Parliaments and Citizens

Cristina Leston-Bandeira

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134904778
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The relationship between parliaments and citizens is one of the least studied subjects in legislative studies, yet this is a crucial dimension to understand parliaments and the role they play in our political systems. Furthermore, this relationship has gained considerable visibility over the last decade thanks in part to the development of new media, but also as a reaction to the trends of political apathy. In a context of increasing political disengagement, parliamentary discourse shifted attention from the traditionally predominant relationship with government to the relationship with citizens. Issues of legitimacy became more directly associated with the link between parliament and citizens, resulting in investment in new and more complex mechanisms for contact with citizens, even in the more centralised systems.

This book looks at a wide range of case studies across Europe and beyond, assessing overall strategies in the move towards stronger engagement with citizens. It assesses the extent to which the shift in discourse has led to actual changes in parliamentary practice.

This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Legislative Studies.

Introduction

Studying the Relationship between Parliament and Citizens

CRISTINA LESTON-BANDEIRA

The relationship between parliament and citizens has been neglected traditionally by the legislative studies scholarship. And yet this is the area that has seen the most phenomenal developments within the last few decades. As a reaction against increasing levels of political disengagement, and utilising modem tools of communication such as new media, parliaments have in fact considerably developed the possibility of linkages with the public. And yet what we know is still very patchy. This introduction establishes the premises of this collection and the questions it aims to address, in order to identify patterns in the relationship between parliaments and citizens across a wide range of case studies.

Introduction

Over the last decade parliaments around the world have followed paradoxical paths: on the one hand the value of parliamentarism has expanded considerably, on the other, parliaments have become the public face of political disengagement. Whilst the value of parliamentarism has been reinforced, the scepticism towards legislatures has in fact increased. Also paradoxically, whilst trust in parliaments has steadily declined, these institutions have never been more active in developing mechanisms to engage with the public.

The relationship between parliament and citizens is one of the least studied areas in legislative studies yet this is a crucial dimension in understanding parliaments and the role they play in our political systems. What is more, this relationship seems to have gained considerably more visibility over the last decade thanks in part to the development of new media, but also as a reaction to the trends of political apathy. However, the publications focusing on this relationship are not only few and far between, but they also tend to focus on a very few case studies. The book edited by Philip Norton in 2002, Parliaments and Citizens in Western Europe, is a unique exception and has made an important contribution towards our understanding of this relationship, but is quickly becoming out of date in light of recent developments such as the growth of popularity of petitions and the expansion of new media. The new millennium has brought renewed questions regarding political engagement of citizens, which have been addressed by the electoral behaviour and public opinion literature, being, however, ignored for the most part by the legislative studies discipline. How have parliaments reacted to these trends? To what extent have parliaments developed an active strategy to engage citizens? To what extent has the relationship between parliaments and citizens changed? And, ultimately, to what extent does this make a difference to diffuse support?

This collection aims to bridge this gap by bringing an up-to-date insight into this area of study from the legislative studies discipline. The contributors adopt the general hypothesis that there has been an overall increase of focus on the relationship between parliaments and citizens, which has resulted in a general move from parliaments towards reinforcing their links with citizens. This move has followed contemporary discussions about political apathy, expressed, amongst others, in low turnout rates. However, we are yet to fully understand the consequences, if any, of these developments.

A Neglected Relationship

In 1967 Hanna Pitkin provided us with a thorough theoretical framework to understand representation. Through a detailed analysis of the concept of representation and its myriad of meanings and consequences, Pitkin identifies a complex process that needs to be understood from different perspectives, in different formats and with differing consequences and applications. By providing us with a four-fold conceptualisation of representation - formalistic, symbolic, descriptive and substantive - Pitkin has given us an excellent toolkit by which to examine the relationship between parliament and citizens (Pitkin 1967). And yet since then empirical studies about this relationship have been few and far between.

As Norton noted in 2002, the relationship between parliament and citizens has been a neglected area of legislative studies (Norton 2002, p. 1). The study of parliament has focused primarily on its role in the decision-making process, namely in terms of its two core functions of legislating and scrutinising. Parliament has been conceptualised essentially as a part in the wider process of decision-making. As a consequence, studies have traditionally focused mainly on the relationship between parliament and government (for example, Loewetiberg 1971, Blondel 1973, Norton 1990, Olson 1994), as well as parliament and party (for example, Polsby 1975, Bowler et al. 1999). The actual relationship with citizens tends only to be addressed as an indirect outcome of the other core functions of parliament or as a consequence of parliament's relationship with government and/or parties. In essence, the study of parliament has mainly been concerned with the issue of power; how much power does the institution have, how great is its ability to influence it, and who are the key actors shaping power.

For a long time, the closest the legislative studies discipline came to studying the relationship with citizens was through studies that focused on the congruence of representation; the extent to which representation reflects the interests of electors (for example, Jewell 1985), the style and focus of representation (Eulau and Wahlke 1978), representatives' demographic and socio-economic profiles (Best and Cotta 2000), or whether descriptive representation leads to substantive representation (Philips 1995). Although touching on a clear link in the relationship between parliament and citizens, these studies tend to concentrate mainly on the representative as a unit of analysis. Crucially, they do not necessarily address the mechanisms that the public has by which to input directly into parliamentary matters or the consequences that parliaments may have on public perceptions; that is, for a long time the legislative studies discipline did not consider the relationship between parliament and citizens from the public's perspective.

Instead, the public's view has been studied extensively by other political science sub-disciplines, such as electoral studies or public opinion studies. As a key mechanism supporting the creation of a legislature, elections are the simplest of the links that bind parliaments and citizens and plentiful electoral studies have focused on the consequences of electoral systems (for example, Carey and Shugart 1995, Gallagher and Mitchell 2005, Farrell and Scully 2007). Though again, these studies tend to focus on the effects within the institution, not necessarily focusing on the public perception. Public opinion studies have of course addressed the issue of trust and confidence in parliament extensively, though usually as one amongst many institutions. These are the studies showing the clear decline in trust in parliament in line with other key political institutions (for example, Norris 1999, Dalton 2004). Here we have a profile of general political disengagement, recently echoed by many studies (for example. Stoker 2006, Hay 2007).

But from the discipline of legislative studies, the focus remained for a long time on the institution and its relationship with government, with a few exceptions such as Mezey (1979), Patterson et al. (1975) and Kim et al.' s studies (1984). In his well-known typology of legislatures, Mezey (1979, p. 36) distinguished himself from previous authors by integrating the dimension of public support with that of policy-making. Whilst mainly concerned with the issue of influence in the legislative process, Mezey did cross this dimension with the level of support from the public, thereby identifying legislatures that may, for instance, have a modest ability to affect policy-making, but which may enjoy high levels of public support. Although this contribution integrates two perspectives not traditionally associated with one another - an eminently legislative studies perspective with one of public opinion - it does not look in detail at the relationship between parliament and citizens. Patterson et al. and Kim et al. add to this by focusing on a detailed breakdown analysis of the concept of support from a legislative studies perspective. Namely, they differentiate various focuses of public support specific to the parliamentary institution, allowing Kim et al. (1984, pp. 178-183) to identify, for instance, that citizens tend to rank legislative institutions much higher than MPs as a group. Later on Mishler would also explore the relationship between parliament and regime public support (Mishler 1993).

However, this still does not develop an understanding of the relationship between parliament and citizens. Sporadic studies have examined specific elements of that relationship such as Norton and Wood (1993), in their study of British MPs' constituency work; or indeed studies on legislative petition systems (for example, Baaklini 1978, Judge 1978). This has not added up to a scholarship on the topic though; it is only far more recently, at the beginning of the new millennium, that studies on the specifics of the relationship between parliament and citizens have begun to be developed. It is with the dual development of a reinforcement of the discourse on political disengagement and an expansion of alternative forms of participatory democracy that the focus started to shift to the relationship between parliament and citizens. Suddenly citizens were not being considered as an invisible mass receptive of the general outcomes of parliament's core functions, but instead as active players of a relationship with parliament; the shift moving from citizens as recipients of outputs, to citizens as initiators of inputs into a key relationship.

Under the Spotlight

In recent decades, parliaments connections with the public have become a major issue of concern for both policy-makers and academics. Within the context of a rise in political apathy in post-industrial societies, well evidenced by a scholarship of authors (for example, Norris 1999 and 2011, Dalton 2004, Torcal and Montero 2006), parliament has often become the most visible face of a general trend of increasing political disaffection, backed up by declining levels of voter turnout and trust in institutions. As traditional representative institutions and processes have been questioned, alternative forms of democracy have acquired increasing visibility. Indeed as Dalton et al. (2003, p. 1) note:

Over the past quarter century, citizens and political elites in advanced industrial democracies have displayed a growing willingness to question whether a fundamental commitment to the principles and instiuitions of representative democracy is sufficient to sustain the legitimacy and effectiveness of current mechanisms of self-government.

The questioning of traditional representative institutions has led to considerable political reform often aimed at parliamentary institutions. Dalton et al. demonstrate the concomitant expansion of three modes of democracy: a reinforcement of the representative element through the strengthening of the elective method (or of the powers of elected bodies), an expansion of direct democracy through a higher number of referendums and of similar initiatives which originate at the citizen level, and the development of advocacy democracy modes through integration of citizens' participation at the policy-formation stage (Dalton et al. 2003, pp. 9-11). All three modes affect the relationship between parliament and citizens; either by questioning the representative legitimacy of the parliamentary institution, or more often by integrating citizen input into what used to be a purely political elite-driven process.

Besides a general trend towards reform, the value of transparency and openness has become a key theme for parliaments. Scandals such as that of MPs' expenses in the UK in 2009 may have reaffirmed the calls for transparency, but this was a move that started well before this specific scandal and well beyond the UK. Demonstrative of this is the fact that the Inter-Parliamentary Union's two major reports within the last decade have both focused heavily on these themes. The 2006 report aimed to provide for a guide to good practice on how to develop democratic parliaments, with a very strong focus on functions that embody linkages with the public (representativeness, transparency, accessibility and accountability to the electorate; IPU 2006, pp. 13-113). Six years later, the IPU ordered another report, this time specifically focused on the function of parliamentary representation (IPU 2012). As trends of low trust expanded, parliamentary institutions have globally become all the more preoccupied with public perceptions and connections. Whether well established or developing democracies, parliaments have deployed considerable time and resources to the development of points of contact with citizens, opportunities for access or even to participate and educate (Hansard Society 2012, IPU 2012).

Partly reinforcing this trend, partly causing it, the development of the Internet has also had considerable impact on parliaments' relationship with citizens, both as a vehicle for openness and as added pressure for change. The Internet has transformed legislatures from closed into public institutions. Despite considerable differences between institutions, countries and publics, within a few seconds and clicks, citizens have access today to a phenomenal amount of information about parliamentary matters, which only 20 years ago would have been unimaginable. Regardless of the extent of the success in using the new media, this has forced parliaments into the public realm and has made them much more exposed.

All in all, the reinforced discourse of political disengagement, together with the visibility brought in by tools such as new media, has caused a transformation of the parliament-citizen relationship into a key priority, putting parliaments under the spotlight to develop mechanisms for more effective linkages with the public. The reality is that for a very long time the relationship between parliament and t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction: Studying the Relationship between Parliament and Citizens
• 2. The Finnish Eduskunta: Still the Nordic 'Vatican'?
• 3. Far Away, So Close: Parliament and Citizens in France
• 4. The Bundestag and German Citizens: More Communication, Growing Distance
• 5. The Paradoxes of Parliament—Citizen Connections in Hungary: A Window on the Political System
• 6. Parliament and Citizens in Italy: An Unfilled Gap
• 7. A Least Likely Case: Parliament and Citizens in the Netherlands
• 8. Developing Links Despite the Parties — Parliament and Citizens in Portugal
• 9. Parliament and Citizens in the United Kingdom
• 10. Parliaments and Citizens in Sub-Saharan Africa
• 11. Parliaments and Citizens in Latin America
• 12. Parliament and Citizens in Asia: The Bangladesh Case
• 13. Do Legislative Petitions Systems Enhance the Relationship between Parliament and Citizen?
• 14. How Are Parliaments Using New Media to Engage with Citizens?
• 15. Conclusion: Parliaments' Endless Pursuit of Trust: Re-focusing on Symbolic Representation
• Index