Commissioned Book Review: Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey, Deliberative Accountability in Parliamentary Committees
| Author | Stephen Holden Bates |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14789299221136408 |
| Published date | 01 February 2023 |
| Date | 01 February 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Commissioned Book Review |
Political Studies Review
2023, Vol. 21(1) NP11 –NP12
journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
Commissioned Book Review
1136408PSW0010.1177/14789299221136408Political Studies ReviewCommissioned Book Review
book-review2022
Commissioned Book Review
Deliberative Accountability in Parliamentary
Committees by Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey.
New York and London: Oxford University Press,
2022, 288 pp., £75, ISBN 9780192847874
The strength of Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey’s
excellent new book on deliberative accountabil ity
– ‘the reason-giving by policymakers for their
policy decisions’ (p. 222) – is that it poses an
old political science question but answers it in a
new way. Schonhardt-Bailey asks what can
arguably be considered a perennial parliamen-
tary studies research question: what constitutes
high-quality deliberative accountability? Yet
the way she answers it goes well beyond the
sub-disciplinary boundaries of parliamentary
studies and, indeed, the disciplinary boundaries
of political science by drawing on, at the very
least, political theory, political sociology, polit-
ical psychology and linguistics. In this sense
then, the book is a work of, in Colin Hay’s
(2010) phrase, ‘inter-sub-disciplinarity’, where
you may often pose the same questions but,
with a new-found recognition of the complexity
of political and social life, there is a shift beyond
the usual way of doing things to get a fuller pic-
ture of what is going on.
Schonhardt-Bailey achieves this shift in two
ways. First, as well as more traditional tools,
she uses innovative, cutting-edge techniques.
She uses quantitative text analysis to examine
the what of deliberative accountability. She uses
video analysis and experiments to examine the
how of deliberative accountability – how body
language in committee interactions impact on
the reception and response of participants and
audiences. And she uses in-depth elite inter-
views to explore the why of deliberative
accountability – why did the main political
actors behave and respond in the ways they did.
Second, Schonhardt-Bailey includes illuminat-
ing comparative elements where she not only
compares parliamentary committees in the UK
upper and lower chambers but also deliberative
accountability across different sub-areas of
policy – monetary policy, fiscal policy and
financial stability policy. She finds that account-
ability varies across policy types and across
parlia mentary chambers. Deliberat ive account-
ability tends to be of higher quality when
focused on monetary policy. The House of
Lords tends to be better at the deliberative ele-
ment of deliberative accountability. The House
of Commons tends to be better at the accounta-
bility element.
In these ways, Schonhardt-Bailey makes
several contributions. First, to deliberative
scholarship by focusing on how deliberation
works and does not work in a politicised, adver-
sarial setting. Second, to accountability scholar-
ship by gauging the quality of accountability and
thereby identifying the conditions under which
accountability becomes counterproductive for
democratic legitimacy. Third, to central bank
communication scholarship by moving the focus
beyond what is being said to also look at how it
is being said and how body language and tone
affects assessments of competence and persua-
sion.
These contributions are all highlighted by
Schonhardt-Bailey, but she also makes another
contribution which she doesn’t mention. The
book extends scholarship on parliamentary
committees by heeding recent calls to focus on
the post-assignment phase of committee activ-
ity and to shine a light into hitherto unillumi-
nated parts of the ‘black box’ of committees.
This is achieved by Schonhardt-Bailey focusing
on the different factors that need to be taken into
account when considering the effectiveness of
deliberative accountability and, in turn, the
effectiveness of parliamentary committees (in
this regard at least). Such factors include insti-
tutional rules and cultures in play within the
committees, who is asking the questions, who is
answering them, how are questions being asked
and answered, and which policy areas are being
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