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Incumbent prime ministers who win re-election often reshuffle their cabinet ministers. These post-election cabinet reshuffles have important implications for policymaking and present a puzzle: why would prime ministers alter the 'winning team' that has just received an electoral mandate? Existing literature has largely overlooked post-election reshuffles, so offers few compelling answers. At most, a plausible but under-theorised and untested conventional wisdom suggests that electoral success increases prime ministers' authority over their ministers. This article thus provides the first systematic study of post-election cabinet reshuffles in single-party governments. It argues that re-elected prime ministers use a temporary increase in their authority to pre-empt future leadership challenges by moving or sacking cabinet rivals. Larger election victories should thus produce larger reshuffles. However, analysis of post-election cabinet reshuffles in four 'Westminster' democracies since 1945 shows no support for this expectation, suggesting that further work is needed to understand these important political events.

Recent work suggests that partisan dealignment should undermine political parties by giving members of Parliament (MPs) greater incentives for personal vote seeking. The key mechanism underlying such arguments is that voters with stronger party ties are less responsive to the records of individual MPs. However, existing tests of this mechanism are largely either indirect, based on responses to rebellious voting or nonlegislative behavior, or drawn from the United States. This article thus provides a new test of whether partisan voters are less responsive to MPs' parliamentary activity. I present two complementary analyses—a natural experiment in New Zealand and a survey experiment in the United Kingdom. Both suggest that more active MPs are more popular, but that this relationship is moderated by voters' partisanship. MPs' parliamentary activity chiefly influences the behavior of voters with the weakest partisanship. This offers new evidence that partisan dealignment heightens legislators' incentives for personal vote seeking.

What shapes legislators' incentives for personal vote-seeking in parliament? Recent work suggests that partisanship among voters deters personal vote-seeking, by limiting its effectiveness. This has potentially significant implications for policy-making, election results and patterns of accountability. However, empirical tests of this argument remain few in number and have several limitations. This article thus offers a new test of the relationship between partisanship and personal vote-seeking. Using legislators' bill proposals as an indicator of their personal vote-seeking activity, I analyse legislative behaviour in the UK House of Commons between 1964 and 2017. I find that members of parliament make more legislative proposals when voters are less partisan. Moreover, partisanship appears to moderate the influence of other drivers of personal vote-seeking: electorally vulnerable legislators make more legislative proposals, but only at low levels of partisanship. These findings provide new evidence that voters' relationships with political parties affect legislators' electoral strategies and parliamentary behaviour.

During the premiership of Theresa May, parliamentary procedure in the UK was scrutinised, criticised and challenged to an extent unprecedented in recent years. This put intense pressure on the 'rules of the game' governing parliamentary politics. This article thus aims to answer three questions. First, what were the pressures on parliamentary procedure in this period? Secondly, what were their consequences? Thirdly, how can these consequences be explained? The article addresses these questions by describing challenges to the House of Commons' rules regarding agenda control, proxy voting and private members' bills. It also describes the procedural changes resulting from these challenges and evaluates their significance. Finally, it considers how far these changes support the expectations of existing literature on parliamentary rule changes. Overall, the article shows that procedural reform during Theresa May's premiership was minimal. Despite some temporary informal innovations, the formal rules of the Commons remained almost entirely unchanged. During this period, therefore, Britain's parliamentary rules were challenged extensively but changed very little.

AbstractWhat explains the power of parliamentary committees? A large literature on the United States Congress sees strong legislative committees as a consequence of legislators' incentives to cultivate a personal vote. These incentives are typically understood to be determined by formal electoral rules. How legislatures are elected thus shapes how they are organised. This article argues that explanations of legislative organisation should also consider a non‐institutional source of personal vote‐seeking incentives: voters' partisanship. Where partisan dealignment is more extensive, legislators have stronger incentives to develop a personal vote. Where committee systems are more powerful, legislators have better opportunities to do so. Partisan dealignment should thus lead to stronger committee systems. This argument is supported by analysis of original data on the postwar evolution of committee systems in five 'Westminster' parliaments. Partisan dealignment is associated with larger committee systems, and with larger expansions of committee systems.

AbstractRecent years have seen an increase in the use of delegated legislation to implement major policy decisions in the UK. This has exacerbated the longstanding criticism that Westminster lacks sufficiently robust procedures for parliamentary scrutiny of delegated legislation. However, the UK is not the only country to use delegated legislation, or to face the challenge of ensuring it receives adequate parliamentary scrutiny. This article therefore places the UK system in wider context by comparing it to six other national parliaments. We highlight one comparative strength of the UK system, two weaknesses it shares with the other six cases, and one way in which the UK might learn lessons from elsewhere. Overall, our evidence suggests that no one country offers a clear template for more rigorous parliamentary scrutiny of delegated legislation. Successful reform of the UK's system is likely to require creative procedural innovation.

Abstract
The UK parliament's role in the Brexit process has been closely scrutinised and fiercely contested. Despite this, we still have relatively little systematic evidence about parliament's role in shaping Brexit legislation. This article therefore analyses the extent and nature of parliamentary influence on Brexit-related legislation between 2017 and 2019. Using new data on the legislative passage of 13 different bills, including over 3000 proposed amendments, we measure the prominence of three different kinds of parliamentary influence, and compare this to findings from earlier periods. We show that some Brexit bills had a fairly typical parliamentary experience, with very few successful non-government amendments but numerous government concessions. However, a dramatic change from earlier periods was the large number of Brexit-related bills that were simply paused once the government encountered parliamentary difficulties. Parliament's influence over Brexit legislation in this period therefore showed elements of both continuity and change. This finding contributes to our understanding of the Brexit process, and of parliament's role in recent British politics.

AbstractThe UK government has pledged to establish a Constitution, Democracy and Rights Commission. This body will have a wide remit to recommend potentially sweeping constitutional change. This article draws on international experience and best practice to outline how the commission might best organise the process to produce proposals which are widely supported, fit for purpose, and durable. We argue that to achieve these goals the commission's organisation should reflect three key principles: impartiality, expertise, and public participation. This would reflect international best practice and build on recent domestic developments. We argue that these principles can best be achieved if the commission works through a citizens' assembly that combines members of the public with party politicians. This would be a new departure for the UK, but a necessary one given the scale of the government's constitutional reform agenda, and its stated goal of restoring public trust in politics.

In August 2019, the UK government's attempt to prorogue parliament for five weeks raised the question whether the UK's prorogation rules ought to be reformed. We place this discussion in comparative perspective by contrasting the UK's prorogation rules with (i) equivalent procedures in 26 European democracies and (ii) recent changes in other areas of UK executive–legislative relations. These comparisons suggest that the UK's current prorogation rules are increasingly anomalous. They give governments significantly more power to suspend parliament than comparable European democracies, and are at variance with recent efforts to counterbalance the executive's wide ranging discretion in the UK.

AbstractThis paper examines the power to prorogue (or suspend) Parliament following the 2019 prorogation controversy in the UK. We outline the legal basis of prerogative‐based prorogation, survey its uses in the UK and other Westminster systems, and compare it with equivalent rules in other European parliamentary democracies. The comparative perspective highlights the outlier status of the UK among comparable European democracies. In the UK, the absence of explicit legal limits on the use of prorogation gives the executive exceptional scope to employ the power for political purposes to sidestep Parliament. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for current discussions about the desirability of reforming the UK's prorogation rules and placing express legal limits on the executive's power.

AbstractCentralized agenda control is a feature of many parliaments, with important consequences for the conduct and outcomes of legislative politics. Much previous work has thus sought to understand the emergence of centralized agenda‐setting rules. We extend this literature by studying the "Balfour reforms", which centralized agenda control in the early twentieth century UK House of Commons. Our aim is to probe a conventional claim in the existing literature: that the opposition supported these reforms. This is a counter‐intuitive claim, which rests on relatively little direct evidence. We analyze historical roll‐call data from 1902 to assess how far the opposition supported agenda centralization. We complement this analysis by examining attempted amendments and speech contributions to parliamentary debates. Contrary to the standard view, we find that the primary opposition party consistently resisted these reforms. This evidence of controversy rather than consensus revises our understanding of a key milestone in the development of the Westminster parliament, and contributes to the wider literature on the choice of agenda‐setting procedures.

AbstractHow does protest affect political speech? Protest is an important form of political claim-making, yet our understanding of its influence on how individual legislators communicate remains limited. Our paper thus extends a theoretical framework on protests as information about voter preferences, and evaluates it using crowd-sourced protest data from the 2017–2019 Fridays for Future protests in the UK. We combine these data with ~2.4m tweets from 553 legislators over this period and text data from ~150k parliamentary speech records. We find that local protests prompted MPs to speak more about the climate, but only online. These results demonstrate that protest can shape the timing and substance of political communication by individual elected representatives. They also highlight an important difference between legislators' offline and online speech, suggesting that more work is needed to understand how political strategies differ across these arenas.

AbstractHow do cabinet reshuffles affect the parliamentary opposition's use of no-confidence motions in the government? Opposition parties employ no-confidence motions as electoral signals to highlight government incompetence and to position themselves as a government in waiting. We argue that cabinet reshuffles – which prime ministers use to respond to policy failures, scandals, poor ministerial performance and disloyalty – present an opportunity for the opposition to deploy no-confidence motions to this end. The incentives to deploy this strategy, however, are contingent on the nature of the party system and are greatest where party-system concentration positions a single opposition party as the alternative to the government and sole beneficiary of a no-confidence vote. We test this expectation using a multilevel modelling approach applied to data on reshuffles in 316 governments and 16 parliamentary democracies, and find support for our expectation: cabinet reshuffles raise the probability of no-confidence motions conditional on party-system concentration.