Fellow, SCAS.
Emeritus Director, The History of Parliament Trust, London

Hybrid event.
Zoom Webinar: https://uu-se.zoom.us/j/65802739142 External link.

ABSTRACT:
We understand parliaments to be systems through which political communities agree to bind themselves by law. But achieving a decision within a large assembly, incorporating, as parliaments should, different interests and opinions, is bound to be a complicated and difficult business. On the one hand, the variety of voices may result in incoherence, and a failure to take any decision at all. On the other, the level of control required to ensure a decision is taken can provide majorities with unconstrained power, but strip the resulting decisions of much legitimacy.

This is the perennial dilemma of parliamentary decision-making. Fraught with further complexities in the modern world, its early history is difficult to trace and has been little explored, but is of considerable consequence for the political development of the state. This paper will discuss some recent approaches to the subject and mainly through the examples of England/Britain, Sweden and Poland, will sketch out an agenda for a comparative history of parliamentary decision-making, in the early modern and beyond.