The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the politics and the business functions of the House of Lords between 1660 and 1681. This is a subject which has been neglected by historians. This dissertation is 98,500 words in length and consists of an introduction, eight chapters, a conclusion and three appendices. In. the Introduction the aims of the study, together with the manuscript sources used are discussed. Chapter 1 is concerned with the composition of the House, the Lords' attendance record and the nature of their parliamentary privileges. In Chap-er 2 the peers' legislative duties are examined, and it is argued that the House of Lords made an important contribution to the legislation of Charles II's reign. Chapter 3 examines the Lords' role as the supreme court, and suggests that the peers carried out their judicial duties in a fair and responsible manner. The theme of Chapter 4 is the close relationship between Charles II and his Upper House. In this chapter it is argued that the House was not a rubber-stamp for royal policies. Chapter 5 analyses the religious views of the peers and shows how these influenced the content of the religious legislation considered in the Chamber. It also argues that the House of Lords was far more tolerant on religious issues than the Cavalier House of Commons. Chapters 6 and 7 focus on the development of coherent political parties in the House during the mid 1670s. In these two chapters it is argued that the Court and Country parties, which emerged in response to important religious issues, were remarkably similar to the later Whig and Tory parties of the Exclusion Crisis (1679-81). The final Chapter discusses why the parliamentary history of the reign was so frequently punctuated by privilege disputes between the Lords and the Commons. Finally, in the Conclusion the Lords' role in Restoration government is assessed.

This study examines UK and Ghanaian parliamentary questions and debates. Using a corpus-assisted discourse studies approach, it investigates questions from transitivity (process types) and debates from evaluatory perspectives. We explore similarities and differences between UK and Ghanaian parliamentary questions and find that, while question forms in the two parliaments are similar, there are significant differences as well. For example, indirect yes/no interrogatives in the Ghanaian data are a major difference between the two. Also, while Ghanaian MPs mark politeness directly by linguistic/word forms, such as the use of modal past, UK MPs mark politeness indirectly. The differences appear to be largely influenced by Ghanaian language interference and cultural differences. From a transitivity standpoint, in both parliaments, mental process interrogatives are the most frequent, followed by verbal, relational and then material processes. We therefore conclude that parliamentary politics can be represented through think, tell, evaluate and do (TTED) processes. Analyses of the debates show that MPs’ concern for the needs of the people becomes a focal point in the debates. Whereas government MPs think that people’s socio-economic conditions are better, opposition MPs think they are worse. This leads us to the conclusion that evaluation in parliamentary debates could be described as a rectangle (drawing on van Dijk’s ideological square), since there is disproportionateness between MPs’ praise and/or criticism for their governments’ policies, which reflects the MPs’ ideological biases. In describing the circumstances of the people, UK MPs use more complex intensifying adverbs and adjectives than their Ghanaian counterparts, a variation which we attribute to first and second language differences. There appears to be a disparity between MPs’ show of concern for the needs of the people and the public perception that MPs care only about their personal interests. MPs construct themselves as agents of the people, and tactically hide behind it their ideological biases.

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This thesis is an exploratory study of everyday leadership in UK parliamentary select committees. It is based on a detailed analysis of the parliamentary context for leadership and highlights the distinctive characteristics of a chair’s everyday select committee leadership practices. It examines how a chair addresses the challenges involved in the social processes of mobilising and aligning committee members and stakeholders around the committee’s purpose: making sense of complex and contentious public policy dilemmas. While still largely bound by parliamentary routines and tradition, select committees offer chairs increasing opportunities for flexibility, influence and leadership. Based on privileged research access to the workings of select committees, this is a real-time embedded comparative case study of similarities and differences in the enactment of leadership across two parallel contemporaneous inquiries within the same committee. It highlights the significance of sensemaking and sensegiving to leadership while proposing that the politicised context accentuates how challenge and conflict are integral to the daily enactment of leadership, which is often more volatile and much harder work than the literature suggests. It builds on existing leadership theory to contribute a novel conception of leadership, based on an adaptive combination of sensegiving, praxis and challenge in this context, with potentially wider application.

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This doctorate looks at the role of parliamentary select committees in the UK House of Commons. Though the literature on this topic is extensive, this research project explores the issue from a distinctive vantage point. While research on committees has predominantly focused on their outputs, such as committee reports, in order to assess the effectiveness of Parliament in holding the executive to account, this thesis looks at the input-side to committee work. It explores the individual beliefs, everyday practices and perennial dilemmas of parliamentary actors in select committees. In doing so, this thesis argues that understanding beliefs and practices of committee members, chairs and staff are crucial ways to better comprehend the way that scrutiny works in the House of Commons. This PhD finds that scrutiny is contested in a range of ways by a range of actors. In taking actors’ interpretations seriously, this PhD reveals that each actor has their own performance style, which is used to enact beliefs about scrutiny. At its most simple, this PhD argues that scrutiny is pushed and pulled in different (sometimes conflicting) directions by parliamentary actors. There is no such thing as uniform, systematic select committee scrutiny; there exist only dense webs of scrutiny that rely upon committee members, chairs and staff to enact their roles in such ways to be conducive to holding the executive to account. These dense webs of scrutiny affect committee relationships, their ability to question witnesses in select committees, and construct consensus in writing reports.

We are habituated to an hyperactive legislature and the proliferation of legislation. The legislature hurtles along, causing Anglo-American legal systems to degenerate into massive, and often meaningless, contradictory or trivial blocks of rules and norms, and ones which are beyond the ordinary citizen or corporation to know and fully to meet. Legislation’s demands are ever-increasing: it grows in volume, in ambition, and it seems to recognise no end to its capacity and entitlement to regulate the most detailed, most banal or most technical of affairs. It has lost any means by which to prioritise those matters with which it ought concern itself. The situation has been brought about by conflating an authority which Parliament acquired in the 17th and 18th Centuries with the legislation it produces. I seek to separate the two and show that there is no justification for attributing to legislation such legitimacy and authority as Parliament as an institution acquired historically. But because legislation-making has been based upon this assumption, there is a loss when Parliament legislates hyperactively because there exist normative reasons why Parliament should perhaps not act in such an unrestrained manner, but ones which, partly owing to the underlying assumptions about the authority of legislation, remain unaddressed. For so long as those who would claim for Parliament an entitlement ambitiously to legislate and without restraint fail to confront these considerations, there remains a normative loss when Parliament legislates in the manner they would advocate. I seek to diagnose a presently less than fully justified conferral upon legislation of authority and an accompanying incompleteness in the arguments of those who would seek to justify an activist and ambitious role for Parliament via legislation. This is not to say that there is no justification for Parliament’s current disposition, but that the foundation upon which Parliament’s hyperactivity in legislation has been built is attended with a failure of those who advance such a position to confront and to meet arguments which run counter to that claim.