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How do institutions adapt and reform themselves in response to new challenges? This article considers the role of ideas and posits that the concept of 'dilemma' – clashes of beliefs played out through power relations and practices – offers a complementary tool to understand institutional change. It draws on the 2014 appointment of a new Clerk to the UK House of Commons – in which conflicting beliefs about the House of Commons administration opened a dilemma for key parliamentary actors – as a token case study to highlight the value of the concepts of beliefs, practices and dilemmas. It further broadens out these findings to consider the value of a wider interpretive approach for understanding how institutions may adapt and change. In doing so, it makes (1) a theoretical contribution by exploring the role of ideas in causing institutional change and (2) an empirical contribution through its analysis of parliamentary administration, an understudied area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While evidence hearings by House of Commons select committees have received increasing attention by the public and the media in recent years, academic research on this topic has remained rather thin. Drawing on both quantitative and qualitative methods, this article examines this topic. It begins by explaining why evidence is important: (i) it is fundamental to sustain detailed scrutiny; (ii) it builds individual-level and institutional-level expertise; and (iii) the range of evidence gathered is used by committees to engage with the public. The article then presents empirical data of the pool of witnesses on which committees rely, which arguably does not reflect the UK population, which raises important further questions over the representative claims of committees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For centuries, the capacity of British ministers to appoint individuals to positions on the boards of agencies, boards and commissions was viewed as little more than one element of the ‘spoils of war’ in a highly majoritarian polity. This article examines how the politics of patronage has evolved in recent decades and argues that it is possible to identify a silent revolution that has gradually but consistently constrained the reach and discretion enjoyed by ministers in deploying their patronage powers. What is particularly distinctive about British political history since 2007 is the introduction of a far-reaching ladder of legislative scrutiny that ranges from informal pre-appointment hearings, at one end of the ladder, to a statutory veto over the minister's preferred candidate, at the other. However, this ‘outlawing of the spoils’ has evolved in a typically British way with reforms being implemented on an ad hoc and incremental basis, that is, frequently without any advance consultation or planning but rather dependent on non-formal, informal and discretionary elements to counter problems as they arise. The result is a complex and frequently overlapping mixture of regulatory and scrutiny processes that arguably offer little in terms of principled underpinning or constitutional logic. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]