The parliamentary style of politics has been formed in the practices of parliaments over the centuries. Nobody has theorised it in advance. Parliamentarians of different times have debated on their procedures, agreed on their rules, and commentaries on procedure disputes have given controversial interpretations of what it means to âact parliamentarilyâ. What we today know as parliament is an unintended by-product of these doings of largely unknown political actors.
Nonetheless, out of parliamentary debates, procedures, conventions, rhetorical practices, forms of electing and controlling government as well as of the types of actors and the ways of parliamentsâ dealing with non-parliamentary institutionsâwe can detect a distinct brand of politics. There is no other institution than the parliament, in which the pro et contra debate on the motions and the dissensus between perspectives of judging are not only allowed but expected and built into the institution itself.
1.1 A Counter-Intuitive Project
Out of all this, I want to construct an ideal type of doing politics parliamentarily. My project may appear contraintuitive. Every scholar and politician seems to know what parliaments and parliamentarians doâand partly for this reason, no theorising of parliamentary politics seems to have been necessary. The very idea seems to be unfamiliar, but just therefore it is important to start the debate.
The intuitive question against my project is: âthe parliament of what?â or âthe parliament of whom?â It is common to think that parliament is always a parliament of a state, of a city or of a university, student union or association. The unit in question is assumed to be prior to its parliament, which, of course, separates the units with a parliament from those without. It is still common to think that the units are the stable and their parliament the contingent element in a polity. Therefore, it seems odd to discuss âparliament as suchâ.
Especially in legal and historical studies, this âparliament ofâ is seen as the primary relationship. The government of a country is seen as the given framework, more important than the contingent and controversial parliamentary form of acting politically. The studies tend to give the state the priority over parliamentary form which can be suspended in extreme situations, such as during the war (see, however, Jennings 1940/1941; Bock 2002). This view is also reflected in the textbook jargon of the parliamentâs âfunctionsâ for the polity in question.
Of course, the parliament is a historical product of European polities. The states were only formed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (see Skinner 1978, 2009), Westminster and a number of other parliaments are, indeed, older than the states. In the European nation-states and empires, parliaments have been fragile and precious institutions. Political struggles since the Middle Ages have, however, to a considerable extent, concerned parliamentâs existence, powers and forms of doing politics.
My thesis is that doing politics parliamentarily is more important than the question of âwhose parliamentâ. The parliamentary form of politics is opposed to the loyalty to any âweâ, typically connected to a âmy country, right or wrongâ patriotism. The parliamentary moment of politics contains a breakdown of âweâ based thinking; it introduces the chance to think otherwise.
The contingency and fragility of parliament also indicates why the parliamentary form of politics is a major achievement. It has been realised in contrast and in opposition to the stable element of the polity, the bureaucratic apparatus, which is, however, indispensable for the legal-rational rules that guarantees the equal treatments of citizens against arbitrary rule (see Weber 1918, 216â226; 1922, 124â130). Parliaments are for Weber a counterforce, a representation of those ruled by the administration (1918, 226). They do not eliminate this everyday rule of bureaucracy, but provide a constraint and alternative to the expansion of bureaucratic thinking, limiting and neutralising its effect as well as offering a distinctly political way of thinking. In this sense, parliaments are both state institutions and at the same time opposed to the stateâs bureaucratic core.
It is the contingency of parliamentary politics that constitutes its novelty, originality and singularity. Thinking parliamentarily marks a shift from loyalty to a given political framework to the chance to think in terms of alternatives. It also breaks from what Ulrich Beck calls âmethodological nationalismâ (see e.g. Beck and Grande 2004) in favour of the parliamentary form of politics.
1.2 Parliamentary Acting and Thinking
The parliamentary way of acting politically is an excellent example of what Quentin Skinner writes, how âpolitical life itself sets the problems for political theoristâ (Skinner 1978, xi; for an interpretation of this sentence see Palonen 2005). In this book, I do act as a political theorist who interprets the singularity of parliamentary practices and from them spells out the main principles of the parliamentary ideal type. With the book, I aim at explicating the ways of thinking politics parliamentarily.
There is no one-to-one correspondence between parliamentary acting and thinking. For politics, acting has priority over thinking, and my aim is to understand better this parliamentary acting by means of explicating what it does mean to think parliamentarily. The parliamentary ideal type of thinking accentuates the profile of parliamentary politics. Thinking parliamentarily offers us a caricature that is not as rich and complex as the actual parliamentary acting, but which can make explicit those criteria that are distinctive for the parliamentary modus of acting politically.
Indeed, I do not speak of thinking as a detached, solitary activity, as Hannah Arendt (1977) does. In line with rhetorical thought (see e.g. Bassakos 2015), parliamentary thinking consists of political judgements formed in dissensus and debate (see Chapters 3 and 4). I speak of âparliamentary judgementâ especially when I discuss the possibilities and limits of parliamentary thinking beyond the substratum of parliaments in a narrow sense (see Chapters 8 and 9).
A number of classical authors, such as Jeremy Bentham, Walter Bagehot and Max Weber, have theorised important aspects of parliamentary politics. Neither they nor later scholars seem to have made a systematic attempt to think out politics parliamentarily. There are theories of representation, deliberation, legislation, democracy and parliamentary government, but no theories of the parliamentary mode of acting politically, of thinking parliamentarily. In the scholarship of recent decades, parliaments have been seen as a part of âthe political systemâ, which has largely neglected the study of the distinctly parliamentary ways of acting politically.
With this book I want to exercise such parliamentary thinking. Since 2004, I have written on different aspects of parliamentary politics, its concepts, rhetoric, procedures and on parliamentary government. Now it is time to write a synthetic volume on parliamentary politics, a new programmatic monograph. Although many readers will find here familiar things, the synthesis is new, and many topics have not previously been discussed or will be interpreted differently in this monograph.
The background concept of this book is, of course, politics. From early on, I have understood politics as a contingent and controversial activity par excellence (see esp. Palonen 1985, 2003, 2006, 2007). In speaking of the parliamentary aspect of politics the idea is that acting and thinking âparliamentarilyâ further âdeepensâ the set of criteria that qualifies the acting and thinking as a highly ambitious form of politics.
The understanding of politics as a contingent, controversial and temporal activity, as in my synthetic interpretation of the history of the activityâconcept of politics (Palonen 2006), remains my conceptual point of departure. This book will take the conceptual history of politics in a specific direction by attempting to render explicit the distinctly parliamentary struggle with time. Acting parliamentarily is seen as an ideal type of acting politically, in the sense of intensifying the contingent, controversial and temporal quality of politics.
I know of no other form of politics that has as thoroughly as the parliamentary form not only recognised, but also institutionalised contingency and controversy. Despite the numerous attempts to find âa new kind of politicsâ during the last half-century, it is striking that no serious proposals have emerged that can compete with parliamentary action as an intensified form of politics as contingent, controversial and temporal activity.
Nonetheless, it is important to discuss, how does the markedly parliamentary type of contingency and controversy manifests itself and how they might be formulated on the basis of distinctive procedural rules and conventions or rhetorical moves and practices? In other words, an example of what we might discuss is the political significance of procedur...