Nineteenth-century MPs spent a significant proportion of their time presenting petitions and corresponding with petitioners. Petitioning and the interactions between petitioners and parliamentarians was an important component of how representation worked in practice. This chapter first examines the shift in how parliamentarians conceived petitions from an eighteenth-century system of ‘virtual representation’ to embodying aggregated popular opinion. The chapter then examines petitioning and the practice of representation. While not everyone had the right to vote, parliamentarians believed that all subjects had the right to be represented through the presentation of their petitions. The correspondence between MPs and petitioners provided a forum to negotiate the meaning of representation. Parliamentarians sought to uphold their independence in the face of petitioners demands to present and support their requests. Finally, the presentation of petitioning was a mechanism for geographic but also issue-based representation. Overall, the interaction between parliamentarians and petitioners provides new insights into the shifting relationship between politicians and the people. More broadly, it focuses attention away from theories of representation and electoral or formal representation to a wider concept of the culture of representation within a given polity.

This chapter quantifies the emergence and institutionalisation of public petitioning on an unprecedented scale in terms of the numbers of issues, petitions, and signatures. The decisive breakthrough in terms of the volume of public petitions to the House of Commons occurred in the late 1820s and was driven by a series of mighty mobilisations including anti-slavery and parliamentary reform. The chronology of petitioning in the UK followed a similar pattern as elsewhere, but the volume of public petitions to the Commons was exceptional when placed in historical and comparative context. The data demonstrates that the volume of petitions and signatures was underpinned by organised mass campaigns, but also a ‘long tail’ of petitions on small and medium-scale issues. Comparing signatures with electoral data reveals that, for most nineteenth century, more people petitioned than voted in parliamentary elections. For all the well-documented vitality of episodic election rituals, this chapter demonstrates that petitions to Parliament were the most popular, regular means of interaction between subjects and politicians for much of this period.

Parliament is the dominant legal force in the constitution of the United Kingdom. The Parliament of the United Kingdom, situated at Westminster, is also the hub of the United Kingdom’s political system. Our system, therefore, is one of parliamentary – not constitutional – government. But government in the United Kingdom is largely conducted through rather than by Parliament. Behind the idea of parliamentary government lie two important features of the United Kingdom’s legislature and therefore of the constitution itself: the pre-eminence within Parliament of the House of Commons and the dominance of the House of Commons by the government of the day. This chapter examines both features, in the context of the role, functions and composition of the House of Commons.

This chapter explores the history and extent of the jurisdiction of Parliament over the ecclesiastical law of the Church of England and the role of bishops sitting as members of the House of Lords, some of them prominent and controversial. Among the ecclesiastical lawyers were several who served as Members of Parliament.The nineteenth century saw the revival of Convocation, the Church’s own Parliament, and the chapter follows it in its efforts to re-establish itself. The Church owned a great deal of property, and lay property holders had opportunities to exploit their rights to the gift of clerical livings. There were accusations of simony. In both contexts there were property disputes. All this sharpened the long-standing question of the relationship between temporalities which were the proper business of secular law and the spiritualities which were not.

Chapter 3 characterises the interaction at Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) as an institutionalised, parliamentary activity in change, in which members of the House of Commons have engaged since the institutionalisation of PMQs in 1961. It is shown that – due to various extralinguistic factors –PMQs has undergone rapid change during the span of 36 years covered by the study. However, it is argued that the institutional backbone of the activity, i.e. the physical set-up of the Chamber, the mediated question–answer sequences as well as the third-person address system, has remained largely the same, which warrants a comparative perspective on the 1978–1988 and 2003–2013 data sets as representatives of the same activity in different times.

Two conflicting views of the UK constitution exist: a Whitehall view, which treats ministers as the centre of the system and a Westminster view in which the House of Commons is central. In the former, British democracy is defined by elections to choose a Prime Minister. In the latter, elections choose a Parliament to which governments are accountable. Under united majority governments, the conflict remains hidden, but it emerges under minority or divided governments. The Brexit crisis was such a period. Its defining constitutional disputes – how far governments can act without Parliamentary approval, whether governments could close Parliament or veto bills, whether the Commons was justified in seizing control of its agenda, whether governments should continue after losing control of the House and whether the Fixed-term Parliaments Act changed conventions about confidence – all reflected aspects of the conflict between the two views. The Westminster theory gathered support in the Supreme Court and Commons, but the ultimate dénouement, a general election bringing to power a majority government, vindicated the Whitehall view. The crisis casts doubt on the Whitehall view’s viability in periods of political change, but also on whether Westminster politicians can make the Westminster view work.

The introduction explains the global-historical, interdisciplinary, and historiographical importance of this topic; sketches the history of decision-making in popular assemblies prior to the seventeenth century; and describes how the book will conceptualize and measure consensual and majoritarian forms of decision-making in the English House of Commons and the colonial lower assemblies. Majority decision-making is taken to be either natural or automatic in politics. This is short-sighted. The dominance of majority decision-making as a global standard for political decision-making is therefore something to be explained, not assumed. It is impossible, therefore, properly to address the promise and pitfalls of majority rule today without a history of its rise at the ready. This book is the first such history. It describes and explains the crucial moment in the majority’s global rise to power: its embrace by the elected assemblies of Britain and America in the age of the English, Glorious, and American Revolutions.

This chapter investigates the House of Commons at Westminster in a pivotal period for women’s representation: the first Blair government of 1997–2001. Based on archival, historical and ethnographic data (observations and interviews), the House of Commons is identified as a gendered space, in which women are peripheral members. For example, the overall proportion of turns taken in a sample of debates shows that men break the rules by speaking out of turn more than women. Prime Minister’s Question Time events are ‘scored’ according to the degree of adversarial features that they possess. The findings show that women and men can be equally adversarial in the House of Commons (both women and men were responsible for the most adversarial exchanges), but that women contributed proportionally fewer adversarial turns than their male counterparts. Finally, it is found that women are less likely to manipulate the ‘key’ of a speech event by using humour or irony (particularly the practice of filibustering) than men in this context. Women MPs’ avoidance of rule-breaking (or meticulous adherence to the rules) is explained as one of ways in which women MPs make sure they are beyond reproach in a Community of Practice in which they are interlopers.

This chapter examines the interlinked barriers to women’s participation identified by the ethnographic descriptions and analyses of parliamentary interaction in the first half of the book. First it considers the nature of stereotypes about gender and communicative styles and their effects on women politicians, in particular the ‘different voice’ ideology and the problems posed by beliefs in the masculine voice of authority in public contexts. These interactional styles are shown to be ideologically salient to the ways in which politicians evaluate political speeches, including their own. Secondly, it considers sexism and its effects by using examples from the House of Commons. This leads to a discussion of fraternal networks and homosocial bonding and the ways in which this can marginalise and exclude some groups. Finally, the underrepresentation and sexist framing of women politicians by the media is considered by reviewing existing international research literature and examples from the UK House of Commons, using a critical discourse analytic approach.

This chapter distinguishes two eighteenth-century accounts of the English constitution. The first, Montesquieu’s, advocated a balanced constitution. The second, which would become the classical theory of parliamentarism, accepted constitutional imbalance. Authors subscribing to this second approach believed that England was a free state because the House of Commons was the most powerful actor. They thought representative assemblies were best equipped to secure political liberty. And while they recognized that representative assemblies could threaten liberty, they were convinced that two practices had emerged to prevent this from happening, which did not require the Crown and Lords to exercise prerogatives equal to the Commons: first, the involvement of ministers in Parliament, and, second, the sheer presence of a constitutional monarch. Through these two practices, England could enjoy all the benefits of a powerful legislature without any risk of legislative usurpation. While this chapter ranges widely, especial attention will be paid to Jean Louis de Lolme and to the debates over parliamentary corruption and parliamentary opposition that occurred during the ministry of Robert Walpole.