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The article offers a critique of the 'decentred state' and the working of the devolved Scottish Parliament in its legislative and political relations with the UK Parliament. It argues that analysis of relations between the devolved Scottish Parliament and the UK Parliament, requires examination of both the political culture and political narratives surrounding constitutional governance and the future of the domestic UK union. Both play a pivotal role in shaping interparliamentary relations in the devolved UK. The paper draws on empirical research from two projects that used both documentary analysis of parliamentary sources and interviews with 35 parliamentarians and officials as a Commons Academic Fellow 2016–2021 and Scottish Parliament Academic Fellow 2022–2023. Both the political narrative and culture of interparliamentary relations between the UK Parliament and Scottish Parliament have been impacted arguably even more by the outcome of the 2016 UK EU Referendum than by the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this special issue of the Journal of Legislative Studies is to explain and understand the era of profound change that has affected, and continues to impact, UK legislatures. This is an era of special change, wrought by the phenomena of Brexit, the Covid-19 pandemic, and forms of nationalism. The significance of these collected papers lies in the application of interpretive, decentred theory (Bevir, 2013; Bevir & Rhodes, 2003, 2010) as the framework through which each contribution interprets its particular subject - legislatures and elite narratives – in this era of rapid and tumultuous transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the narratives and traditions that converged in the debates that raged in the House of Commons in response to the UK government's controversial proposals for planning reform in 2020. Using decentred theory, it is argued that planning is essentially decentred in that it has no essence, no fixed core beyond a general concern with the relationships between town and country, central and local government, economic development and the environment, private property and community, individual freedom and state power. This means that English planning comprises a web of contradictory traditions that can be articulated in service of various agendas. The analysis explores how the traditions in planning were interpreted through and reframed by various ideological traditions in the Conservative Party to legitimise different arguments concerning the desirability, or otherwise, of housebuilding and how planning should govern new housing development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing research on bicameralism has paid rather limited attention to examining the legitimacy of upper chambers. This paper addresses this research gap and examines the unintended roles of upper chambers using the case of the Czech Senate. It explains how citizens perceive the role of the upper chamber and how their perceptions can differ from the chamber’s actual role. The research employs content analysis of semi-structured interviews with two groups of citizens (30 in total). The results show that the Senate is perceived as an elitist, apolitical institution that is or should be composed of wise, experienced, and moral people. A minority of citizens perceive the Senate as a body representative of local interests. However, these perceptions do not correspond to reality. The difference between the Senate’s perceived and real role can have both negative and positive effects on the institution’s legitimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The phenomenon called legislative inflation is extensively used in public debate across jurisdictions – including new democracies attempting to overcome communist legal heritage. Typically, the phrase refers to the quantitative aspect – growth in the number, volume and frequency of amendments of primary and secondary legislation exceeding the natural demands of the technological progress and growing complexity of business relations. This paper attempts to provide a bird's eye view of legislative inflation in Poland after the 1989 democratic breakthrough. As Poland is an example of successful democratic and market transition of the nineties, substantial redrafting of the legal framework during EU accession and populist right-wing governance, the results seem relevant beyond the domestic context. Documented patterns suggest that the search for driving forces behind the legislative inflation should shift from the parliament towards cabinet ministers and the bureaucratic apparatus under their supervision, the pace of legal text production justifies the search for a theoretical conceptualisation of how the law could govern societies unwilling and unable to familiarise themselves with its flow and to examine the impact of legal text production on society and the economy it seems useful to shift from the data on the text itself towards its actual impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the seemingly puzzling situation in which legislators vote against a government of which they will become a part. Why are legislators from the coalition parties not fully disciplined in the investiture vote? Is it because of the type of government when the characteristics of the investiture vote is similar (a simple majority and an ex-post vote)? Using Israel and Italy as case studies, we demonstrate that when the type of government is an oversized coalition and the investiture consists of a simple majority and an ex-post vote (as a constant), legislators will be willing to vote against their party. We argue that they do so to express their disappointment with the positions they are offered and/or the policies that the coalition is adopting. Given the simple majority and oversized coalition, they are risking little and potentially reaping future rewards from their actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parliamentary speech is an important and highly visible feature of legislatures in democracies. Time in parliament is scarce and the allocation of floor time is characterised by largely incompatible preferences between party leaders, aiming to preserve a unified party label, and individual members of parliament (MPs), facing incentives to differentiate themselves and take alternative stances to maximise their personal reelection prospects. This paper investigates the role of MP policy positions in the allocation of parliamentary speeches in different institutional settings. Measuring positions using a novel dataset containing tweets by MPs in three European countries, we find that MPs with positions diverging from the party line get allocated less time on the parliamentary floor when floor time is exclusively controlled by parties, but not when parliamentary rules allow individual access to the floor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]