IPSA WORLD CONGRESS

MADRID 8-12 JULY 2012 RC 33 THE STUDY OF POLITICAL SCIENCE AS A DISCIPLINE PANEL THE FRAGMENTATION OF POLITICAL SCIENCE AS A DISCIPLINE

On the Fate of Parliamentary Studies in European Political Science: The post-war decline of intra-parliamentary topics in Britain and Sweden [draft, language not corrected]

Kari Palonen

Academy of Finland Professor

FI-40014 University of Jyväskylä, Finland

E-mail: kari.i.palonen@jyu.fi

ABSTRACT (September 2011)

Parliamentary politics was a core topic in the debates on political theory in the first half of twentieth century in different countries and independent of the disciplinary or academic background of scholars. Also for political science professors of the period, such as Harold J. Laski, Ernst Barker, Ivor Jennings, Karl Löwenstein, Ernst Fraenkel or Axel Brusewitz and his school the debates on the parliamentarism in general, and the questions of internal parliamentary practices were at the core of their scholarly agenda. After ca. 1960 the parliament seems to lose its central position and the fragmentation of studies is visible. Even the British journal Parliamentary Affairs turns in the course of 1960s from internal questions of parliament to electoral and partisan politics. The assumption behind this shift seems to be that the electoral results and the formation of government through negotiations between parties are more important than intra-parliamentary politics. This shift is not due to any general “crisis of parliamentarism”. In the paper I discuss two alternative interpretations of the shift, the one is the “party state” theory of parliamentarism advocated by Gerhard Leibholz, the other is US dependence of political science with a by-product a disinterest in the intra-parliamentary politics in the European sense. At the end the recovery of parliamentary studies since 1990s will be shortly discussed.

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The autobiographical background

Around 2003 I have added a parliamentary dimension to my academic profile. Quentin

Skinner’s ideas of renaissance rhetorical culture (1996), Reinhart Koselleck’s

temporalisation of concepts (1979, 2000) and attention to the link between Weber’s re-

thinking of the concept “objectivity” and his demands for the parliamentary control of

expert knowledge (Weber 1904, 1918) were behind this new interest (see Palonen 2004

and now Palonen 2010 in particular).

The origins of this paper can be traced to autumn 2006, when I was in Warburg-Haus in

Hamburg. I wanted learn the state of art in established parliamentary studies and went

through the contents of the British journals Political Quarterly (founded in 1930) and

Parliamentary Affairs (founded in 1947). In the first decades of both I found in a lot of

interest for studies on political theory of parliamentarism, on parliamentary government as

well as on parliamentary rhetoric and procedure. Since the 1960s intra-parliamentary

studies were more or less completely replaced by those on elections, parties and policy

issues, much less interesting from my point of view.

This strange disappearance of the intra-parliamentary politics from parliamentary studies,

in Britain and in other European parliamentary regimes is something worth discussing. My

initial guess was that this refers to trends in political science, in particular the emphasis of

the discipline to become more ”scientific”, but also other grounds might be imagined. This

was the basis for writing the Abstract for this paper.

In the present paper I shall depart from the prominence of parliamentary topics in the

study of politics on the first half of the twentieth century in two countries, Britain and

Sweden. For both a comparison of longer trends on the basis of the journal articles is

easily available. My discussion limits to their tables of content, to overview commentaries

or to short analyses of some of the articles. To discuss what is not thematised there is as

important point as what there is.

After World War I parliamentary studies were at the core of interest in writings about

politics. In Sweden they were closely connected to an already well-established academic

political science, which had a much weaker position in Britain. Implicit in both countries

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was a ”parliamentary theory of politics”, as a condition of advanced contemporary form of

politics as such. But what was “parliamentary”, was already controversial.

For discussing the study on the post-war continuation and relative decline in parliamentary

studies in the 1950s and 1960s I focus on the journals, Political Quarterly, Parliamentary

Affairs and Statsvetenskaplig tidskrift. Here I deviate from my initial ‘hypotheses’ by

noticing that the growring disinterest in parliamentary studies has a different profile and

calendar in Sweden and Britain.

When moving to speculate with reasons for the decline of the intra-parliamentary topics

from the political science agenda, I focus on the academic political science, although not

necessarily the most interesting reasons can be found there. However, what is remarkable

is that the growing academic disinterest was not due to any ‘crisis of parliamentarism’. On

the contrary, the two post-war decades illustrated a remarkable revival of parliamentary

government in Western Europe, except perhaps in France, but in my British and Swedish

sources this success was not linked to any active re-thinking of its principles either in

parliamentary studies or in political theorising in a broader, non-disciplinary sense.

In the final section I shall shortly discuss the recovery of parliamentary politics and

parliamentary studies during the recent decades, although largely outside the province of

political science. The ”rhetorical turn” (Rorty) has been slow to reach parliamentary

studies, but signs of that are in different fields.

Parliament at the core of the study of politics

Parliamentary studies were a central scholarly topic on the first half of twentieth century

Western Europe, although – I must say: of course – no history of parliamentary studies or

of the political theory of parliamentarism exist. For this perhaps the most obvious reason is

that parliament is no a priori construction, but rather a name for practices, conventions and

rules formed by political agents disputing with each other, who only slowly became

conscious of having to do with a new and distinctive type of acting politically.

In the literature on parliamentary government some ”classics” have been canonised:

Burke, Sieyès, Constant, Bentham, J.S. Mill, Bagehot in particular. Specialists could speak

also of Hatsell, Erskine May, (Henry Geoge) Grey, Chateubriand, Guizot, Duvergier de

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Hauranne, Mazzini, Mohl, Maitland or Dicey, perhaps on (William Gerard) Hamilton or

Cormenin. Also enemies of parliamentarism such as Carlyle, Donoso Cortes or Bucher

might be remembered, or they might remark that it was Victor Hugo, who adopted for

himself the term parlementarisme, coined by Louis Bonaparte for the purpose of

denunciation (Hugo 1852, 273-278). Of course, none of them were professors of political

science in the disciplinary sense.

In the twentieth century the theorising on parliamentarism has become academic but has

not necessarily taken place in political science. For example in Germany and Austria most

academics who wrote on parliamentarism in the Wilhelmine or Weimar era as well as in

the early Federal Republic were originally jurists. They include Georg Jellinek, Josef

Redlich, Max Weber, Hugo Preuß, Carl Schmitt, Rudolf Smend, Hans Kelsen, Richard

Thoma, Leo Wittmayer, Hermann Heller, Gerhard Leibholz, Ernst Fraenkel, Franz

Neumann and even younger scholars such as Wilhelm Hennis, although the three last

mentioned were political science professors in West Germany.

In Britain after World War I we can detect a shift of the catchword from ”parliamentary

government” to ”parliamentary democracy”. Although the older parliaments remained on

the agenda, the emphasis on the studies was on the parliaments after the realisation of

universal suffrage.

In this phase an institutionalisation of political science at the LSE and in Cambridge took

its first steps. Harold J. Laski and Ernst Barker got a Political Science chair already in the

1920s, whereas the author of the standard work Parliament, Ivor Jennings, was during the

war sent to found a university in Ceylon. Laski and Jennings were jurists, Barker a

philosopher by training. After World War II parliamentary scholars, such as R.B. Bassett or

Bernard Crick were already teaching political science, and parliamentary topics remained

prominent in the understanding of politics also for example for Michael Oakeshott, who

followed Laski in the LSE chair after his death in 1950 (on Oakeshott’s links to

parliamentary studies and differences to Laski see Soininen 2005 and 2008).

In the 1920s and 1930s the confrontation of parliamentary democracies with ”dictatorial”

tendencies was a major topic (see for example Llanque 2008). The parliamentary regime

was challenged even in Britain, by the former Labour politician Oswald Mosley and his

“New Party” in particular. Laski in Parliamentary Government of England was skeptical

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over the ”marriage between capitalism and democracy” (Laski 1938, 68) and saw socio-

economic reforms as a condition of a functioning parliamentary democracy that would not

be ”transformed into an organ of the registration of the will of the Cabinet” (ibid, 34).

Nonetheless, for Laski such a tendency ”is not a consequence of any inherent defect of

the system itself,” but he believed in the debating and discussing powers of the Parliament

as such (ibid.). He concluded: ”Parliamentary government, to retain its hold, must give the

promises of great results” (ibid, 35).

Swedish colleagues still sometimes boast that the Skytte professorship for Politices

eloquentiae, founded in 1622, would be the ”world eldest political science chair”. In fact, it

was for some 150 years rather a chair in Latin, but W.E. Swedelius in mid-nineteenth

century it turned into a chair of constitutional history of politics. With conservative MP

Rudolf Kjéllén (professor skytteanus 1915-1922) the chair got a geopolitical orientation. He

was followed by Axel Brusewitz (1881-1950, professor skytteanus 1923-1947), who broke

with everything Kjellén had stood for, politically and academically. Swedish constitutional

history still remained crucial for him, and parliamentary studies were also practised in the

Lund, Göteborg and later in Stockholm political science (statskunskap) chairs in as well as

in law and history. Uppsala under Brusewitz turned into a centre of parliamentary studies,

especially serving as a basis for numerous dissertations from the 1920s to 1940s.

From his inaugural lecture onwards Brusewitz with his typological perspective opted for a

research programme around the parliamentary government (Brusewitz 1923). He

discussed its alternatives and conducted comparative studies on the constitutional history

of parliamentary practices in different countries or in relation to different aspect of

parliamentary politics. Brusewitz sketched in Uppsala a real political science research

agenda for parliamentary studies. Besides numerous studies on Sweden it included

dissertations on Germany (Arrhén 1929), Finland (Lindman 1937, defended in Åbo

Akademi in Finland), France (Simonsson 1938), Norway (Björnberg 1939), Austria

(Skottsberg 1940) and Britain (N. Andrén 1947). Swedish parliamentary studies from

1920s to 1950s from the perspective of international debates on parliamentarism would

deserve closer study (for some aspects see Kurunmäki 2010 and Brandt 2008, 166-168).

In the research agenda of Uppsala parliamentary studies the point of departure is the

definition of the government’s responsibility to the parliament, in the minimum sense of the

absence of the stated non-confidence (Brusewitz 1929, 324-325). It includes comparative

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studies on different parliaments and comparisons between the ways of parliamentarisation

and democratisation. Brusewitz and his students tacitly assumed the parliamentary

democracy as a paradigm for the advanced political cultures. The pure typological

alternatives are complemented with the discussion of mixed cases such the Weimar

Germany or Finland with attempts to combine parliamentarism with presidential elements,

or Poland under Pilsudski attempting something that Brusewitz calls ”parliamentary

dictatorship” (Brusewitz 1928a, 1930). The successful parliamentary regimes in Western

Europe were also presented as those that managed to avoid the challenge of totalitarian

and authoritarian regimes – in most cases by creating a stronger executive power and

admitting the parliamentary initiative to the government.

Brusewitz and his students held the British type of parliamentary government with the

Bagehotian ”monistic” lines superior to the ”dualistic” theories à la Robert Redslob. The

dualist theories left a grey area between parliamentary and presidential powers, for

example in the Weimar Constitution. The efficiency of the parliamentary government was

implicitly set in opposition to the more ”deliberative” parliamentarism of mid-nineteenth

century Britain and the French Third Republic with their governmental instability.

Parliamentary studies in the journals

To get a rapid overview on the status of parliamentary studies, on the trends and fashions

among them or within the discipline in relation to them, I take a closer look at journals. My

concentration on the journals has nothing to do with the questionable present-day fashion

to regard journal articles as the main product of scholarship. This is a partisan project in

favour of the established journals over new one and of the mightiest province, the

Anglophone one, over all others. For me the journal articles are by-products of major

monograph projects, usually written on demand for some conferences or other occasions.

Statsvetenskaplig tidskrift and the Political Quarterly and Parliamentary Affairs are thus all

journals, in which parliamentary studies once played a prominent role. For all of them I

was able to find online the content of the issues and could also download articles. My uses

of these journals here is just illustrative: the titles and authors already allows us to date the

rise of new trends and the vanishing of old ones, without any deeper study of the content

and quality of the studies. The following analysis indicates the decline of the parliamentary

studies within the academic province of political science. Of course, the authors writing in

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these journals contained also other scholars, such as jurists and historians, as well as

journalists, politicians and parliamentary officials, engaged in parliamentary studies or

commenting current parliamentary phenomena.

Of course, the illustration of academic trends and fashions should be complemented by

detailed and substantial studies on the topics and of the period. My general point for using

the vocabulary of trends and fashions is to emphasise that also in the disciplinary histories

we should get rid of the narratives of ‘progress’. The rather sudden and groundless decline

of previously successful and interesting research practices also offers us an example of

the topic of this workshop, the fragmentation of political science.

Statsvetenskaplig tidskrift

The journal Statsvetenskaplig tidskrift was founded in 1897 and it is, after Political Science

Quarterly, the second-oldest ”political science journal” that continues its publication. In the

early years the journal had, like the most of the political scientists (statsvetare in Swedish)

a conservative bias against democratisation and parliamentarisation of Swedish politics.

The replacement of Kjellén by Brusewitz marks a turn of the tide also in the journal.

Brusewitz’s article from 1929 ”Vad menas med parlamentarismen? Ett försök till en

typologisk bestämning” [What is meant by parliamentarism. An attempt to a typological

determination], is a programmatic piece on the concept with implications for parliamentary

scholarship in Statsvetenskaplig tidskrift. His other studies and reviews also concentrate

on the typological discussion of political regimes in their relation to parliamentary politics in

different countries (Brusewitz 1928a,b,c, 1930,1937). The Lund professor Fredrik

Lagerroth, a great defender of the parliamentary powers of the Swedish estates in the

”Age of Liberty” (1718-1772), as well as the Göteborg professor Georg Andrén also

inspired parliamentary studies for their students.

The journal includes authors and reviewers from Denmark, Finland and Norway (see the

special issue 4/5, 1930 on parliamentarism in the four Nordic countries), occasionally also

translations from foreign authors, such as Hans Kelsen or Gerhard Leibholz. Besides

academic articles it published overviews on constitutional and parliamentary trends and

developments in different countries and book reviews, including books written in English,

German, French and Finnish. The overall profile of the journal was not bound to the

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discipline but – in accordance with the older Swedish concept of stat – the border was

relative to constitutional history and constitutional law, international relations and

international law, including the League of Nations, history of political thought as well as

more empirical studies in law, history, administration, finances and social sciences.

The Brusewitzian view (see also G. Andrén 1932) regards parliamentarism as a definite

type of political regime in opposition to others – absolute and constitutional monarchy,

presidentialism, semi-plebiscitarianism, dictatorship – with mixed forms possible. What

matters are the constitution and the party constellation in the parliament, and the divide

between majority and minority parliamentarism was a major topic in Nordic countries.

Missing are for example studies on the parliamentary control of the administration, which

remains prominent in the British studies and was strongly advocated in Max Weber’s

parliament pamphlet (see esp. Weber 1918, 235-248).

Equally missing is the interest in what the parliamentarians are doing, their speeches,

motions or legislative initiatives. Neither the parliamentary procedure for deliberation and

debate nor the rhetorical styles and practices of the parliamentary debate plays any role in

the Brusewitzian system or regime paradigm of parliamentarism. Nils Andrén’s review

article on the recent literature on the British parliament is the only exception. He deals with

the history of procedural tracts from Hakewill’s and Scobell’s seventeenth-century tracts

via John Hatsell and Thomas Erskine May to Gilbert Campion’s radical re-edition of May’s

Parliamentary Practice (first edition 1844) and the second edition of Campion’s own

Introduction to Parliamentary Procedure (N. Andrén 1949, esp. 265-271). Maybe Andrén

tacitly juxtaposes the narrow Swedish interpretation of parliamentarism as a type of regime

and the broader British understanding of the Parliament as a deliberative assembly and

the parliamentary government as a part of more comprehensive rhetorical culture debating

pro et contra. Laski’s above quoted worry about the fate of British parliamentary

government clearly includes this dimension. Perhaps Andrén’s contribution signals the end

of the Brusewitzian approach, which he followed in his study of the British acceptance of

the parliamentary government in the 1830s (N. Andrén 1947).

The Swedish bicameralism was a regular subject to reform proposals and remained a key

topic in Statsvetenskaplig tidskrift the 1950s and 1960s. Otherwise we can note a

remarkable decline of parliamentary themes after Brusewitz’s retirement and death. The

lack of comparative studies on the post-war recovery of West European parliamentarism

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marks the contrast to the inter-war profile of the journal. Party and election studies and the

US type of political science methodologies enter to the journal. However, the old domestic

tradition of political science resisted the enthusiasm for new fashions. Olle Nyman in

Parlamentarisk regeringssätt (1981) in a sense follows the Brusewitzian agenda by

offering an overview on Swedish parliamentarism, discusses competing definitions for the

regime type and presents the constitutional reform proposal from 1960s and 1970s.

Political Quarterly

The journal Political Quarterly was founded by Leonard Woolf in 1930. Its initial profile was

between an academic journal and a broad political periodical, similarly to the Edinburgh

Review or Westminster Review that had terminated their publication. Political science

professors, including Harold Laski, George Catlin, Carl J. Friedrich and most actively Ivor

Jennings, contributed to the Political Quarterly.

Parliamentary themes were prominent in the first decade of Political Quarterly. Unlike in

Sweden, in Britain the internal procedure and agenda questions are regularly discussed in

debates on the Parliament. The journalist Herbert Sidebothan in ”The Inefficiency of the

Parliament” evokes a common mood of time on the ”declining prestige of the Parliament”

(Sidebothan 1930, 351). While admitting that ”Parliament does not govern”, he insists on:

”For the proper discharge of its duties that Parliament must be independent of the

Government” (ibid, 352), and he demands an end to the government’s right to dissolve the

Parliament (ibid, 354), and links this reform to the Parliament’s procedure and agenda.

M.P. Walter Elliot (1930), however, in his reply defends the Parliament’ dependence on

the electorate. Following European trends to strengthen the executive powers, the ”New

Party” supporters J. Stratchey and C.M. Joad strongly want to transfer the legislative

initiative and the leadership of the parliamentary agenda to the government. ”Our

proposals are inspired throughout by the conviction that when a Government has been

elected, it should be permitted to govern” (Stratchey & Joad 1931, 356). For such views

the Parliament is no a deliberative assembly.

Ramsay MacDonald’s new ”National Government” provoked angry responses from

Jennings and Laski. In ”The Constitution under Strain” (1932) Jennings discusses the

powers of the Prime Minister to dissolve the Parliament independently of his position of

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party leader. He turns against Laski’s support of such interpretation (Jennings 1932, 196-

199) and parodies the new government’s relationship to the Parliament: ”from the point of

view of governments, Parliamentary debate is a waste of time” or even ”unbusinesslike”:

”Parliament is merely a nuisance” (ibid, 201). As contrast to such theses, Jennings insists:

”Parliamentary debate is valuable for the very reasons why it is obnoxious to governments.

It compels ministers to formulate reasons for their acts; it insists upon the examination of

motives; it makes government public and hinders if it does not prevent corruption.” (ibid.)

The Parliament’s ”power to criticise openly is the only method of securing the purity of

administration” (ibid, 202). Such insistence on the debate and the control of government

through it as the key elements of parliamentary politics are completely absent from the

agenda of Swedish parliamentary studies.

Laski puts the main emphasis on the value of the opposition and party conflict. The

National Government’s stress on the unity leads to a view that ”opposition to the

government is a crime, and party spirit a threat to well-being” (Laski 1934, 21). He

parodies the ”new, ‘scientific’ approach” to politics in favour of ”co-operation instead of

conflict”, for which the ”old function of opposition is obsolete” (ibid, 23). If the government

secures its own electoral majority, it tends to ”deprive the proceedings of the House of

Commons all reality and effectiveness” (ibid, 25). The contempt of debate in the name of

the huge parliamentary majority also tends to lead to ”scepticism of parliamentary

institutions” (ibid, 25-26).

Jennings four-part essay ”Parliament in wartime” (from April 1940 to January 1941) is,

despite its chronicle style, written in the course of events, of general interest for

parliamentary scholars. If we compare it with Fabienne Bock’s recent study Un

parlementarisme de guerre 1914-1919 (2002), some differences of the exemplary role of

the Parliament in British political culture, as compared with the seemingly omnipotent

Assemblée nationale of the Third Republic, become obvious. Bock insists for example that

the Assembly was not summoned from August 1914 to January 1915 and obliged its

members under conscription to military service, instead to the parliament.

Jennings’s first essay refers to the early months of the war, when Britain was only

marginally involved in the battles. He concluded: ”Parliament has performed its critical

function extremely well. There has been no suppression of opinion; indeed, when

questions war policy and war aims were under discussion the solitary Communist member

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was given more opportunity than anyone to put his point of view.” (Jennings 1940a, 193)

The failed British invasions to resist the Nazi occupation of Norway changed the situation.

With the vote of confidence on the 8th of May 1940 with 281 to 200, ”Mr. Chamberlain had

won, but he had also lost” (Jennings 1940b, 238). Labour Party joined the coalition

government under Churchill. Jennings makes an interesting remark on a major

Westminster principle, namely ”that if there was no an Opposition there was nevertheless

a ‘shadow opposition’ prepared to act for the purposes of parliamentary procedure” (ibid,

246). Instead of adapting the parliamentary procedure to the government without a real

opposition, the Westminster Parliament maintained its procedure as a methodological

principle to enable debating all items pro et contra, although in personal terms no

opposition worth the name was found in the House of Commons.

The regular meeting of the Parliament, its control of the government’s and administration

emergency measures etc. illustrate for Jennings that ”British democracy is far from being a

temporary dictatorship” (Jennings 1940c, 353). For him ”the parliamentary control of

ministers arises not from their fear of defeat but from their anxiety to maintain and increase

their popularity” (ibid, 354). After the fall of France in June 1940, the House of Commons

continued to defend civil liberties against emergency powers (ibid, 357-359). However,

Jennings blames the House for ”the strange and unconstitutional idea that representative

government can be carried on by secret session” (ibid, 363), as opposed to the principle of

publicity, as classically advocated in Jeremy Bentham’s Essay in Political Tactics (see

Bentham 1843). In his last article Jennings admitted that in the wartime Parliament ”there

have been no ‘politics’. The debates are no longer an oratorical contest between opposing

groups” (Jennings 1941, 55), and he blames the tendency to reduce the Parliament into an

information office: ”The purpose of the Parliament is to give not news but views” (ibid, 62).

Due to the secret sessions the House of Commons tended to lose its initiating and

focusing role in the public debate in the British political culture (ibid, 65).

In the post-war decades Political Quarterly soon lost its academic quality to the new

Parliamentary Affairs (1947) and Political Studies (1951). Occasionally scholarly articles

on parliamentary topics were still published. R.B. Bassett discusses in ”British

parliamentary government today” the volume of Campion and others, Parliament. A survey

as well as the relationshop of the Labour Party to parliamentary government (Bassett

1951). Peter Bromhead’s ”How should Parliament be Reformed” (1958) gives an overview

of the Westminster reform committees’ work. An unsigned article ”Decline of the

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Parliament” from 1963, at the end of the Macmillan era, is the last that I have picked up

from Political Quarterly before noticing that it turns uninteresting for my purposes. The

thesis of the article is: ”The signs are that Parliament is in decline – losing in popular

esteem, losing in the degree of control it should exercise over the government, failing to

adapt itself to the complexity of the tasks the quickened tempo of modern life had thrust

upon it. For this it has chiefly itself to blame.” (Decline, 1963, 233) The article has

interesting suggestions, such as the full professionalism of parliamentarians, whereas in

matters of debate it seems that the ”modernist” tense of the author has lost the point.

Parliamentary Affairs

The Parliamentary Affairs was founded by the Hansard Society, which also publishes the

debates of the Westminster Parliament. Its creation marks an academisation of research

by retaining the paradigmatic status of Westminster. ”Parliamentary”, not ”legislative” or

”representative” problematics in its title is a clear sign of this, although the British

Parliament is discussed in a comparative perspective (and a special issues of the US

congress was published in the issue 3:1, 1949). Still, Parliamentary Affairs it was not a

narrowly academic journal but for example parliamentary officials and parliamentarians

themselves were invited to contribute. For this journal I have both collected the tables of

content and discuss some articles that interest me.

The initial problematic of the journal follows close to the broader British concept of what is

”parliamentary”. The Clerk of the Parliament, Eric Taylor, present in a three-part article the

elementary concepts of parliamentary procedure and discusses their political uses (Taylor

1947, 1948a,b), and Thomas Lloyd Humberstone deals with the university representation,

that the Labour government was abolishing in Britain (Humberstone 1947, 1948a,b). The

legislative buildings and parliamentary library refer to topics not on the agenda of

Statsvetenskaplig tidskrift, probably not even the question of the payment of members.

The role of ”women in the legislature” also long time remained a non-question for the

Swedish colleagues, despite a few female members in the Riksdag since the early 1920s.

In the 1950s the intra-parliamentary themes as well as the general institutional and

constitutional questions of Westminster remain central in the journal. At the same time the

parliamentary institutions and practices in Commonwealth and other non-European

countries rise to the agenda of the journal, together with the voting and election topics as

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well as the parties separated from their parliamentary groups. Starting in the 1950s but

increasingly in the 1960s, we can identify questions of the ”Parliament and-X” type, the ”X”

referring to the press and other media, trade unions or other interest groups, civil service,

public enterprises or science and so on. Here ”Parliament” no longer stand as a procedural

model of politics, but is one ”power factor” among others, the relations of which are

analysed frequently with a social science modernisation paradigm. After mid-sixties the

procedural questions and intra-parliamentary concepts receive less and less attention,

although the never vanish completely from a journal still published by the Hansard Society.

As an example of the broader British type of parliamentary problematic we can mention

Gilbert Campion’s article ”European parliamentary procedure” (1953), based on the

volume that he co-edited for the Inter-Parliamentary Union. Campion presents a short and

useful comparison between the British and French type of parliamentary practices, the

latter serving also as a prototype for the most other continental parliaments. He discusses

topics such as the inclusion of cabinet ministers to parliament vs. their exclusion from it,

the government formation in two- and multi-party system, the parliamentary agenda-

setting and the committee systems in a manner that illustrates the continued relevance of

the two historical paradigms of parliament. The article can also be read as a warning

against too simple theorising or generalising about parliaments.

The parliamentary scholars frequently criticised, restricted or straightforwardly rejected the

thesis of the decline of parliament. J.G.S. Shearer’s review (1953) on G.W. Keeton’s book

The Passing of Parliament is a good example of this. The author argues from the insider

perspective and judges from Keeton’s thesis on the loss of the power to the ministerial

administration in Whitehall as exaggerated or even misunderstanding how the Parliament

exercises its power. A similar tone, although toward a different ”loss” of power can be seen

in David Mitrany’s article ”Parliamentary Democracy and Poll Democracy” (1955).

The sanctioning of the ”unparliamentary language and conduct” of members is a practice

known to the British parliamentary procedure since the early seventeenth-century. In

Westminster the context-dependence of unparliamentary expressions has always been

recognised. Commonwealth parliaments, however, have made lists unparliamentary

expressions, and they serve as the basis for the article ”Expressions in Parliament 1955”

collects allowed and disallowed expressions. The expressions include both everyday

words, such as ”liar” or ”dishonest” and metonymical disqualifications, such as ”mango

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diplomacy” or ”mimicking Molotov”, but no discussion of criteria for disallowing or

comparing different parliament’s degree of ”toleration” of them is included.

A more general comparison is included in Lionel Laing’s ”The Transplantation of the

Parliament” on the adoption of the Westminster parliamentary procedure abroad. Despite

some mechanical imitations, such as the use of the name ”Hansard”, the author concludes

that the parliamentary level is not lower in new parliaments: ”Conscious effort is made to

retain the sense of dignity which seems an inherent quality of parliamentary institutions

and nowhere is this conscious effort better exemplified than in those new countries where

British rule is giving way to autonomous legislatures” (Laing 1957, 407).

Articles on the reform of parliament are occasionally discussed in the fifties (Viseman

1958, 1959), sixties Hill & Wichelow 1965 and seventies (Walkland 1976). Perhaps more

interesting are two articles on parliamentary procedure, namely Richard A. Chapman’s

”The Significance of Parliamentary Procedure” (1962) and C.J. Boulton’s ”Recent

Developments in House of Commons Procedure” (1969). Chapman offers a pedagogical

reminder of the historical significance of the procedure as a background for the analysis of

the Parliament’s contemporary role that combines its services to the government to enable

and orderly organising of the parliamentary agenda and the protection of parliamentary

minorities against the arbitrary use of the majority rule. Boulton’s work is connected to the

committees on the procedural reform in the 1960s. The character and power of standing

and select committees, the financial procedure and the emergency debates as discussed

in the committees are presented without further questions of their parliamentary

significance in general. However, the nineteenth-century problematic of how to combine

the increased parliamentary power due to the growing agenda of items with the ever-

diminishing time to debate single items remains also here at the core of both papers.

Why was the parliament lost from political science?

As we can see from the abstract, I originally assumed two reasons for the decline of

parliaments in political science of the 1960s. The first is the professionalisation of political

science and the ambition to “apply theories” used in the neighbouring and allegedly more

advanced fields. In parliamentary studies the specific reason for the decline of intra-

parliamentary questions could perhaps refer to the quantitatively leading position of the US

15

political science in comparison to the European disciplines in the first post-war decades.

And the US Congress rather identifies itself as a ”legislature” than as a ”parliament”.

My second initial guess refers to the subordination of parliaments to parties and elections.

The German constitutional lawyer Gerhard Leibholz developed a theory of Parteienstaat,

supporting an interpretation of the West German 1949 Grundgesetz that gives to the

parliamentary parties an extraordinary position and marginalises the free mandate of

members (Leibholz 1951). The parties have played a decisive role in the continental multi-

party regimes in order to render a ”parliamentary diplomacy” to the formation of coalition

governments possible. In such situations the emphasis on the free mandate, intra-

parliamentary procedural regulations and rhetorical practices has declined.

Leibholz’s thesis does not play any role for the Swedish and British periodicals. The party

mandate of members and of the marginalisation of the their freedom are not on their

agenda. In a broader sense, nonetheless, we can speak of a metonymic identification of

politics with party politics for the entire post-war Western Europe. From this perspective

the parliament was judged as only one arena of party politics among others, which even

tended to be secondary to both election campaigns and party conferences. The Kautskyan

idea (1911) of the Social Democratic parliamentarian as the delegate of the party tempted

also the bourgeois parties, which built their electoral and organisational apparatus after

World War II, especially when, as in Sweden, the elections were organised along strict

party lists. To this trend corresponds also the rise of the parties to the core of the

international political science agenda in the 1950s and 1960s.

In countries with old parliamentary and parliament studies traditions, such as Sweden and

Britain, the scientistic pathos did not fully dominate in academic political science of the first

post-war decades. A specialist journal such as Parliamentary Affairs had also resources to

resist academic fashions: scientistic articles were there, but they neither gained hegemony

nor suppressed the other modes of discussing parliamentary politics in Britain. The point

was, rather, a disinterest or an inability to re-think the parliamentary politics from within.

Here a discrepancy between the Swedish and British parliamentary studies is obvious.

The Brusewitzian look at parliaments as a part of a regime typology was hardly continued

by his students and successors. It could also be speculated that the very post-war

recovery of parliamentary regimes in the face of the dictatorial threats, while the old

16

constitutionalist remnants vanished, made this constellation obsolete for Swedish

scholars, although the reform of the bi-cameral Riksdag still was on the Swedish political

and scholarly agenda. The Bagehotian (1867) momentum opposing presidential and

parliamentary regimes, which Brusewitz still followed, was equally de-thematised under

the recognition of the US ”leadership” of the western world.

Laski, Jennings and post-war British parliamentary studies discussed the late nineteenth-

century dilemma between the ideal of thorough deliberation and scarce parliamentary

time. The ”Parliament and-X” type of studies might have hoped to overcome this dilemma

by subordinating the parliament to a ‘broader’ political culture and to sociological

approaches for its analysis. In such a context the scarcity of time or the loss of the

possibilities to debate appeared as an inevitable part in the process of socio-cultural

”modernisation” of politics. It was less a scientistic theory of parliaments than the loss of

the insight into the paradigmatic singularity of the Parliament for the entire political culture

that made British scholars disinterested in parliamentary studies.

Ivor Jennings formulated the old paradigm as follows: ”The democratic process is a

process of constant argument over different opinions. The House of Commons begins the

public debate which is carried on by the weekly journals of opinion and the monthly

reviews. From there it percolated into the leading articles and thence into the railway

carriage, the factory and the office.” (Jennings 1941, 65) He admitted that this scheme did

not work during the wartime: ”Parliament, for ordinary people, is not only not in news; it is

also out of the war.” (ibid.) In the post-war era the paradigm of the Parliament as an

initiator of public debates was still farther away from the experiences of citizens, due both

to the media changes and to the governmental politics. The singularity of a parliamentary

type of political culture, with its emphasis on the procedure and on inherent value of the

debating pro et contra was no longer identified or was judged as obsolete, not only to the

public but also to the parliamentary scholars.

For the political sociologists conducting “Parliament and X” type of studies this loss was

inevitable. They regarded Parliament as merely one ”social institution” among others, not

as a rhetorical model for a debating political culture. Such type of research could no longer

understand the perspective of older parliamentary studies, parliamentary officials or many

parliamentarians themselves. Political theorists, who still insisted on the singularity of the

17

Westminster Parliament for politics in general, such as Michael Oakeshott or Bernard

Crick, were marginalised in the British political science profession.

A recovery of parliamentary studies

Parliamentary studies never vanished completely. On the contrary, besides Parliamentary

Affairs, also new journals, such as Parliamentary History, Parliaments, Estates &

Representation, Journal of Legislative Studies or Zeitschrift für Parlamentsfragen were

founded, and established national and international institutions allowed the specialists to

write on these topics. However, the studies in these specialist publications, so far as they

concern the contemporary period at all, rather resembled those of Brusewitz in their

concentration on parliamentarism as a regime type or to the “Parliament and X” type of

political sociology. Parliamentary studies also faced with new adversaries after 1968, such

as different attempts to reactivate direct democracy, and this confrontation appears to be

for example behind the founding of Zeitschrift für Parlamentsfragen. The link to older

British type of studies on the parliamentary procedure and political cultures of debating pro

et contra have been largely missing from these specialist publications.

The wake of ”rhetorical turn” in the human sciences, on the way since the 1980s (see

Nelson et al. 1987) or the different versions of “new rhetoric” could have offered link to

older layers of parliamentary eloquence. However, it lasted long time for them to reach

parliamentary problematics, at least regarding the contemporary period.

Sweden, indeed, has had a lively vague of rhetorical studies since the 1980s. The main

authors, such as Kurt Johannesson or Göran Hägg (see Johannesson et al. 1987,

Johannesson 2000; Hägg 1998, 2002) are literary scholars and do not discuss the specific

parliamentary genre rhetoric when they make excursions to politics.

In Britain in particular Quentin Skinner’s Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes

(1996) has inspired rhetorical studies on the Parliament in the sixteenth and seventeenth

century Westminster (see Mack 2002, Colclough 2005, Peltonen 2012). For the

contemporary period also a new interest in analysing rhetoric and political speeches can

be detected within in British political science (see for example Finlayson and Martin 2008).

The links to the distinct parliamentary genre of rhetoric, including the older British tracts on

18

parliamentary eloquence and parliamentary procedure (discussed in Palonen 2008a and

2008b) are, however, hardly thematised in these studies.

For the new interest in parliamentary rhetoric and discourse the linguists have played a

pioneering role (see for example Bailey ed. 2004, Ilie ed. 2010). With some exceptions,

such as Cornelia Ilie, an immigrant to Sweden, they neither have any interest in older

practices of parliamentary rhetoric or on the role of parliamentary procedure for the

rhetorical political culture.

Today an inter-disciplinary cooperation of parliamentary studies has gained ground, and

within it a new emphasis on concepts, rhetoric and procedure has become visible (see the

EuParlNet website, http://euparl.net/). All this has been supported by such factors as the

online publication of parliamentary debates, both for the contemporary and past ones.

Such electronic corpora greatly facilitate the use for example of conceptual historical

approaches in the longitudinal and comparative studies of political concepts in general and

intra-parliamentary concepts in particular (see Ihalainen & Palonen 2009).

Similarly the older documents and studies on parliamentary rhetoric and parliamentary

procedure are now largely availably online. For recovering ”lost treasures” (Skinner 1998,

112) for the understanding of parliamentary politics the research is now better equipped

than a half-century ago. In other words, we do have better chances than to distinguish the

parliamentary character of politics from mere politics in parliaments.

Finally, in both political and academic debates an insight into the contingent and

controversial character of politics is, despite strong populist reactions and technocratic

illusions, more widespread than ever. What is needed is the clear recognition that the

parliament is the political institution, in which the fair dealing with opposed points of view

and the debating them pro et contra has built in to its procedure. For a study of politics that

recognises the contingent and controversial character of politics, the study of

parliamentary procedures, practices and concepts becomes as first rank subject matter.

19

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