Government Party Discipline in Parliamentary Democracies: The Cases of Belgium, France and the United Kingdom in the 1990s

At the beginning of each parliamentary session, almost all European governments give a speech in which they present the government’s policy priorities and legislative agenda for the year ahead. Despite the body of literature on governments in European parliamentary democracies, systematic research on these executive policy agendas is surprisingly limited. In this article the authors study the executive policy agendas—measured through the policy content of annual government speeches—over the past 50 years in three Western European countries: the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Denmark. Contrary to the expectations derived from the well-established “politics matters” approach, the analyses show that elections and change in partisan color have little effect on the executive issue agendas, except to a limited extent for the United Kingdom. In contrast, the authors demonstrate empirically how the policy agenda of governments responds to changes in public problems, and this affects how political parties define these problems as political issues. In other words, policy responsibility that follows from having government power seems much more important for governments’ issue agendas than the partisan and institutional characteristics of governments.

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A House for the Future: Debating Second Chamber Reform in the United Kingdom

Government and Opposition ◽

10.1111/1477-7053.00031 ◽

2000 ◽

Vol 35 (3) ◽

pp. 325-344

Author(s):

David E. Smith

Keyword(s):

United Kingdom ◽

The United States ◽

Royal Commission ◽

Parliamentary Democracies ◽

The United Kingdom ◽

House Of Lords ◽

Responsible Government ◽

The Future ◽

Anglo American

The publication of the report of the royal commission on the Reform of the House of Lords, A House for the Future, provides an occasion to look at second chambers and bicameralism in Anglo- American democracies. This limited focus is not for want of subject matter: the Inter-Parliamentary Union reports that of 178 parliamentary democracies in 1996, 58 were bicameral. Nor is the subject of second chambers, while never popular, a neglected area of inquiry at present. In fact, more has been published on the topic in the past four years than at any time in recent memory. The reason for focusing on Anglo-American countries is that they are the democracies where upper chambers are being transformed today. In response to events unique to themselves, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom have of late looked beyond responsible government as traditionally defined and begun to examine the role of their second chambers. The United States warrants inclusion because it is the founder of the theory of modern bicameralism.

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Keeping party programmes on track: the transmission of the policy agendas of executive speeches to legislative outputs in the United Kingdom

European Political Science Review ◽

10.1017/s1755773910000433 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 3 (3) ◽

pp. 395-417 ◽

Cited By ~ 23

Author(s):

Shaun Bevan ◽

Peter John ◽

Will Jennings

Keyword(s):

United Kingdom ◽

Media Coverage ◽

Coding System ◽

Cross Sectional ◽

Party Discipline ◽

The United Kingdom ◽

Policy Agendas ◽

The Uk ◽

The Relationship ◽

Over Time

In the United Kingdom, the transmission between policy promises and statutes is assumed to be both rapid and efficient because of the tradition of party discipline, relative stability of government, absence of coalitions, and the limited powers of legislative revision in the second chamber. Even in the United Kingdom, the transmission is not perfect since legislative priorities and outputs are susceptible to changes in public opinion or media coverage, unanticipated events in the external world, backbench rebellions, changes in the political parties, and the practical constraints of administering policies or programmes. This paper investigates the strength of the connection between executive priorities and legislative outputs measured by the Speech from the Throne and Acts of Parliament from 1911 to 2008. These are categorized according to the policy content coding system of the UK Policy Agendas Project (www.policyagendas.org.uk). Time series cross-sectional analyses show that there is transmission of the policy agenda from the speech to acts. However, the relationship differs by party, strengthening over time for Conservative governments and declining over time for Labour and other governments.

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