Explaining Change in Legislatures: Dilemmas of Managerial Reform in the UK House of Commons
| Author | Alexandra Meakin,Marc Geddes |
| Published date | 01 February 2022 |
| Date | 01 February 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0032321720955127 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321720955127
Political Studies
2022, Vol. 70(1) 216 –235
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321720955127
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Explaining Change in
Legislatures: Dilemmas of
Managerial Reform in the
UK House of Commons
Alexandra Meakin1 and Marc Geddes2
Abstract
How do institutions adapt and reform themselves in response to new challenges? This article
considers the role of ideas and posits that the concept of ‘dilemma’ – clashes of beliefs played out
through power relations and practices – offers a complementary tool to understand institutional
change. It draws on the 2014 appointment of a new Clerk to the UK House of Commons – in
which conflicting beliefs about the House of Commons administration opened a dilemma for
key parliamentary actors – as a token case study to highlight the value of the concepts of beliefs,
practices and dilemmas. It further broadens out these findings to consider the value of a wider
interpretive approach for understanding how institutions may adapt and change. In doing so,
it makes (1) a theoretical contribution by exploring the role of ideas in causing institutional
change and (2) an empirical contribution through its analysis of parliamentary administration, an
understudied area.
Keywords
interpretive parliamentary studies, parliamentary reform, managerial reform, dilemmas,
parliament, British politics
Accepted: 9 August 2020
How do institutions adapt and reform themselves in response to new challenges? This
question has been discussed and debated across many types of institutions and with lots
of different theoretical and analytical viewpoints (Hay, 2002; Thelen, 2009). In this arti-
cle, we offer an original contribution to this discussion by exploring the value of an inter-
pretive approach to explaining institutional change. We do this by focusing on how
beliefs, traditions and practices shape change, specifically making use of a case study in
the form of the appointment of a new Clerk of the UK House of Commons in 2014. We
1Department of Politics, The University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK
2School of Social and Political Science, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
Corresponding author:
Alexandra Meakin, Department of Politics, The University of Sheffield, Elmfield Building, Northumberland
Road, Sheffield S10 2TU, UK.
Email: a.meakin@sheffield.ac.uk
955127PSX0010.1177/0032321720955127Political StudiesMeakin and Geddes
research-article2020
Article
Meakin and Geddes 217
focus on this case for two reasons. First, legislatures have seen considerable institutional
change and challenge in recent years. In our case study institution, for instance, we can
also look to procedural innovations following COVID-19 (House of Commons Procedure
Committee, 2020) and a failure to deal adequately with complaints of sexual harassment
and bullying (Cox, 2018; House of Commons Commission, 2018c). And second, it builds
on an understudied area of political science, namely the internal governance of legisla-
tures (see Judge and Leston-Bandeira, 2018; Stirbu, 2011; Yong, 2018). As such, we hope
to offer new empirical findings on parliamentary organisation.
While our case study on parliamentary change is timely and original, this article’s core
contribution comes from the use of our token case to argue for the complementary value
of interpretive approaches in explaining institutional change more generally. In particular,
we point to the role of ‘dilemmas’ as a key concept through which institutionally situated
actors interpret and untangle divergent beliefs. The clash of beliefs, as framed by particu-
lar dilemmas and played out in practices, can explain subsequent institutional change and
political outcomes. This article therefore strengthens interpretive scholarship, which has
sometimes found it difficult to explain the role of ideas in causing or facilitating change
(Geddes, 2019; Glynos and Howarth, 2008; Hay, 2011). We make our argument in the
following four sections. First, we consider existing approaches to understanding institu-
tional change and specifically identify how this has shaped debates about parliamentary
change. Second, we draw on interpretive theory to explain how ‘dilemmas’, defined as a
clash of situated actors’ beliefs, practices and traditions, explain change. Third, we apply
our framework to the recruitment for the Clerk of the House of Commons in 2014, which
highlights how ideational dilemmas cause change. Fourth and finally, we summarise the
contribution of our case study to broader debates about institutional change.
Understanding Institutional Change in Parliaments and
Beyond
Historically, the study of institutions focused on how institutions persist, rather than how
change occurs (Thelen, 2009: 474). The application of the ‘new institutionalisms’ that
have emerged since the 1990s (Hall and Taylor, 1996) has aided a move towards under-
standing institutional change, with the development of concepts such as ‘punctuated equi-
librium’, whereby stable institutions change gradually but, following some kind of
(usually exogenous) shock such as a revolution, may change more significantly (Krasner,
1984); or ‘critical junctures’, in which a confluence of factors lifts the normal constraints
of action for actors within an institution (Collier and Collier, 1991). Analysis of change
using the new institutionalist approaches has also been criticised, however, for relying on
exogenous shocks or events or, as with their theoretical predecessors, being unable to
explain change more generally owing to their approach focusing on institutional stability
(Gorges, 2001). To overcome these weaknesses, Kathleen Thelen and colleagues have
proposed a focus on the importance of incremental and endogenous changes to institu-
tions through, for example, the removal of old and addition of new rules, layering new
rules alongside other rules, or the changing impact or application of existing rules
(Mahoney and Thelen, 2010; Streeck and Thelen, 2005). Meanwhile, other scholars have
looked at introducing a greater explanatory role of ideas to institutionalist analyses, some-
times labelled ‘constructivist’ (Hay, 2006) or ‘discursive’ (Schmidt, 2008) institutional-
ism, or incorporating ideas into existing theories of new institutionalism (Schmidt, 2010).
Some scholars have taken this a step further and adopted an ‘interpretive’ approach (Bevir
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