The Coming of Parliamentary Television: The Lords and the Senate Compared
| Date | 01 March 1997 |
| Author | Anthony Mughan,Jonathan P. Swarts |
| Published date | 01 March 1997 |
| DOI | 10.1111/1467-9248.00068 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
The Coming of Parliamentary Television:
The Lords and the Senate Compared
ANTHONY MUGHAN AND JONATHAN P. SWARTS *
Ohio State University
Subscribing to a Burkean view of representation, legislators have long tended to
resist constant public scrutiny. In recent years, however, they have overcome this
reluctance in a large number of countries and voted to allow the televising of their
proceedings. But why they did so remains a mystery. Some media theorists argue that
television exposure is a `great democratizer'. It demysti®es public authority ®gures
and obliges them to become more accountable for their actions. The experience of
the British House of Lords and the United States Senate suggests instead that
television was invited in by rational political actors as a means of achieving their
goals in a time of change. In this view, television is best seen not as a force in its
own right, but as a medium of communication that can be strategically deployed
by goal-oriented political e
Âlites responding to dierent political circumstances and
institutional incentive structures.
In the spirit of the Burkean maxim that, between elections, members should be
left to decide on the basis of their judgment, parliaments have long tended to
operate on the principle that the deliberative function is performed best when
shielded from constant public scrutiny. In the past, this argument has been used
to justify practices as diverse as not having public galleries, refusing access
to the print and, later, electronic media, and denying voters the right to elect a
chamber directly. The US House of Representatives, for example, was
popularly elected right from the moment of independence in the late eighteenth
century, but a Senate designed to be `a brake on hasty action' 1was shielded
from direct election until the passage of the seventeenth amendment to the
constitution in 1913. Seen in this light, a curious, and unexplained, political
development of recent times has been the decision of democratic parliaments
worldwide to forego their preference for privacy and allow the televised
broadcast of their proceedings. Why?
Insofar as it is a phenomenon that encompasses a variety of chambers, upper
and lower, elected and unelected, in¯uential and largely advisory, the advent of
parliamentary television would seem to be susceptible to general explanation.
But the literature on the topic is rarely comparative and almost always
#Political Studies Association 1997. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main
Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
* We would like to thank the referees for their insightful and helpful comments on an earlier
version of this article.
1S. E. Morison and H. S. Commager, The Growth of the American Republic, vol. I (New York,
Oxford University Press, 5th ed., 1962), p. 285.
Political Studies (1997), XLV, 36± 48
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