Australian bicameralism as semi-parliamentarism: patterns of majority formation in 29 democracies

The article analyses the type of bicameralism we find in Australia as a distinct executive-legislative system – a hybrid between parliamentary and presidential government – which we call ‘semi-parliamentary government’. We argue that this hybrid presents an important and underappreciated alternative to pure parliamentary government as well as presidential forms of the power-separation, and that it can achieve a certain balance between competing models or visions of democracy. We specify theoretically how the semi-parliamentary separation of powers contributes to the balancing of democratic visions and propose a conceptual framework for comparing democratic visions. We use this framework to locate the Australian Commonwealth, all Australian states and 22 advanced democratic nation-states on a two-dimensional empirical map of democratic patterns for the period from 1995 to 2015.     

Transnational Constructors of Parliamentary Democracy in Swedish and Finnish Constitutional Controversies, 1917–1919

During the First World War, the legitimacy of established polities was challenged everywhere in Europe. Not only the combatant great powers but also smaller states witnessed a resurgence of constitutional disputes and competing ideological conceptualizations of revolution and reform, the will of the people, democracy, and parliamentarism. While these controversies primarily focused on the future of the national polities concerned, historical experiences and discourses accelerated by the war and the Russian Revolution were transnationally interconnected and contributed to discursive transfers between political cultures. Swedish and Finnish socialists were linked by their internationals, liberals were connected by transnational debates for and against ‘Western’ democracy and parliamentarism, and conservative politicians and academics were involved in ideologically oriented networks. This article reconstructs transnational links and discourses in order to understand the exceptionally confrontational dynamics (which, in Finland, partly led to a civil war) and the outcomes of the Swedish and Finnish constitutional debates in 1917–1919. It examines the nature of the transnational connections of eight Swedish and Finnish conservatives, liberals, revisionist socialists, and far-Left socialists, analysing their argumentation on constitutional questions in published works and parliamentary speeches as illustrative examples of the political groups they represented.     

晚清雨泽奏报制度在州县运行机制的研究——以循化厅档案为例

中国历代统治者都非常关注地方降水情况,要求各地定时向中央奏报雨泽,形成一种自下而上的雨泽奏报制度。本文主要利用循化厅档案资料考察晚清时期雨泽奏报制度在州县上的运行实态。州县雨泽奏报在程序上有旬报和月报之分,无论旬报还是月报,格式上均要逐日书写天气状况、降水起讫时刻和降水量多寡。除旬报和月报外,还存在另一种特殊的上报程序,即各属如遇夏雨冬雪要随时上报。统县政区和高级政区长官对州县雨泽上报格式、时限、人员、信息准确性等进行查核,是确保雨泽信息准确的重要保障。州县户房的书吏是具体负责雨泽信息收集并上报的人员,在此之外,农官上报也是雨泽、收成奏报的来源之一。     

An Alternative Approach to Canadian House of Commons Reform

Empowering backbench Members of Parliament in order to restore the effectiveness of the House of Commons has been a central theme in Canadian parliamentary reform for at least fifty years, but results are widely seen as disappointing. This article argues that unrealistic expectations, fostered by adherence to a traditional conception of the Westminster model of representative and responsible government, are part of the problem. A modernized conception of parliamentary government, recognizing the House as a forum for competing political parties between elections, could help us to better understand the House and improve its contribution to democratic governance. The proposed approach suggests innovative procedural options for legislative debate, Question Period, and other activities. It also offers a consistent basis for addressing issues such as floor-crossing, coalitions, and prorogations. More broadly, it points to the need for an integrated approach to the House, elections, political parties, public education, and citizen engagement in order to respond to contemporary democratic challenges.     

What Was Parliamentary Reporting? A Study of Aims and Results in the London Daily Newspapers, 1780–96*

The nature of these newspaper reports – that is, the character of their principal content – has never been studied, despite its obvious importance and, as we shall see, its marked differences from our Hansard. This article relates their nature to a vital feature of parliamentary leadership, the ability to lead the argument in debate. The practical reasoning in parliamentary deliberation and justification, especially what speakers contributed towards the outcome or ‘the sense of the debate’, predominated in these reports. This implied a need for reporters to concentrate on the ‘substance’ of speeches and their bearing on the motion. One result was that speeches which were judged to define or develop arguments pro and con were treated at length, the defining speeches most extensively and others in proportion to what they added. Conversely, speeches which reiterated known positions or which were irrelevant to the arguments in hand were omitted or downplayed, even if they were important in some other way, while whole debates which added little to ongoing discussion could be treated quite briefly. But if being a front bencher did not guarantee coverage, being a back bencher was no bar: the criterion was the importance of a speaker's contribution, while the manner of coverage accented what was contributed. The reporters’ concerns emphasized debates that promised significant change in matters of national importance, but gave relatively little attention to recurrent or localised business as such. Their writing – they were known as debate writers or news-writers – was interpretation answering to evaluative and selective criteria rather than a record in a simple sense. Their work is not to be understood in the same terms as a modern Hansard, and in particular not as a defective Hansard, but rather is such that it requires further work on a wide range of new research questions if it is to be understood to best effect, a requirement which suggests a need to study it critically before using it as source material.     

‘With All My Oldest and Native Friends’. Joseph Parkes: Warwickshire Solicitor and Electoral Agent in the Age of Reform1

Joseph Parkes, Birmingham solicitor, electoral agent, whig party advisor and secretary to the Parliamentary Municipal Corporation Commission was a modern master of exposing corrupt and fraudulent electioneering and using it as a catalyst for the election of reform and Liberal politicians immediately following the 1832 Reform Act. Warwickshire's own political and legal history was the foundation for Parkes's understanding of how politics worked in Britain and what was wrong with it, and helped forge his vision for an effective reform in parliamentary and local government. This essay examines Joseph Parkes's understanding of national electoral politics, informed by his work in Warwickshire. As a local solicitor, Parkes gained the wisdom of controlling electoral registration, canvassing in a routine and orderly manner and establishing a network of professionals to secure that registrations turned into votes at elections. This experience would culminate in the formation of the Reform Club, a national organisation of whigs, Liberals and radicals, that would, eventually, become the base of the Liberal Party in modern British politics. In short, Joseph Parkes was a man who could not, and did not wish to, escape where he came from, at least in terms of his political education. His Warwickshire experiences and lessons learned, solidified a series of political reform goals that he pragmatically approached as a political advisor, operative and attorney, rather than an elected public servant, and marked the direction of politics for the rest of the century.     

A Lingering Diminuendo? The Conference on Devolution, 1919–20

This article looks at one of the more obscure moments in British constitutional history, the rise of federal devolution in the United Kingdom in the early 20th century and, in particular, the context to the Conference on Devolution that sat between October 1919 and April 1920. The conference, as this article will briefly discuss, has been relegated to footnote status in the historiography on federal devolution and British politics. However, while the conference has not been the subject of detailed academic attention, the claim that devolution and constitutional reform in this period was a by‐product of the crisis in Ireland pre‐partition has gathered considerable traction among political historians. This article will redress both the paltry analysis of the Conference on Devolution within the academic literature and the Irish‐centric historiography on federal devolution in the early 20th century. On the latter front, this article will demonstrate that the conference was the product of forces that extended beyond the Irish crisis, in particular parliamentary congestion. As for the conference itself, this article will use a wide range of archival sources to examine critically the conference's deliberations and in doing so will challenge prevailing assumptions regarding the supposedly one firm source of agreement during the conference: the powers that the devolved bodies should enjoy.     

The Parliamentary Organisation of the Whig Junto in the Reign of Queen Anne: A Further Note

The parliamentary organisation of the whig Junto in the reign of Queen Anne was far superior to that of the tory party. At the centre were the meetings in which three or four of the five members of the Junto were present together with some of their followers. Evidence of such meetings is rare but here is presented a letter giving the details of a meeting of all five in April 1713 at the home of Lord Somers, together with their ally, the tory earl of Nottingham, probably to discuss the forthcoming peace proposals, to end the war of the Spanish Succession, and the protestant succession to the British throne.     

Parliamentary politics as an integration mechanism: The Slavic-speaking inhabitants of interwar (1922–1940) Western Greek Macedonia

ABSTRACT

This article is a case study on how Parliamentary politics could operate in favour of the integration of ethnic minorities into the nation-state. The incorporation of the largest part of the region of Macedonia into the Greek State after the Balkan Wars (1912–1913) led to radical changes in the lives of the Slavic-speaking villagers of Greece (‘Slavic-speakers’ is a term used in this paper so as to describe the inhabitants of Macedonia who had a Slavic language as their mother tongue. Often, in the Greek newspapers of the time the language was referred to as Macedonian or local Macedonian. It was similar to the Bulgarian language but could also be understood in Serbia). Up to 1936, local politicians’ approach of peaceful integration through prosperity and fair administration prevailed but in 1936, parliamentary democracy was abolished and ceased to function as a mechanism for integrating Slavic-speaking villagers into Greek society.     

Aviation Archaeology Offshore: The Recovery of a Rare Ju88 Aircraft Wreck during Work for the New London Gateway Port

Abstract

During dredging works for the new London Gateway Port in 2011, fragments of a German Ju 88 bomber were recovered from the Thames Estuary. Subsequent archaeological investigation by Wessex Archaeology, using geophysical survey and divers, resulted in the location of the wreck site and its subsequent recovery under licence in 2012. Post-recovery analysis has enabled it to be identified as a very rare prototype Ju 88T. The aircraft, flown by men of the secretive Luftwaffe special operations unit VOdL, was lost during a reconnaissance mission to record bomb damage at Chelmsford in 1943. The Norwegian fighter ace who shot it down, Marius Eriksen, subsequently achieved fame as a Norwegian skiing champion and actor. The recovery was unusual in that it was carried out as a staged archaeological investigation and in the context of offshore development, where ‘avoidance’ is the usual strategy.