Parliamentary privilege encompasses certain special rights and immunities deemed necessary to protect legislatures and members from undue interference so that they can effectively carry out their functions of inquiring, debating and legislating. The doctrine has engendered conflicts that have never been wholly resolved between courts and legislatures, and between individual rights and parliamentary privileges. The advent of modern human rights and emphasis on democratic values such as accountability and transparency has brought a new urgency to this problem. The current passive and defensive approach of Canadian legislatures is unsustainable, as is the approach taken by the SCC in recent jurisprudence. The paper argues against expanding the scope of judicial review of privilege claims as a solution, and in favour of open modernization processes led by parliamentarians, and involving public participation. Further, the paper advocates for the application of a “relational approach” versus the traditional “contest approach” to parliamentary privilege.

Inaug.-Diss.--Munich. / Vita. Bibliography: p. xiv-xxviii.

This is a study of the parliamentary activity of the Front national (FN) in the Assemblee nationale from 1986 to 1988. The research is based on a comprehensive analysis of all parliamentary proceedings involving FN deputes during this period, using as primary sources the publications of the Assemblee nationale, including daily reports of the Journal Officiel, together with major daily and weekly newspapers and magazines from 1984 to 1993, and a cross-section of the publications of the FN at national and local levels. Part I examines the apparent contradiction between the anti-parliamentary reputation of this extreme-right party and its decision to join the French Parliament. The study traces the FN's patient quest for political legitimacy, its grudging acceptance by the established political parties and its strategy of recruiting personalities of the moderate right within its Rassemblement national. While the respectability derived from this helped the FN to enter Parliament, it also sowed disunity within the party's ranks. This is the context within which the parliamentary experience must be understood. Part 2 examines the effectiveness of the FN deputes in their parliamentary activities: drafting and tabling of bills, reports and amendments, interventions in parliamentary sessions, questions to the Government, voting patterns. The two main issues on which the FN deputes concentrated were immigration and law and order, but they also addressed many other questions and attempted to present themselves a force of economic liberalism without which the socialist experiment could not be ended since the traditional moderate right was too weak to defeat it. Part 3 pursues the analysis of the FN's continuing parliamentary activity in its second year in Parliament. It also traces the party's growing awareness of the limitations of parliamentary power as well as its own limitations as a parliamentary group, and its decisions to use parliamentary experience to broaden its political dimension. The conclusion weighs the impact of this parliamentary experience on the party and its local and national implantation, as well as on the recomposition of the French political scene.

Univ. de Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne), Diss.--Paris, 2002.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Pennsylvania, 1917. / Published also as Supplement no. 1 to the Annals of the American academy of political and social science, May, 1918. Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Técnicas de estimação de pontos ideais baseadas na teoria espacial do voto têm sido largamente utilizadas para retratar legislaturas ao redor do mundo. No entanto, tais técnicas foram pensadas inicialmente para o estudo do caso norte-americano, que possui um sistema político bipartidário e no qual as migrações partidárias são eventos raros. Em países como o Brasil, algumas precauções devem ser tomadas. Assim, o primeiro objetivo deste trabalho é metodológico. Como os pressupostos sobre a distribui ção dos erros não são factíveis para o caso brasileiro, o uso de técnicas como o W-Nominate e o IDEAL não é recomendável. Desta maneira, defenderemos o uso do método não paramétrico Optimal Classication. Ainda neste sentido discutiremos a questão da unidade de análise e como ela pode inuenciar na escolha do número de dimensões relevantes. O segundo objetivo é substantivo. O que pretendemos responder é quantas e quais dimens ões são necessárias para representar razoavelmente bem as preferências dos senadores brasileiros. Mostraremos que uma só dimensão que expressa o conito entre governo e oposição é suciente. / Ideal point estimation methods based upon the spatial theory of voting has been broadly used to represent legislatures around the world. However, such methods were initially thought to analyze the U.S case, that has a bipartisan system and in which party switching are rare events. In countries like Brazil, some precautions must be taken. Thus, the rst aim of this study is methodological. As the assumptions of the error distribution are not feasible to the Brazilian case, the use of techniques like W-Nominate and IDEAL are not recommended. So, we argue in favor of the use of the non-parametric method Optimal Classication. Further, in this direction, we discuss the problem of the unit of analysis and how it can mislead the choice of the number of relevant dimensions. The second aim is substantive. What we intend to answer is how many and which dimensions are necessary to represent fairly well the preferences of Brazilian senators. We will show that only one dimension that manifest the conict between government and opposition is sucient.

This thesis argues that the aggressive and informal style of discourse used in Thai parliamentary debates is a product of the Thai political sphere, serving clear functions In its context. Adopting the approach of Critical Discourse Analysis, the thesis presents discourse as socially constituted as well as socially constitutive. The research employs a two level analysis to explore this hypothesis. At the macro level, Critical Discourse Analysis and the Sociocognitive Approach are operationalised to investigate the socio-political conditions that prompt this 'unparliamentary' mode of parliamentary discourse. At the micro level, politeness theory and pragmatics are employed to investigate the potential functions that small linguistic features may serve under such social conditions. Five sample accusatory speeches and two sample respondent speeches from recent debates are selected for close textual analysis using this approach. It is argued that the unparliamentary style of the debates' discourse is the result of discursive strategies used in politicians' speeches. These strategies are textual evidence of sociocultural practice and discourse practice. They reflect the speakers' attempts to subvert three competing conjunctures in the Thai political domain: the debate's formal and actual purposes, its Code of Behaviour, and its multiple audiences. Debaters need to balance three contending purposes: the desire of highly partisan participants to cause maximum damage to the opposing side, their attempts to seek public support (including the maintenance of face), and their need to stay within the parliamentary Code of Behaviour. This thesis identifies a number of strategies that potentially serve these conflicting purposes, for example, intertextuality, enthymeme and prolepsis/disclaimer. These findings lead to the conclusion that an unparliamentary debating style, constituted of small, seemingly insignificant linguistic features, carries larger social implications. Despite being a reflection of social conditions, this debating style has the potential to redefine these conditions. Thai no-confidence debates offer an accomplished parliamentary speaker the opportunity to achieve apparently contradictory political and linguistic ends, within the same tightly-crafted speech.

96 leaves

This thesis examines the practice of parliamentary constitutional interpretation. Parliamentary constitutional interpretation is a form of reasoning used by parliamentarians to articulate the constitutional effect of a Bill, within the legislative process in Parliament. The significance of the practice is explored through a combination of empirical study and theoretical enquiry. The first part of the thesis describes and analyses parliamentary constitutional interpretation in three case studies, each on a different Government Bill from the 2010-2012 parliamentary session. Each study provides a fine-grained account of how parliamentarians interpreted the constitutional effect of each Bill and the role this interpretation played during the passage of the Bill. In order to identify the constitutional effect of a particular clause, parliamentarians interpret a range of constitutional norms including: constitutional principles, constitutional statutes and constitutional conventions. In each case study, parliamentary constitutional interpretation played an important role in shaping the constitutional effect of each Bill and holding the Government to account. The second part of the thesis uses the reality of the practice, as described in the case studies, to identify the value of parliamentary constitutional interpretation and to situate the practice within political constitutionalism. Two principal values of the practice are identified. Firstly, parliamentary constitutional interpretation can enhance the level of justification within the legislative process. Secondly, it can facilitate a distinctively parliamentary contribution to the normative content of the constitution. By expanding the role of legislative politics within the constitution, parliamentary constitutional interpretation can develop and strengthen the political model of constitutionalism. These values also serve as both a template for analysis of parliamentary performance and as a guide to parliamentary reform.

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