This week we’re looking at the politics of parliamentary reform. Parliament is the central institution of UK democracy yet often it appears subordinate to government. Why does that matter? How did it come about? And are there any lessons for the possibility of reform in the future?
Parliament is at the heart of democracy—it’s where voters are represented, laws are debated, and key decisions are made. But who really controls what gets discussed and how time is allocated?
In the UK, that power lies overwhelmingly with the government, leaving most MPs with little say over what they debate. That seems odd—after all, parliament is supposed to be sovereign. So why does it allow the government, a supposedly subordinate body, to set its agenda?
To unravel this, Prof Alan Renwick is joined by Dr Tom Fleming, Lecturer in British and Comparative Politics at UCL and a member of the UCL Constitution Unit.
Mentioned in this episode:
Alan Renwick: [00:00:00] Hello, this is UCL Uncovering Politics, and this week we're looking at the Politics of Parliamentary Reform. At least in theory, Parliament is the central institution of UK democracy, yet often it appears subordinate to government. Why does this matter, how did it come about, and are there lessons for the possibility of reform in the future?
Hello, my name is Alan Renwick and welcome to [00:01:00] UCL Uncovering Politics, the podcast of the School of Public Policy and Department of Political Science at University College London. Parliament is the core political institution in many democracies. It's the body that voters elect. It's from Parliament that government, the executive branch, is formed. Parliament also provides the forum in which issues are debated, proposals are scrutinized, and key decisions are made.
Who decides what parliament discusses and how time is allocated is crucial. Here in the UK, that power is overwhelmingly concentrated in the hands of the government. This means that most MPs have little say over what they debate. But that seems curious. Parliament, it's often said, is sovereign, yet parliament allows a supposedly subordinate body, the government, to decide what it does.
So, what's going on? How has this situation come about? And what can we learn from it? Well, my colleague, Dr. Tom Fleming, has just co-authored an article [00:02:00] exploring exactly these questions. He is Lecturer in British and Comparative Politics here in the UCL Department of Political Science and a member of the UCL Constitution Unit, and he's also an expert on all things parliamentary, and I'm delighted that he joins me now.
Tom, welcome back to UCL Uncovering Politics. Very good as ever to have you on the show. Let’s begin with a bit of background here. Both of us are very familiar with these parliamentary things, but many of our listeners won't be. So when we're talking about Parliament's agenda, what do we mean by that, and how is that agenda decided today?
Tom Fleming: Okay, thanks Alan, and thanks very much for having me back. The very first thing I should say is that only talking about one bit of Parliament here. In Parliament, the UK has two chambers, the House of Commons and the House of Lords. What we're focused on here, and what we're focused on in this article, is the House of Commons in particular.
Things work differently up the other end of the corridor. In the House of Commons, as you've already said, most of what [00:03:00] is discussed in the House of Commons is decided by the government. When we talk about agenda control or agenda setting, we're mostly talking about who decides what things, what motions, what bills, what proposals are going to be debated and discussed on any given day.
In the House of Commons, the default situation is that the government decides what's discussed. There is a rule that's called Standing Order 14, and it begins, same as provided in this order, that government business shall have precedence at every sitting. Then it goes on to list some exceptions to that default arrangement.
Those exceptions are things that I think some listeners might be familiar with. There are things called opposition days. There are 20 of those in each session. A session usually lasting about a year. There are then 35 days, though not all of those are in the House of Commons itself, where the agenda -
Alan Renwick: So that's 35 days every year.
Tom Fleming: 35 days every year or every session which are set by a committee of backbench MPs. Those who are not ministers and are not sort of spokespeople [00:04:00] for the opposition parties, but backbench MPs. There are days when they can choose what's discussed, and then there are a certain number of Fridays in each session set aside when laws proposed by backbenchers, so called private members bills, can then be discussed. I suppose that the latter of those has been in the news quite a lot recently because of the so-called Assisted Dying Bill.
Alan Renwick: Just listening to you there and setting out the various exceptions to this rule, sounds like there are quite a lot of days when non-government business is discussed.
I mean, I don't know how many days a year parliament sits, but, you know, maybe 200 days, something like that? And if there are 35 opposition days, and then-
Tom Fleming: There's 20 opposition days, there's 35 backbench days, although I think only about 27 possibly of those must be in the chamber, some of them happen elsewhere.
But yeah, to engage with the basic point. Yes, there are still days when, many days, other actors can set the agenda, but I think there's various things we need to bear in mind when interpreting what that means. The first of which is perhaps to say that even when the government chooses what's discussed, that's not the same as [00:05:00] saying only they discuss it, particularly when we think about parliament's role being to scrutinize the government and to scrutinize the government's laws. The fact that there's more time spent on government business could mean we're getting more scrutiny, more chances for those other MPs to scrutinise them. It's not as simple as saying more time for the government is worse for the opposition in terms of some of their goals. But in terms of deciding what's discussed, it clearly means there's less time for that.
Alan Renwick: But I guess I was going to kind of the opposite direction. Isn't that the case that the opposition and others can put all sorts of things on the agenda and get lots of things through?
Or are you suggesting that the government does have more control than that suggests?
Tom Fleming: I think there's two things that would slightly push against that. One is that, there are limits on the types of things that they can propose on these days. So legislation, I talked earlier about private members bills, those are bills that, subject to overcoming certain procedural hurdles, have some chance of getting to be the law.
But on those opposition days and on those backbench days, they're not debating laws, they're debating motions. [00:06:00] They might simply be neutral motions that say, ‘the House has considered X or Y issue’. More often, particularly for the opposition, there'll be a motion that expresses some sort of criticism of the government.
But their passage mostly has no immediate substantive impact. These are chances to debate an issue, express a view, but they're not a chance to push through policies or change things or, or at least to, um, invite MPs to vote for policies.
Alan Renwick: Would it be fair to say, when its business not being directed by government, then Parliament is more than just a, and I mean this is an unkind phrase, a talking show?
Whereas when Parliament is doing serious stuff and making decisions that might impact people's lives, that's very much being controlled by government. Or is that going too far?
Tom Fleming: That’s perhaps slightly phrasing it in an overblown way, but broadly, yes. Parliament, when it did, when in the Commons, when its agenda is being set by the others, is largely in a debating mode. When it's set by the government, it's largely in a legislating decision-making mode.
Just the second thing I might just briefly [00:07:00] note is that the timing and distribution of some of these days is not entirely within the opposition or the backbench business committee's grasp. So, whilst the rules say the opposition should get 20 of these days in each session, it doesn't say when they should happen.
It doesn't say the opposition should get to pick when they happen. So, the opposition are reliant on the government making that time available, which, by and large, they usually are. But at certain times, it does mean the government can hold these back or avoid them being on a certain sort of awkward day and things like that.
And because they are set out in a kind of pro rata, well, not in a pro rata fashion, they're set out per session. And I've said earlier that a session usually lasts about a year. But once a session goes longer than a year, then that means the share of days going to these, or the guaranteed share of days going to these other actors could get smaller if the government doesn't voluntarily make extra days available.
Alan Renwick: So, it sounds like the government agenda control over parliament, over the House of Commons in the UK really matters. I mean, this is [00:08:00] something that really makes a difference to what kinds of things can go through, what kinds of things can pass.
Tom Fleming: Absolutely. And if we step back a bit, I think one of the ways that I found it useful that others have used it to try and sort of explain the importance of agenda setting rules for what happens in the House of Commons, is that we often study electoral systems, obviously you've done research on electoral systems, to try and think about how the votes we cast at elections then get translated into seats in a particular chamber of parliament.
The next step of how those seats then gets translated into politics, particularly policy outcomes, at a point where the electoral system stops mattering. What matters, among other things, are the procedures by which the Parliament or the chamber of Parliament chooses to share our influence amongst different actors.
Alan Renwick: So procedural geekery really matters. And how does the UK compare with other countries? Is this unusual or is the UK typical?
Tom Fleming: The UK's not typical. It's usually seen in the literature as being, the more government-controlled end of the [00:09:00] possible spectrum of kind of agenda setting processes.
It’s not true that all other parliaments do it one way, and the UK is the weird one, but it is true that when you think about sort of degrees of government control, the agenda in the House of Commons is set by the government to a much greater extent than it is in many other places, where there tends to be a larger degree of input from other parties through a variety of means.
Sometimes there might be a business committee of some kind where the party leaders or party business managers get together to agree the agenda, possibly by consensus or possibly through rules that allocate influence proportionately to your seats, but through a variety of ways. This includes, in some places, the chamber itself ending up having a vote on the proposed agenda, different parliaments managed to spread out influence over the agenda in a slightly more diffuse way.
Alan Renwick: And we're going to be focusing on how this system came about, so perhaps we should get the kind of overall picture of that. [00:10:00] How this has changed over time, when this, this current system emerged, before we go into some of the detail on that.
Tom Fleming: Absolutely. The episode that we're going to be talking about, was in 1902, which was something called the Balfour Reforms.
I'll come back to that in a second. But I think that the main story here is that around the start of the 19th century, there was far less government control, far fewer rules about when MPs could and couldn't propose things, far fewer restrictions on their ability to do so. And gradually, across the course of the 19th century, through a series of reforms over time, that government control got extended. Sometimes in bigger steps, sometimes in smaller steps, but it's a long-term process that accretion of government control. Then in 1902, the episode that we studied, you have this moment called the Balfour Reforms, so called because they were led by the senior minister and soon after the prime minister, Arthur Balfour, which cemented that process.
It sometimes gets talked about as a sort of big bang, but I think it's better to see it as the culmination of this longer-term process. [00:11:00] And that basically set the template that has sort of remained since with some slight adjustments. That's the first time they adopt a rule that has a very similar formulation of saying the default is the government chooses, apart from some exceptions, and that has changed slightly. So, backbench business was only introduced in 2010, although that was quite like something that had sort of persisted in the 20th century for a while as well. But the basic model of government control as the default was probably cemented from the start of the 20th century but had evolved gradually across the 19th.
Alan Renwick: And you're focusing in on this episode in 1902. What's so interesting about that moment?
Tom Fleming: So, I think several things, partly that this has been singled out by historians, political scientists, and so on as being the sort of landmark moment that capped off this process.
Another reason is exactly, as I just said, that principle, the basic idea that the default arrangement is that time belongs to the government. Accept some exceptions [00:12:00] that seems to us quite an important procedural moment as well, sort of saying that in the rules in a black and white manner.
Alan Renwick: So, do I understand by that that it had already become the case before in 1902? That government tended to dominate the agenda of parliament, but it was always possible for parliament to kind of reverse that without government say, or the government had to continually kind of reassert that power. Whereas now, it is the case that government would have to consent to removing this power.
Tom Fleming: I think that's right. It's a bit of both in that over time, certain days or certain slots had been earmarked as those either explicitly for the government or for types of business that tended to be things the government would do, so the same in effect. But what tended to happen, particularly from the 1880s onwards, for about the two decades running up to this change, was that towards the end of a session, the government would find it was running out of time for other business it wanted to get through before parliament would stop sitting.
What it would do, is it would introduce a [00:13:00] motion saying, for the rest of this session, we're going to have that slot on that slot that's normally for other MPs is now going to be the government business. They would take up more than their sort of default allocation. What happened in this change is that they basically built in that process of extension. So, they slightly enlarged the share of days given to the government. Meaning, they made it more predictable which times would be given to the government. They built into the rules automatically later in the session, more time would accrue to the government rather than the government having to come to MPs and say, could we have more time, please?
I think that speaks to important distinction here. We sometimes use the terms the term government to mean the ministers sitting in their offices in Whitehall, um, who were also MPs. But we also sometimes use it to mean most MPs in the House of Commons who support the government. So currently, the Labour Party and their MPs.
But here that distinction really matters because we're moving from a position where the government comes to the House of Commons and asks its MPs to vote for it to have more time versus them no longer having to even ask their [00:14:00] MPs. So, there's no risk that their MPs could say, no, actually, we don't want to give you that time.
Even if the risk was, you know, not that large before, they now don't have to run the risk at all. It's just their power by right, not something they have to request.
Alan Renwick: Okay, that's clear. Thank you. So, we've got the background here. Now let's go to the paper. And what's the question that you're asking about this episode in the paper?
Tom Fleming: So, it's quite a simple question, really. Did this change in 1902, this centralisation of agenda control with the government, happen by consensus? So, for these changes to come about, MPs must vote for these procedural changes. So, the question is, was this consensual? And did the opposition party, the liberals at the time, vote for this, or did they vote against it?
Alan Renwick: And we always build upon existing literature when we're doing this kind of research, so what did, what did we know already, or think we knew already?
Tom Fleming: Yeah, and so, this paper is very directly targeted at saying, there's something in the literature we find a bit surprising, so let's explore that a bit more.
And that something is that the existing literature tends to depict this as being a consensual [00:15:00] procedural development. They suggest that the Unionist government brought this forward, but the Liberal Party -
Alan Renwick: So, Unionist is what the Conservative Party tended to be called in the United States.
Tom Fleming: Yes, exactly. So, Conservative might be the term that people are more familiar with. Yeah, we can say conservative because that's simpler. The Conservative government at the time led initially by Lord Salisbury and then by Arthur Balfour brought forward this reform in the House of Commons. The Liberal opposition, the main opposition party at the time, in this account did not oppose this change.
There were some other smaller parties who might have done, but the kind of big opposition party did not. And we see in various bits of writing across quite a long period. It's sort of been most developed by a couple of political scientists called Eggers and Sperling, and a sort of relatively recent article where they also, set out this idea, that this was a consensual development.
So that paper is not actually asking the same question as us. They're not asking, how did this reform happen? They're asking, why did this reform happen by consensus? The kind of starting point is the thing we want to ask a bit about. [00:16:00] They draw on that earlier literature, and where we come in is saying we're not that convinced that this did happen by consensus.
We think that's important because, theoretically, it seems a bit surprising for this to happen by consensus. It's a kind of redistributive change. It takes some power away from MPs, some MPs, and it gives more power to ministers. So, we might expect MPs to dislike that if we think, um, about their kind of self-interest.
When we look at that existing literature, there's not loads of direct evidence. There are people saying this happened by consensus and kind of citing earlier work. But when you can really dig into the weeds of this, there's not loads of direct evidence based on how did MPs vote when this procedure came forward?
Alan Renwick: So, you've got the question, how consensual was this decision? How do you go about seeking an answer to that?
Tom Fleming: So, what we do, we look at basically the voting patterns. We go back and look at the records of how MPs voted. If the claim that we want to probe is the Liberal Party either didn't oppose this or even embraced this, we think, well, let's look at how [00:17:00] Liberal MPs voted. To the extent they voted against this, that would seem incompatible with the existing story.
Alan Renwick: So that sounds simple. What do you find?
Tom Fleming: We first look at one vote which is on adopting this change, the key change we single out that we think is particularly important. We also look at eight further votes that were on amendments trying to water down that proposal. On all nine of those votes, we find that the Liberal Party voted unitedly against the government proposal. We initially tried to measure how cohesively they voted. We might think sort of a majority of Liberal MPs would vote one way and a minority another. We find none of that. They're completely united on this. Not all MPs voted, but of those MPs who vote, all of them vote against the government.
Alan Renwick: Every single one. And I think you also find that the majority of them do vote. So, it's not just that, it's not like there's only a few of them taking part in the vote.
Tom Fleming: I can't remember now if it's a majority. But one thing we do to get to the concern that might be, well, they're voting against it, but they don't [00:18:00] really care. Maybe this is only a handful of MPs turn up and so what we're mistaking for opposition is just a small number of them.
But we show that we looked back at the previous session and looked at the average turnout of Liberal MPs in their votes in that session. We find there's higher turnout on these votes than the median vote in that preceding session. We think this is a reasonable turnout, even if it's not all MPs. In general, turnout in these votes in this period is much lower than 100%.
Alan Renwick: This seems very curious. You've got an existing literature that seems to agree that this was a consensual process. Then you look at the evidence on, well, how did people vote in this decision? You find that it was the complete reverse of a consensual process. Every single liberal MP who voted, voted against the proposal from the government. How did the existing literature manage to get it so wrong? When you talk about, well, what evidence would you look at in [00:19:00] order to decide whether this is consensual, it seems blindingly obvious that you would look at the voting record, and the voting record shows that direct opposite of what the existing literature seems to show.
Is there some more complexity in here that I'm not getting?
Tom Fleming: I think so. I'd say a couple of things and I'd preface them both with the fact we were keen for this paper to not be a sort of pedantic ‘gotcha, these people are wrong type paper’. Rather, we wanted to set out to explore again something where we think there's scope for further exploration.
That might just be a semantic difference to make us feel less confrontational, but I think it's sort of important that we don't frame the paper that way. On the substance, so you've said there, you think it's blindingly obvious that we should look at the votes. That's not automatically true. I do think that's true, but I think a different perspective would be to say, MPs vote against opposition MPs, vote against the government for all sorts of reasons. This includes habit and point scoring - it's just what they do. If you're the opposition it's what's expected, and so maybe there's a difference between did they oppose it and did they vote against it [00:20:00].
I'm sceptical of that because I think we can't really know what's inside MPs heads and so it seems reasonable to look at their actions to think of opposition as being an activity, rather than a mindset. I think that seems more consequential to me. Its MPs votes that will shape the outcome, not what they think when they're voting if they're voting a different way.
We also look at a few other things to try and convince ourselves more that this is sincere. One thing people could say is, well, in 1905, three and a half years later, the Liberals get into government, and they don't change this. That could show that they liked this all along and that would lend further ability to this kind of insincerity idea.
But we think that by looking at all those amendments, and we also analyze some of the speeches that MPs give, we think it bolsters our belief that this is probably sincere, that it's something we can never establish definitively. But we think if this was just token opposition, they might vote against the final thing. But also voting in favour of lots of amendments trying to water it down and giving speeches that criticize the [00:21:00] substance rather than just attacking the government in sort of more general terms, we think makes it more credible that they might believe the thing they're doing. So, we can interpret their voting as a fair indication of their actual opposition.
That is one way in which people might reach a different conclusion from us. The other, I think, is that, among the previous people who've said this happened by consensus, that wasn't really the question they were asking in their research. Quite often the types of questions we ask in political science aren't sort of factual, descriptive, what happened questions. Often, they are explanatory questions about why a thing happened. We start from someone else has said this thing happened, let's then find out why that was and set it in some wider context. Here, most of the citations that we find for people saying this happened by consensus. It's not their focus. They're drawing on things that were said a hundred years ago in a particular book. That seems to have just sustained through, which means other people have then taken it as their starting point rather than probing it. The last thing I'd [00:22:00] say is that if we step back from just the narrow question of how MPs voted on this thing in 1902, and instead say, this big change over decades of the government having more control over the agenda.
Was this a thing government forced through or a thing that there was some level of broad agreement about? I think the latter is a reasonable interpretation and so you could step back from this specific thing to say, well, there is a degree of consensus and cross-party movement here rather than only ever conflict and imposition by the government. This might then lead you to be more relaxed about the precise details of who wrote it in a particular year.
Alan Renwick: What would be driving that overall change over time? Why would there be a general view that government does need to have more power over agenda setting?
Tom Fleming: People have highlighted several different factors that are largely about the capacity of the House of Commons to do the sorts of things people at the time think it should do. A couple of them [00:23:00] are about the kinds of explanations are about rising demand for time.
If Parliament has a fixed amount of time, clearly, if everybody wants to use it all up infinitely, then you're going to have a problem. You're going to have a bottleneck where just things can't happen. There’s good evidence that MPs started wanting to use more time across the 19th century. Part of that might be due to changes in society and the economy that just meant there were more problems and things they wanted to highlight or legislate about.
Another point is that in gradual expansion of the franchise, i.e. those with a vote over the 19th century, meant that, and this is an argument put forward by someone called Gary Cox, it meant that MPs could no longer rely on bribing a small number of people that they could easily contact to get back into Parliament at the next election.
Instead, they might have to think about a more kind of programmatic appeal. They might have to say, I will legislate for or support legislation for things to appeal to that wider audience. So, a shift of focus their parliamentary activity towards doing things they [00:24:00] think will help them get re-elected might become more important.
The last big part of the story is, I think, over this period, voters are starting to see politics more in terms of political parties. Meaning, thinking about their choice at an election to not just be about a choice between two local candidates, well, more than two local candidates, who will have affiliations with some kind of party label. Instead, voters more and more see elections as choices between parties who are rival potential governments. When we think about the procedural knock-on consequences of that, it might make sense that people would think that, well, once parliament's assembled and been elected, and particularly with MPs themselves voting in a more cohesive way, mirroring that more partisan electorate.
That it makes sense that the government can get on and propose things, and that it should be the role of government to take the lead and to initiate policy, rather than policy simply being the amalgamation of various MPs idiosyncratic interests.
Alan Renwick: But why then did the UK end up at a different place from other democracies?
Tom Fleming: [00:25:00] Yeah.
Alan Renwick: Do we know that?
Tom Fleming: I think, the key question, in that lots of those things explain why you would need an agenda setting process. Basically, you can't have a free for all, you need some way of giving priority to some actors or others. Other parliamentary chambers solved that in different ways.
When we, at the start of this episode, talked about the fact that some other parliaments are more decentralized, the question of why the UK ended up going down that centralized route I think is a puzzling one. The one explanation that has been offered is that, in a way, they were sort of the inadvertent beneficiaries of it. Meaning, the cabinet existed and already had clearly some role in directing the conduct of government and running an admittedly much smaller state than we have now, but running the state, that was obvious. It's a beneficiary of this process, and there wasn't necessarily some other kind of group of MPs who could advocate for no, instead let's go down some other option.
Let's have a more committee-based agenda setting system or, one of the various other things. That’s one of the arguments. But I think that remains [00:26:00] a tricky question for us to solve because we often focus more on the push for having some agenda setting rules and less on the war. How did they then choose which of those rules to pick?
Alan Renwick: Does it go back to the electoral system that you mentioned right at the start, that the UK has predominantly a two-party system apart from for a brief period of kind of transfer in the 1920s? There are two parties that each of which like playing a majoritarian game in politics. So, they like gaining majority power, holding government power and thereby being able to kind of control things for a period.
They seem to prefer that to a model in which they might have some influence during periods when they're not in government. Whereas most other democracies in the early decades of the 20th century moved towards at least most parliamentary democracies moved towards a more proportional system of government in which you have coalitions of parties coming together where you might think that there's a kind of different logic being played out in, in how [00:27:00] politics works.
Tom Fleming: That is certainly part of it, and I think it helps to explain a sort of equilibrium between having a majoritarian electoral system and majoritarian agenda setting rules. Meaning, once you've got yourself to the position of having these two big parties who alternate in government and have these rules, it's obviously in their interests to sustain them.
There is perhaps a more complicated story actually about the causal arrow running in the other direction in that there is an argument that, first past the post, doesn't automatically lead to the same two parties being the big parties everywhere, which we already see in the UK where we have some regionally concentrated parties not being the same. We have two party politics in lots of places in the UK. They're not the same two parties and so one argument that has been made is that the kind of level of nationalization of that party system, the extent to which it builds to just there being these two parties is shaped by the kind of the size of the legislative prize you're after.
So, where more power is concentrated with solely the government increases your [00:28:00] incentives to coalesce into a bigger team, so that when you get to parliament, you're going to be the majority government and control those rules. Whereas, if the agenda setting rules are more fragmented, more decentralized, the stakes of and the incentives for that kind of coalescence are smaller because you know you're still going to have some influence even if you are 20 percent of MPs rather than that crucial 50%.
Alan Renwick: We're getting into some juicy corners of political science here. But before we go too far down that route, just a final question before we wrap up, because as ever, we're short of time. What are the implications of this for today? I mean, you kind of referred there to the idea that the UK is now in an equilibrium position where we have this majoritarian pattern of power with two parties competing for very strong power during periods of government. Does that mean that we're kind of locked into this situation for a government has power over parliament and it's difficult to imagine us getting out of that?
Tom Fleming: I think that is a fair way of [00:29:00] describing the situation. I don't know if it automatically follows from our research.
I'm a bit wary of drawing conclusions from something in a very different political era about the likelihood of different outcomes now. I guess what we can say is we know things have changed a bit recently. I said earlier this backbench business is a relatively recent addition and that came about in a way, through quite a sort of confusing process. Meaning, through a committee set up in the late 2000s to look at parliamentary reform in the wake of the MPs expenses scandal.
There was a sudden window which MPs exploited to come up with these proposals and then politically mobilize other MPs to back them and this exploited that moment of political opportunity to slightly lessen the government's agenda control. Even there, the MP's expenses scandal had got nothing to do with the gender control and so sort of the parliamentary reform that emerged from that moment of crisis seemed to bear very little connection to the problem it was responding to.
But I think, you said we're locked into this system with the two big parties. I think it’s also possible to think that that isn't inevitably true. We [00:30:00] saw at the last election the two main parties getting a very low share of the vote in historical terms. And so, if we were to see coalitions in the future, that could well be something whereby a small party in a coalition might think, I stand a good chance of being back in opposition after the next election. So, maybe now would be my time to think over the long term more about the possibility that we should spread this power out slightly more.
Alan Renwick: Okay. So, you're wary of drawing conclusions from this research, uh, for that, what, what is the kind of takeaway message that you want our listeners to get from this research?
Tom Fleming: I think maybe there are two, one is a sort of substantive one. More is about the time. How we can learn interesting things about the past of Parliaments. On the substantive one, I suppose it's an interesting big question, or at least I think it's interesting to think about how do our legislative institutions evolve?
Do they evolve through competition and conflict and people arguing about how they should be organized and the team that has the most power at any one moment imposing the option that it prefers, and do they instead develop through more kind of [00:31:00] consensual processes? Whereby, the actors have some shared view of the problem they're trying to solve and the preferred solution to that problem.
At least, I think, shines a light on one important episode being a more conflictual one rather than a more consensual one. It doesn't, it's still compatible, of course, with other times being consensual. Perhaps the more practical point, I think, is that it's interesting to study the nitty gritty detail of how things happened because I think it helps us then shed more light on those bigger questions of why things happened. By digging into the detail of how people voted in something that could sound quite nerdy and obscure, it gets us back to that much bigger question of, you know, how do institutions evolve, even if it starts from something very narrow?
I think often we look at the timing of reforms, or we look at the how certain countries have different types of institutions, but looking in detail at how the change comes about, I think shines an important light on the fact that this is very political. It's not something that simply happens automatically.
Alan Renwick: Well, I'm certainly well, very [00:32:00] much in favor of getting into nitty gritty. That process that you described with that kind of interaction between majority and position type reforms and more consensual type reforms. I think that's interesting. Often, we don't, I think, just, just work through enough understanding what are the factors that shape what, what mode of, of institutional reform, um, is available at any given time and how that might shift over time.
So great stuff. Thank you so much Tom. This has been really, interesting. I've certainly learned a great deal. Hope our listeners have too.
We have been discussing the article, The Origins of Centralized Agenda Control at Westminster, Consensus or Controversy, by Thomas G. Fleming, Simon Hicks, and Radoslav Zubek, recently published in the journal, The Legislative Studies Quarterly.
There's also a blog post. post length version on the Constitution Unit's blog, and as ever, we will put full details of both the article and the blog post in the show notes for this episode. [00:33:00] Next week, we're looking at the sources of growth in religion-based violence. To make sure you don't miss out on that or other future episodes of UCL Uncovering Politics, all you need to do is subscribe.
You can do so on Apple, Google Podcasts, or whatever podcast provider you use. And while you're there, we'd love it if you could take a moment of time to rate or review us too. I'm Alan Renwick. This episode was produced by Eleanor Kingwell Banham and Kaiser Kang. Our theme music is written and performed by John Mann.
This has been UCL Uncovering Politics. Thank you for listening.