation ◽  
Members Of Parliament ◽  
Women's Participation ◽  
Political Recruitment ◽  
Supply And Demand Model

This chapter examines the progress of women's participation and representation in the House of Commons. It first considers women's descriptive representation in the House of Commons over the last century, with emphasis on the differences in the proportion of women Members of Parliament (MPs) elected by the main political parties. It explains improvements in the numbers of women MPs in the last decade or so, together with the party asymmetry, by reference to the supply and demand model of political recruitment. It then reviews arguments for women's equal participation in politics, taking into account how women's descriptive representation intersects with symbolic and substantive representation. It also discusses resistance to the claim that women's representation matters and concludes with an analysis of the masculinized nature of the political institution that women MPs inhabit, along with the recommendations made in the 2016 The Good Parliament report.

scholarly journals What Motivates an Oligarchic Elite to Democratize? Evidence from the Roll Call Vote on the Great Reform Act of 1832

2019 ◽  
Vol 79 (3) ◽  
pp. 773-825 ◽  
Author(s):  
Toke S. Aidt ◽  
Raphaël Franck
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Roll Call ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
Roll Call Vote ◽  
Members Of Parliament

AbstractThe Great Reform Act of 1832 was a watershed for democracy in Great Britain. We study the vote on 22 March 1831 in the House of Commons to test three competing theories of democratization: public opinion, political expedience, and threat of revolution. Peaceful agitation and mass-support for reform played an important role. Political expedience also motivated some members of Parliament to support the reform, especially if they were elected in constituencies located in counties that would gain seats. Violent unrest in urban but not in rural areas had some influence on the members of Parliament. Counterfactual scenarios suggest that the reform bill would not have obtained a majority in the House of Commons in the absence of these factors.

Co-determination in Germany

1954 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 1114-1127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Herbert J. Spiro
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
Labor Relations ◽  
West Germany ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Scientist ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Labour Government ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Industrial Societies

When the Labour Government began to nationalize industries in Great Britain, swarms of social scientists descended upon that island. They wanted to study this “great experiment,” which many of them viewed as the trail-blazer for an inevitable trend in all modern industrial societies. That was nine years ago. Now it seems that the nationalization dogma has lost most of its force even in Labour circles. But another great experiment has been in progress on the Continent, in West Germany: Mitbestimmung, the scheme under which labor participates in the management of private industrial corporations. In part it was born out of British disillusionment with socialism's erstwhile cure-all. Because of its novelty and uniqueness, it is attracting increasing attention from social scientists. But this time, the different disciplines are unevenly represented. Economists, and especially experts in labor relations, have shown the most interest. When they run across a student of politics in pursuit of the same quarry, they often express surprise. And the Germans, who are being visited, interviewed, questioned, polled, and subjected to every conceivable form of social scientific scrutiny, react even more strongly. They are positively puzzled: “You are not a Nationaloekonom? But then surely an Industrie- or Betriebssoziologe, or perhaps a Jurist ….” The political scientist is an animal of which few of them have heard. And fewer still can imagine off-hand why he would want to concern himself with co-determination.

scholarly journals Classification Accuracy as a Substantive Quantity of Interest: Measuring Polarization in Westminster Systems

2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 120-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Peterson ◽  
Arthur Spirling
Keyword(s):  
Classification Accuracy ◽  
British Politics ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
Qualitative And Quantitative ◽  
Technical Performance ◽  
Members Of Parliament ◽  
Parliamentary Systems ◽  
Supervised Learning Algorithms ◽  
Historical Accounts ◽  
Over Time

Measuring the polarization of legislators and parties is a key step in understanding how politics develops over time. But in parliamentary systems—where ideological positions estimated from roll calls may not be informative—producing valid estimates is extremely challenging. We suggest a new measurement strategy that makes innovative use of the “accuracy” of machine classifiers, i.e., the number of correct predictions made as a proportion of all predictions. In our case, the “labels” are the party identifications of the members of parliament, predicted from their speeches along with some information on debate subjects. Intuitively, when the learner is able to discriminate members in the two main Westminster parties well, we claim we are in a period of “high” polarization. By contrast, when the classifier has low accuracy—and makes a relatively large number of mistakes in terms of allocating members to parties based on the data—we argue parliament is in an era of “low” polarization. This approach is fast and substantively valid, and we demonstrate its merits with simulations, and by comparing the estimates from 78 years of House of Commons speeches with qualitative and quantitative historical accounts of the same. As a headline finding, we note that contemporary British politics is approximately as polarized as it was in the mid-1960s—that is, in the middle of the “postwar consensus”. More broadly, we show that the technical performance of supervised learning algorithms can be directly informative about substantive matters in social science.

The Socialist Movement in Great Britain and the United States

1924 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 276-284 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bertram Benedict
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
Prime Minister ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
The United States ◽  
Annual Conference ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
Labor Party ◽  
British Labour ◽  
General Elections ◽  
Socialist Movement

There is little need to point out the growing strength of the British Labor party. At the recent general elections, it achieved approximately one-third of both the House of Commons and the popular vote; and the fact that at the preceding election it had rolled up twenty-two per cent of the House and thirty per cent of the ballots proves that its recent achievement was not merely occasional. Throughout Great Britain there is thoughtful consideration as to whether Mr. J. Ramsay MacDonald will prove as able a prime minister as he proved a leader of His Majesty's Opposition.What may not be so widely appreciated is that the British Labor party is fundamentally, in fact no less than in theory, a socialist party. At its annual conference held in June, 1923, the following resolution was proposed:“This Conference … asserts that the supreme object of the Labour Party should be the supersession of Capitalism by the Socialist Commonwealth … ;” and with hundreds of delegates representing several million members, the resolution was passed unanimously. Indeed, as the chairman, Sidney Webb, remarked in putting the resolution to a vote, it was largely unnecessary, for everyone in Great Britain recognized that the British Labour party was a socialist movement.

1. The Starting Point

2021 ◽  
pp. 5-29
Author(s):  
Peter John
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
British Politics ◽  
Parliamentary Democracy ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
Party Government ◽  
Institutional Rules ◽  
Nation States ◽  
House Of Lords ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Uk

This chapter discusses what makes British politics distinctive and recognizable: its parliamentary democracy, uncodified constitution, and pattern of party government. It begins by outlining some recent events that have made British or UK politics so fascinating and controversial. The chapter then describes the political system, particularly the institutional rules that affect what happens and govern how politics takes place. Parliament, composed of the House of Commons, House of Lords, and the Crown, is the supreme legal authority in the UK. The chapter also provides a summary of the British constitution. It places the UK in a comparative context, to be studied alongside other nation states. Finally, the chapter sets out the information and concepts that help in understanding the nature of and limits to British democracy.

RECONSIDERING THE IRISH ACT OF UNION

2000 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 399-408 ◽  
Author(s):  
S.J. Connolly
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
Social Consequences ◽  
The Political ◽  
Past Century ◽  
Major Theme ◽  
The Past ◽  
Starting Point

AbstractTHE political, administrative and social consequences of the union of Great Britain and Ireland, and even more the eventual unravelling of the structures it created, have for the greater part of the past century provided Irish historians with a major theme. By contrast the measure itself has received little sustained analysis or discussion. F.R. Bolton's monograph, first published in 1966, remains – more than three decades later – the standard reference. In part this is a tribute to the depth, breadth and penetration of Bolton's account. But there is also at least the suggestion that the negotiation and passage of the union legislation, during 1799–1800, is to be seen as unproblematic, a relatively straightforward event providing a terminus or a starting point for discussion of the more complex and challenging periods on either side.

Lord Willoughby de Broke and the Politics of Radical Toryism, 1909-1914

1980 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 205-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory D. Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Resistance To Change ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
The Political ◽  
British Politics ◽  
Home Rule ◽  
Political Democracy ◽  
National Review ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Status ◽  
Political Figure

In the midst of the political controversies of the early twentieth century, Lord Willoughby de Broke, a landed aristocrat with little parliamentary experience, emerged as a major political figure. An ally of the Chamberlains, Lord Milner, Sir Edward Carson, and Leo Maxse, editor of the National Review, he became a significant spokesman for extreme conservatism. During the Parliament Bill struggle, the battle over the Conservative leadership in the fall of 1911, and the Home Rule crisis, Willoughby de Broke organized the efforts of peers and other Conservatives radically dissatisfied with the direction of British politics. Since 1914 Willoughby de Broke has become a symbol of reaction and traditionalist resistance to change: the fox-hunting nobleman “whose face,” in Dangerfield's wellknown description, “bore a pleasing resemblance to the horse,” and who “was not more than two hundred years behind his time.” Such an analysis, however, is more amusing than accurate. In fact, while Willoughby de Broke's objectives were basically those of a traditional landed aristrocrat, his methods and emphases strongly prefigured those of later rightist politicians, both British and continental: tactics of political democracy could be mastered in order to preserve the status quo.Although Willoughby de Broke often fondly recalled the patriarchical society he had known in his childhood on a great estate, he did not merely attempt to recreate the past. He and his political associates, for all their commitment to conservatism, understood that important adaptations would have to be made to new conditions.

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