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Leaders, Politics and Institutional Change: The Decline of Prime Ministerial Accountability to the House of Commons, 1868–1990

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Extract

In the Westminster system the prime minister's active participation in parliamentary proceedings is a key mechanism for ensuring the accountability of the executive. We survey the evolution of the four main prime ministerial activities across the period 1868–1990. There has been a long-term decline in prime ministers' speeches in the Commons, a stepped decline in debating interventions and a significant decrease in question-answering from the late nineteenth century to the 1950s. But prime ministerial statement-making increased after 1940, ebbing away again in the 1980s. And the downward drift in question-answering was halted by procedural innovations since the 1960s, which standardized the frequency of prime ministers' appearances and lead to the dominance of ‘open’ questions. We trace the varied impacts of institutional changes and shorter-term political or personal influences. The direct accountability of the prime minister to Parliament has undoubtedly declined, a trend probably paralleled by decreasing indirect accountability. These findings raise fundamental questions about executive-legislature relations in the United Kingdom

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Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

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References

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37 Many cell entries in Table 1 are necessarily judgemental since systematic data is unavailable, but we have used explicit criteria for our estimates. Formalization is defined as ‘high’ when the activities involved are subject to written rules formulated in public documents; as ‘medium’ if practices are governed by strong conventions; and otherwise as ‘low’. Publicness is defined as ‘high’ if an activity takes place in a public arena directly monitored by the mass media; as ‘medium’ if the context can be indirectly monitored by the media with considerable reliability; as ‘low’ if the context is a private one; and as ‘very low’ if private activity is also protected by strong secrecy norms. Parliamentary focus is defined as ‘high’ when an activity occurs in the Commons or concerns the reactions of MPs generally; as ‘medium’ when the activity involves or concerns many MPs but is limited to those of one party; and as ‘low’ when the activity involves few MPs or concerns other reactions. Frequency is defined as ‘high’ when the activity occurs many times in a parliamentary session; as ‘medium’ when it occurs several times; as ‘low’ when it occurs once or twice per session or less; and as ‘very low’ if it occurs only once in several sessions.

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