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The authors deal with the place of parliamentary politics in democracy. Apparently a truism, parliamentarism is in fact a missing research object in democratic theory, and a devalued institutional reference in democratic politics. Yet the parliamentary culture of politics historically explains the rise and fall of modern democracies.
In the early twentieth century political thought the relationships between democracy and parliamentarism were at the focus of the agenda. In the postwar era the study of politics has taken the parliament for granted, meaning its analysis has been on the whole limited to concomitant factors, such as elections, party systems or the government-opposition divide. Even rhetorical studies have largely dealt with historical and linguistic aspects of argumentative reasoning, and parliaments have been merely considered institutions producing speeches and texts to be studied.
By exploring democracy from the vantage point of parliamentary politics, the book advances a novel research perspective. Aimed at revising current debates on parliamentary politics, democratization and democratic theory, the authors argue the role of the parliamentary culture of politics in democracy, highlighting the argumentative, debating experience of politics to recast both some of democratic theory's normative assumptions and real democracies' reform potential.
List of contents
From the Contents: Part I: The Uses of Parliamentarism Parliamentary Emergency Powers: A Political Chimera? Questions in the House: Parliamentary Politics and the Rhetoric of 'Question-Time' Cambridge and Oxford Union Societies as Parliamentary Bodies 'Advanced Liberalism' and the Politics of Reform in Victorian Parliamentary Culture The Mandate in the Parliament Varieties of Anti-Parliamentarism in Europe Revising the Aggregative Role of Parliaments in a Fragmented World Part II: Debating Democratic Theory and Performance The Rhetorical Use of 'Parliamentarism' and the Interwar Crisis of Democracy Democracy and Compromise: Why Consensus is not Democratic? The Legitimacy Politics of the Theory of Aleatory Democracy The Paradox of Democratic Selection: Is Lottery Better than Voting? Can Deliberative Mini-Publics Help to Improve the Standards of Representative Democracy?
About the author
Dr. Kari Palonen ist Professor am Department of Political Science der Universität Jyväskylä, Finnland.
Report
"Parliamentarism and Democratic Theory" is a critically important work of exceptional scholarship and very higly recommended for academic library Political Sicence reference collections in general, and Parliamentary Democracy supplemental studies reading lists in particular.
Midwest Book Review 1/2016
