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To what extent does democracy in the UK suffer from a participation crisis? (25 marks)

Another reason why the House of Commons is more effective in checking government power is Prime ministers Question Time, which is a weekly slot where MPs can ask one notified question of the Prime Minister and one unscripted supplementary question. These are also usually dominated by the PM and the leader of the opposition who can ask four or five supplementary questions. Question Time also extends to other ministers, forcing them to answer oral questions from MPs. On occasion Prime Minister question time can expose a PM or seem to sum up the political weather, for example Tony Blair said to John Major “You’re weak, weak, weak”. Furthermore, PM questions are very high profile due to the high amount coverage via the media and the one occasion in the week where much of the population will form a judgement on the two main party leaders. Also, the vast majority of the government can only be questioned in the House of Commons.

Under a minority government, no party has ultimate control of making policies, it instead rules on consensus with the other parties, conversely, in a majority government, a single-party dominates the legislative process. Though complex agreements between opposition parties, the governing party can maintain confidence. For example, countries including Canada use contract parliamentarism, where opposition parties agree to support the government in return for policy on other concessions (Akash et al., 2010, p. 216). While this promotes collective responsibility, parties are still able to decide their own position on most matters. Therefore, parties collaborate to protect minority agreements that “often survive a full parliamentary term” (Akash et al., p. 216). This can result in motions being passed that cover a broad variety of different topics that ultimately can address issues that all parties see lacking in

Parliamentary sovereignty and the rule of law are both concepts that are key to shaping the British constitution, however there is ambiguity as to which concept is the heart of the UK’s constitutional arrangement in the recent years.

‘Parliamentary sovereignty is a constitutional relic. It has been rendered obsolete, in particular, by the supremacy of EU law and the UK’s statutory recognition of human rights. We should no longer talk about this irrelevant doctrine.’

Parliament has a central function in carrying out a scrutiny role. It carries close inspection and where it is necessary, amendments maybe proposed this is carried out in both houses. It holds the government collectively and the PM and other ministers accountable for their actions. It does this in debates, question times and through the work of Departmental Select Committees (DSC). However it maybe be argued that is not enough since scrutiny does not often involve blocking legislation. It is not expected that parliament will make substantial changes, but it does

A parliamentary government is a democratic form of government which operates on a party system. It is the most popular and widely adopted form of democracy. A state that operates on a parliamentary system is run by two executives, firstly the head of state who is either a monarch or president who then appoints a prime minister as the head of government. A parliament can be run by either a single majority political party or as a coalition government in which more than one party collaborate to form the government. In this essay I will be assessing the key strengths and weaknesses associated with a parliamentary government. In doing so I will conclude that whilst a parliamentary government has weaknesses its strengths outweigh these and therefore it is the superior form of democratic government.

Arguably, the scrutiny of Public Bills has depended more on the House of Lords than it has on the House of Commons in recent years. The term “scrutiny” means the critical observation or examination regarding the Public Bills. The “effectiveness” of the scrutiny could be measured in a variety of ways, such as the period of time the bill stays in parliament for, and whether parliament can take on board evidence from committees and implement the bills into legislation. In order to determine if the House of Lords has been more effective than the House of Commons in scrutinising public bills, it is crucial to compare and contrast the effectiveness of the procedures used in both houses.

For many years it has been argued that parliamentary sovereignty has, and still is, being eroded. As said by AV Dicey, the word ‘sovereignty’ is used to describe the idea of “the power of law making unrestricted by any legal limit”. Parliamentary sovereignty is a principle of the UK constitution, stating that Parliament is the supreme legal authority in the UK, able to create and remove any law. This power over-rules courts and all other jurisdiction. It also cannot be entrenched; this is where all laws passed by the party in government can be changed by future parliaments. In recent years sovereignty of parliament has been a

When was the last time you took a moment out of your busy life to think about democracy? When we hear ‘democracy’ we all think about how truly blessed we are to live in the United Kingdom, where we elect our government and we chose who gets to represent us. Well, you’re wrong. In the UK we have many rights and freedoms; we can express our opinions without fear and within the bounds of the law, live our lives the way we wish to. However, we still have a walking contradiction to our so called democracy (of which, we, as a country, are very proud). The House of Lords, extortionate to run, unelected by anyone and utterly unnecessary, still exists for some unknown reason. The House of Lords needs to be abolished. We need to take action to prevent the elite members of our society being paid large sums of money to examine laws and make decisions, that quite frankly, have nothing to do with them. If we wanted them to have power in our country, we would have elected them.

“Parliamentary sovereignty is no longer, if it ever was, absolute” (Lord Hope). Discuss with reference to at least three challenges to the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty. Parliamentary sovereignty is the concept that Parliament has the power to repeal, amend or create any law it wishes and therefore no body in the UK can challenge its legal validity. There are many people who would argue that this is a key principle to the UK Constitution, on the other hand, there are those who strongly believe that this idea is one of the past, and that the idea of the UK Parliament being sovereign is false. One of these people is Lord Hope, who said “Parliamentary sovereignty is no longer, if it ever was, absolute”. During the last 50 years there have been a variety of developments that have proved to be a challenge for the legitimacy of parliamentary sovereignty, and the ones which will be examined in this essay are: the devolution of powers to the Scottish Parliament; The United Kingdom’s entry into the European Union in 1973; and finally the power of judicial review. Starting with the devolution of powers, these challenges will all be evaluated when discussing whether or not the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty applies to the United Kingdom. Westminster’s sovereignty has been gradually diminishing over time as varying amounts of power have been devolved to Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland. In this essay, the devolution of powers to the Scottish Parliament will be

However, seeing as this party would seeem intitially to be the ideal voting system, there are strong disadvantages which limit its potential. Perhaps the most obvious one is that it fails to provide a majority very often. For example, when used for the London Assembly in 2012, Labour gained 12 seats, the most for a single party, and the Conservatives gained 9, however Labour were still not able to gain a majority of seats as the Green Party and Liberal Democrats won 2 each, showing that if this was used for the general elections, we would end up with another coalition.

There is a House of Commons Select Committee for each department within Whitehall. These were set up to scrutinise government and hold them to account. The formation of these committees consist of a minimum of 11 members and look at three aspects of each department – Administration, Policies and Spending. With this established, we will be looking at the policy aspect of scrutiny and evaluate how much Select Committees influence the content of legislation. The paper will be structured by starting with the analysis of current literature on this topic and trying to pinpoint what has already been stated about the influence select committees have

A coalition government, also known as a coalition cabinet, can be one of the most entertaining, and volatile, forms of government. Often, it may be hard to know how an issue is going to turn out, unlike countries where there are only

Since MMP has been implemented into New Zealand, it has allowed for a wider diversity of parties to be in parliament. On account of that, while it is still possible for a party to win the majority seats in parliament, it is very difficult to do so; Church (2015) states that this has not happened in the last four elections. As a result, MMP has impacted on the relationship between the executive and parliament by making the executive to make arrangements between themselves and minor parties, in order to stay in power. This is also for the executive to be able to pass votes of confidence and supply, as well as get potential Bills that they want implemented, to be passed through parliament. Since 2008, John Key, Prime Minister and leader of the National party has had “enhanced confidence and supply arrangements” with minor parties, consisting of United Future, ACT and Maori party, in order to stay in the executive. An enhanced confidence and supply arrangement, is when the minor parties are appointed ministerial posts outside of cabinet, and only be bound by cabinet responsibility when it involves their portfolio or have been involved in an development of policy that ended with an agreed position. As Boston and Bullock (2009) note, these enhanced arrangement is very unusual, as New Zealand is the only country to have these in politics. Sweden has experimented with similar arrangements, termed “contract parliamentarians,” however it did not include members of non-government