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[11]1. A procedural perspective on parliamentary politics

How does parliamentary politics distinguish itself from other styles of politics? An answer compatible with the etymology of ‘parliament’ is that parliamentary politics is rhetorical politics par excellence, ‘government by speaking’ (Macaulay 1857) or ‘government by discussion’ (Bagehot 1872).

Quentin Skinner’s thesis (1996) on the employment of the in utramquepartem debate in the rhetorical culture of the English Renaissance has prompted a number of studies on parliamentary rhetoric. Markku Peltonen has recently identified that in 1593 this principle was established as an official part of British parliamentary procedure (Peltonen 2013: 139). Pro et contra debate is not merely tolerated in, but presupposed by parliamentary politics as a condition for dealing with items on the agenda in a ‘parliamentary’ manner. Rhetorically, this manner of debating is in the deliberative genre and is unlike both the epideictic rhetoric of acclamation and the forensic rhetoric of the law courts.

The thesis of this book is that this rhetorical culture is still preserved in the procedural rules and conventions of the British parliament at Westminster. The volume deals with the conceptualisation of Westminster procedure, especially with respect to the parliamentary agenda, debate and the revisions these underwent when faced with the increasing pressures on parliamentary time after the 1832 reform of parliament. Tracts on procedure from the sixteenth century to the present have interpreted the procedural rules as well as disputes about their use; in addition, they illustrate how the rhetorical culture intersects with parliamentary politics with its politics of the agenda and politics of debate. The main argument, based on the analysis of these tracts, is that the distinctive parliamentary character of the procedural rules and practices characterises politics even in the face of the government’s precedence in proposing parliamentary initiatives.

[12]1.1 Conceptualisation and transformation of the procedural ideal type

The point of departure for this study is that there exists a certain parliamentary mode of thinking and acting politically, a parliamentary ideal type in the sense of Max Weber’s essay on ‘objectivity’ (Weber 1904; Palonen 2010b). Parliamentary procedure is the primary conceptual site of debating pro et contra, and it is the procedure that distinguishes parliaments from other political assemblies. This study seeks to analyse the formation and transformation of parliamentary procedure – both as a political ideal type and as a substrate for the parliamentary version of deliberative rhetoric.

The British parliament, more precisely the House of Commons, provides us with historically the first and conceptually the most complex example of a thorough proceduralisation of the parliamentary type of politics. For this study the unique Westminster procedure serves as the closest historical approximation to the parliamentary ideal type. In other words, the study aims at a conceptual history of parliamentary procedure, using the House of Commons as a paradigmatic example of the parliamentary ideal type. To emphasise this is one reason why ‘parliament’ is not capitalised in this book.

The object of the study is the procedural conceptualisation of parliamentary politics as well as the history of this conceptualisation, not the history of the British parliament or even the history of Westminster procedure as such. In accordance with the perspectivist character of ideal types, the study focuses on only certain definite aspects of procedure, while others – such as rituals and ceremonies, for example, or the House of Lords as a non-representative assembly – are in practice disregarded.

Also setting this study apart from others is the fact that it focuses on tracts written about Westminster procedure rather than studying the ‘realities’ of procedural change, as Josef Redlich does in his classical study Recht und Technik des Englischen Parlamentarismus (1905, English edition 1908). From the late sixteenth century to the present only a limited number of procedural tracts have been written, and these form the main corpus of the volume (presented in detail in Chapter 2). The history of the tracts offers us a perspective on the growing self-awareness of the distinctiveness of parliamentary politics. The first tracts were simply advice books describing existing procedural rules and practices. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, however, the tracts increasingly dealt with disputes on procedure itself. These express members’ own proceduralistic understanding of political disputes on the rules and their application have become an inherent part of parliamentary politics.

We can treat the procedural tracts as representative of the changes that have occurred in parliamentary politics. This volume is, thus, a ‘textual’ history of parliamentary procedure and does not claim to provide a ‘real history’. This[13] corresponds to Weber’s concept of the ideal type, in particular to his perspectivist theory of knowledge and the corresponding claim that through a onesided accentuation we can understand a phenomenon better than by aiming at an impossible ‘full picture’.

In this one-sided focusing on procedural tracts lies the main scholarly contribution of the present volume. It is striking how few studies there have been of procedural tracts. Redlich, of course, mentions all the major tracts until ca. 1900, and Caroline Strateman in her dissertation (1937) discusses them more thoroughly from the earliest periods up until the 1760s. New editions of old tracts contain some information on their points and contexts. While this volume is not a history of the tracts as such, the second chapter does contain an overview of the tracts and of their role in the formation and transformation of Westminster procedure.

The wider point lies in the politics of procedure, that is, in the thematisation of parliamentary procedure as a form of acting politically. This research perspective presupposes a kind of phenomenological bracketing of the ‘natural attitude’ in reading the procedural tracts, which were written for distinct purposes on specific occasions. My aim is not to deny the actual political context, but to discuss the significance of the tracts in conceptualising the political ideal type of parliamentary procedure.

Accordingly, the study has a different subject matter from a historian’s study of the same topic. In questions such as what aspects are interesting and how much contextual background is presented to readers, my practice differs from that of my colleagues in history departments. My knowledge of British history is limited, and I view parliamentary practices from a foreigner’s distance. Moreover, the study is written mainly for a European audience of political theorists, conceptual historians and scholars of rhetoric.

1.2 Max Weber on ‘objectivity’ as a procedural concept

Although it may not be evident at the outset, this book continues my work on Max Weber’s revision of the concept of ‘objectivity’ in rhetorical and parliamentary terms, ‘Objektivität’ als faires Spiel. Wissenschaft als Politik bei Max Weber (Palonen 2010b; for an English summary, Palonen 2010a). The starting point for Weber’s famous 1904 essay on ‘objectivity’ was the ongoing struggle within economics between the historical and the marginalist schools. He quotes a desperate Viennese PhD candidate who speaks of there being ‘two sciences of political economy’ (zwei Nationalökonomien) and asks what that might mean for the concept of ‘objectivity’ (Weber 1904: 160-161).

[14]Instead of weighing the merits of the two schools, Weber thematises the role of scholarly controversies for research practices as such and through them the concept of ‘objectivity’. Politics and culture are subject matter for the human sciences (Kulturwissenschaften), and Weber’s central thesis is that, at least in this domain, scholarly controversies are both unexceptional and highly valuable (ibid.: 153). Weber’s verdict refers to his perspectivist view of knowledge, indebted to Nietzsche and the rhetorical tradition: there exists no ‘objectivity as such’ independently of the specific and one-sided perspectives applied by the scholar (ibid.: 170, 180-181). Weber’s major claim was that the core of research practice lies in a confrontation of perspectives, each having formed different ideal types with the one-sided accentuation of aspects of the phenomenon being studied (ibid.: 186-187). ‘Progress’ in the human sciences consists in strengthening this confrontation between differing perspectives, approaches and ideal types and encouraging scholarly debate (ibid.: 205-207).

Weber rejects all the main contemporary views of ‘objectivity’. For him ‘objectivity’ cannot refer to any ‘things in themselves’: his perspectivism is radically opposed to all forms of ‘realistic’ epistemology, as if a concept could be taken ‘out of the matter itself’ (ibid.: 181). Nor can ‘objectivity’ refer to a quality of the scholar, who always works from some perspective on the topic discussed, or to a ‘middle course’ between differing views or to a consensus among scholars (ibid.: 153-154). Weber’s discussion illustrates how ‘objectivity’ refers to a relationship between both theories and scholars, with no possibility for an Archimedean point beyond the controversy. Nor does there exist a common set of questions (Fragen und Gebiete) for all scholars in a field (ibid.: 184), but scholarly controversies can extend to debates about the research agenda. The perspectives of scholars are not socially predetermined standpoints, as later claimed by Karl Mannheim (1929), nor does ‘objectivity’ refer to the ‘winner’ status of a theory that beats its rivals and then is changed itself in the future.

On the contrary, for Weber the open-ended confrontation between perspectives lies at the very core of research practice in the human sciences. For fair competition allowing shifting constellations between old and new perspectives, Weber uses the metaphor of the ‘eternal youth of historical research’ (Weber 1904: 205-207). Weber’s rhetorical move in the ‘objectivity’ essay consists of a ‘paradiastolic’ reinterpretation of the very concept of ‘objectivity’ (as discussed in Skinner 1996: ch. 4). For Weber ‘objectivity’ refers neither to a quality nor to a result of a scholarly dispute, but rather to a procedure for dealing with disputes with an open mind, or in a spirit of fair play. Or, conversely, ‘objectivity’ for Weber is nothing more than the application of fair play to debates on research practices and results.

My thesis is that Westminster parliamentary procedure provided for Weber the historical paradigm for dealing fairly with scholarly controversies. My point [15](already in Palonen 2004) is that Weber’s ‘objectivity’ essay should be read in the context of his polemics against the rule of officialdom and his suggestions for its parliamentary control, as expressed in his 1918 pamphlet Parliament und Regierung im neugeordneten Deutschland (Weber 1918: esp. 235-248). The perspectivist and controversial character of knowledge is not limited to original scholarship but holds equally for the everyday knowledge of state administration and its application to governmental politics. Weber’s proposals for parliamentary control of administrative knowledge illustrate both the political value of such control (lacking in Wilhelmine Germany) and the procedural resources for obtaining such knowledge. With this example, it becomes clearer how British parliamentary procedures provided an implicit model also for Weber’s reconceptualisation of academic controversies in the procedural terms of ‘objectivity’.

The present study further contributes to a better understanding of the origins of Weber’s concept of ‘objectivity’ and its relation to Westminster procedure, of which he clearly was well aware, although he never commented on it in detail (see the references in Palonen 2004). With a Weberian political imagination and a focused reading, I will discuss how procedural tracts manifest the presence and the forms of ideal-typical parliamentary politics as well as how this ideal type was formed and transformed. At the same time I will illustrate how the conceptualisation of the parliamentary ideal type, as expressed in the procedural tracts, has altered in response to the changing political situation. The rules and practices of procedure are themselves matters of dispute, and since the eighteenth century the tracts have largely been expositions and interpretations of procedural controversies.

The parliamentary procedures for debate explicitly recognise and have institutionalised politics as a controversial and contingent activity. My aim is to understand, in particular, how the tracts on procedure conceptualise the dissensus and debate aspects of parliament.

1.3 The procedural character of ideal-typical parliamentary politics

How does procedure make the decisive distinction between parliament and other types of assemblies? What is the exact procedural point of Edmund Burke’s famous distinction (1774) between parliament as a ‘deliberative assembly’ and as a ‘congress of ambassadors’, into which he thought it might be in danger of degenerating?

Rhetoric scholars have difficulties understanding that parliamentary debate does not follow the rules of classical oratory. The Canadian rhetoric professor [16]James De Mille, however, succinctly formulated the difference between oratory and debate: ‘Oratory is the discussion of a subject by one; debate is the discussion of a subject by more than one. Oratory considers the subject from one point of view; debate considers the subject from two or more opposed points of view.’ (De Mille 1878, 471) Debate is thus not merely an exercise in speech, but itself the primary rhetorical unit of parliamentary politics; it is constituted and regulated by procedure and regularly discussed in the procedural tracts.

The lack of interest hitherto shown in procedural tracts is to a considerable extent due to the belief that Westminster procedure has remained practically unchanged. Edward and Anne G. Porritt expressed this belief explicitly in their study on the unreformed House of Commons.

In a word, by the end of the reign of James I the procedure of the House of Commons had so taken the form in which it came down to the nineteenth century, that could a member of the House of Commons which passed the Reform Act of 1832 have been transported back to the days of the first of the Stuart kings, he would have been at home with the orders and usages, the written and unwritten laws which governed its procedure. (Porritt/Porritt 1903: 544)

The impression it gives of familiarity does not, however, necessarily mean that procedure has remained unchanged. An important activity in conceptual history is to defamiliarise the familiar, to look beyond the facade of similarities in vocabulary. Moreover, the Porritts’ claim is not based on the analysis of procedural documents or tracts. One of the aims of this study is to question the historical validity of this continuity thesis by analysing procedural tracts and the views they present of parliamentary politics.

Parliamentary procedure serves for members and analysts as an inventory of those regular items on the parliamentary agenda that members can be expected to encounter and on which they may have to take a stand. The procedural tracts classify the types of items that members should use as resources in acting politically in a parliamentary manner. They offer at the same time a catalogue of the disputes that may arise over procedure itself.

Such an inventory of disputes underscores the proceduralism of parliamentary politics: no issue can be debated and decided unless it is put onto parliament’s agenda. Parliamentary agenda-setting follows definite rules concerning who may put a motion on the agenda at what time and in what manner. The rules also govern how items on the agenda relate to each other as well as an item’s trajectory from the original motion to a final decision.

The order of parliamentary debate is also formalised. It relies on simple assumptions, well known in the literature on rhetoric. As John Marks Brewer succinctly points out: ‘Only one topic will be under consideration at any one time, and only one person at a time will be speaking’ (Brewer 1916: 289). James De Mille similarly asserts: ‘The peculiarity of parliamentary debate is that the subject to be examined is presented in a formal statement, called a resolution,[17] or question, to which alone the discussion must refer’ (De Mille 1878: 472). The model of parliamentary procedure has been applied with greater or lesser success to other assemblies, institutions, organisations and meetings, but I shall not deal with such applications in this work (see Haapala 2012 on Cambridge and Oxford Unions).

The page length given to intra-parliamentary deliberations in the tracts provides us with a preliminary indicator of the rise of the distinctly parliamentary manner of proceeding. The complexity of procedure – for example, the number of stages to be included in the debate or the range of options for what can be done with an item on the agenda at each stage – relates to parliamentary insiders’ own understanding of what is ‘parliamentary’ in the procedure. A reflexive dimension of parliamentary proceedings lies in the possibility of parliament interrupting its own deliberations in order to question whether the ongoing proceedings are of a sufficiently parliamentary character, thus distinguishing procedural debates from debates of other kinds.

All modern parliaments include written regulations on procedure; in Britain since the early nineteenth century these have been called ‘standing orders’. The tracts up to John Hatsell’s four volumes in the late eighteenth century (revised edition published in 1818) relied on the other main source of procedure, the exposition of precedents: which interpretations of them were still valid and what had fallen into disuse, as well as what new interpretations were considered possible. Commentaries on precedents, for their part, propose an explicit range of legitimate interpretation and form the basis for debate when someone wants to apply a precedent. This practice is flexible, leaving room for both a huge diversity of items on the parliamentary agenda and wide interpretative powers to the Speaker, or to the majority. Hatsell’s project of codifying precedents and commenting on them was inspired by Speaker Arthur Onslow’s view of parliamentary proceduralism as a protection against arbitrary majorities.

The value of relatively stable procedure is obvious. Endless procedural debates would lead to parliamentary paralysis (see Pierre 1887: 5). Due to their common procedural elements, parliamentarians of all countries tend to speak the same language with only dialectical or idiomatic variations. Westminster procedure may be used as a model for the procedural politics of parliamentary cultures throughout Europe, even for countries that would otherwise reject major features of the British model.

In parliamentary procedure, debate concerns what parliamentary moves are to be considered forbidden, what tolerated, what recommended, what expected, what uncommon and so on. However, astute parliamentarians soon learn to what is not excluded by the rules or how they can be circumvented by, for example, referring to other rules. From this perspective, the possibilities for tactical use of parliamentary rules and conventions, the unevenness of their availability or of the political competence of different members, as well as the possibilities[18] and methods used to restrict such tactical use, are obvious topics in a study of the politics of procedure.

The status of the parliamentary freedom of all members – a free mandate, free speech, free elections, freedom from arrest (parliamentary immunity) – and the egalitarian internal relations between members as maintained in the procedure for deliberations provide us with additional criteria by which to distinguish parliaments from estate or corporate assemblies. Behind the combination of freedom and equality we can detect appeals to more implicit parliamentary principles, such as fair play. A major reason for the accusation of unparliamentary language or conduct lies in perceived violations of the principle of fair play. The principle also provides legitimisation for attempts to prevent the arbitrary use of power by the majority or by the government.

The proceduralism of parliamentary politics transforms broad issues into motions on an agenda, and allows interruption to a debate in order to raise the question of procedure, ‘order’ in Westminster jargon. Issues can be debated and decided in a regulated pattern and within a regulated time. Procedure treats questions as discrete items on the agenda of a particular parliament in the concrete here and now. Members must deal with the question as it exists in a definite form and at a definite stage in the parliamentary process. Possible alternatives about what to do next with an item on the agenda are decided only by a straight yes-or-no vote. In other words, the parliamentarisation of politics proceduralises debate and alters the conditions on which members can pass a motion. This proceduralism, furthermore, supports the free mandate of members: in election campaigns questions are not posed in a parliamentary form.

An inherent dimension of the parliamentary transformation of issues into items involves the regulation of parliamentary time. Although parliamentary time is always limited, thorough treatment of an item on the agenda requires allowing enough time not only for debate, but also for the intervals between debates. Here the time given for spontaneity and inspiration in debate meets the time given for distance and reflection between debates. Full parliamentary deliberation requires various distributions of time – between the speeches of members, between different types of items on the agenda, and between the different stages in the passage of a motion.

Parliamentary decisions are in one sense only about removing an item from the agenda in order to make room for another. The parliamentary question at the end of the day takes the form: ‘What shall the parliament do next with this item?’ A motion can be moved forward onto the next stage in its journey or it can be taken off the agenda altogether. One way of avoiding taking a stand is to adjourn a motion sine die.

The politics of the agenda includes the question of the manner of parliamentary agenda-setting and the rank and weight of items on the agenda. The agenda gives an indication of the power relationships between parliament and[19] government, particularly in relation to the parliamentary initiative of members. One of the lessons to be taken from the Long Parliament during the English Revolution was that a parliament cannot be a governing body, and since the Glorious Revolution hardly anyone in Britain has yearned for direct parliamentary rule. Giving priority to government initiatives in budgetary, legislative and other questions is legitimate, but the precise limits of this advantage are a matter of dispute.

Historically, no similar debate has been conducted concerning items on the agenda and the politics of parliamentary agenda-setting in terms of how items may be prioritised, advanced, delayed or removed. The relative increase in government powers that has resulted from the increasing demands on parliamentary time overall has also prompted procedural debates over issues of agenda-setting.

The key political question is the relationship of procedural principles to the parliamentary majority. Procedural limitations prevent a majority from altering the rules to its own advantage, that is, they serve to maintain fair chances for all candidates now and in future parliaments in relation to the incumbent majority. How can a majority’s misuse of parliamentary procedure be prevented, or would this be a violation of parliamentary sovereignty? Would a simple majority be justified in altering a (mis)use of procedure that was detrimental to parliament as an institution? In such cases, the assumed range of threats and options will be evaluated in comparison with parliament’s culture and tradition, as well as with the response of the electorate and foreign parliaments.

Nonetheless, the tactical use of existing procedures is an inherent part of the political competence of parliamentarians. Typical parliamentary debates appeal to the rules of procedure, to precedents, higher, unwritten principles of parliamentarism, or to a juxtaposition of different parliamentary rules one against another. Differences in procedural competencies may alter the way an item is treated or may open up a debate regarding the need to change an existing procedure. In some cases, such as sanctioning the use of unparliamentary language, members may aim not so much at deliberative rhetoric altering the opinions of other members as at epideictic rhetoric getting a response from a nonparliamentary audience, which may in turn give rise to questions of revising the rules or their interpretation in order to reinforce the principle of parliamentary fair play.

We can easily imagine grounds that might be used to argue for procedural revisions. Political events at home and abroad, revisions of the constitution, the suffrage or the electoral system, shifting constellations between parties and coalitions or changing practices in parliamentary speaking, as well as the increase in the number of items on the agenda all tend to provoke calls for procedural reform. Reforms may be part of a comprehensive parliamentary or constitutional set of reforms or an individual procedural reform occasioned by a specific[20] controversy. A method often used in reforms is to invoke principles that underlie procedures and to compare them to current practices and the proposed reforms. What can be achieved in terms of procedural change may depend on the parliamentary majority, but in procedural questions, party and government lines might be transcended in the name of defending the proceduralism of parliamentary politics as such.

From the perspective of the individual member, the politics of procedure can rely either on using the possibilities of the existing procedure for different political purposes or on examining the limits and limitations of the procedure. Both of these may involve testing the range of legitimate possibilities in order to get a judgment from the parliamentary majority, or it may involve provocatively violating the procedure in order to obtain its revision. Pro et contra debates can ensue with either of these alternatives. In short, we can distinguish between the politicking with and the politicisation of the parliamentary procedure (in the sense of Palonen 2003).

These examples of the political uses of parliamentary procedure illustrate that procedure forms a subtext of parliamentary politics. The politics of procedure thus transcends the procedural level itself and becomes intertwined with other levels, such as parliamentary rhetoric and parliamentary government. In this sense the history of parliamentary procedure also contains wider perspectives on parliamentarism.

1.4 Westminster procedural tracts on the parliamentary ideal type

Jeremy Bentham’s Essay on Political Tactics will be analysed below as one of the main British procedural tracts. It differs from all the rest by aiming at a general model of procedure for all public assemblies, and it was written for the use of the French assemblies after the convocation of the États généraux in 1788. The British parliament serves Bentham’s purpose as it provides a successful historical model of how procedures have been applied to parliamentary politics.

Whatever the differences between this study and Bentham’s, they both regard the Westminster parliament not only as a British political institution, but as an exemplary parliament that over the centuries has constructed a distinctly procedural style of politics, as is also often discussed in the tracts on procedure. To distinguish this study from works on British parliamentary history, some additional words are needed on how I approach the Westminster parliament, namely, as the earliest significant historical example of a parliamentary institution to form a high degree of proceduralism in its forms of politics.

[21]It is obvious that this study has hardly anything in common with sociocultural histories of parliaments, such as those concerning parliamentary architecture, or a rational choice approach to the political economy of parliaments (Congleton 2011). Nor has it much in common with the long series of histories of separate parliaments within a period, as exemplified by the History of Parliament Trust’s series (http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/about/publications).

It is somewhat closer to histories of parliament as an institution and definitely uses the results of such studies (e.g. Maddicott 2010; Hexter ed. 1992), and the same holds for constitutional histories of longer or shorter periods (see Dicey 1885 or Tomkins 2005). The work has more in common with intellectual histories of the British parliament, typically written by non-British authors (such as Kluxen 1983; Baranger 1999 or Turkka 2007). Against the tendency of mainstream political scientists to reduce parliamentary studies to studies of ‘political systems’ or ‘forms of government’, an interest in the political theory of parliamentarism, which was common to many older British political scientists such as Harold Laski (1938), Ernst Barker (1942), Ivor Jennings (1939), Michael Oakeshott (1939) and Bernard Crick (1964), is shared by the author of this volume, as is the recently revived interest in parliamentary rhetoric (see Mack 2002; Colclough 2005; Ilie ed. 2010; Finlayson 2012; Peltonen 2013).

The closest material to this study is obviously procedural studies. Redlich’s magnum opus is not merely a presentation of the debates on procedural changes after the 1832 Reform Act. Redlich also wants to link parliamentarism with the ‘theory and practice of politics’ (1905: V), and his discussion of the debates on adapting procedure to the extension of the suffrage and to the adoption of parliamentary or cabinet government as well as to the increase in the number of items on the agenda and the new expectation for members to intervene in debates provided an important background for the writing of the present study. Nonetheless, Redlich’s perspective is that of a legal historian, for whom texts serve as material for interpreting changes in practice.

It is here that the inversion of perspective in this volume is most obvious and challenging. Instead of using procedural texts as a vehicle for interpreting action on procedures, I am using them as ‘moves in an argument’ (in the sense of Skinner 1988: 283), or as contributions to specific debates on procedure. The ‘real’ and ‘intellectual’ histories of parliamentary practices are used here to contextualise these moves and to identify their political and thematic origins, because the moves have often been in response to what has gone before.

The contexts are presented to a remarkable degree in the tracts themselves, by John Hatsell and Thomas Erskine May, for example. In other cases a background reading of the literature is needed, and here Redlich’s work is still unequalled. Occasionally parliamentary debates or Select Committee reports can be used as a contextual complement to the procedural tracts. This does not[22] mean a return to a ‘textualist’ history of political thought (devastingly criticised by Skinner 1969), but it means treating the procedural tracts as political and rhetorical moves in themselves.

The procedural tracts form a fairly coherent genre, of which the authors were well aware, and which also provides a degree of inter-textual linking between them: the best known older tracts tend to be mentioned in the later ones. While their scope, topics and perspectives on parliament differ widely, the tracts are nonetheless sufficiently comparable with each other even to an anachronism-sensitive approach that pays close attention to differences of context. This inter-textual character of the genre is also the main reason why a relatively high degree of independence from actual parliamentary events is possible in this volume.

The tracts have multiple audiences. For laypersons, to whom parliamentary procedure may appear as a foreign country, the tracts furnish the broad outline; for parliamentarians, journalists and parliamentary officials, the tracts provide interpretations of the rules and disputes concerning them. Tract authors since the eighteenth century have tacitly recognised that disputes over procedure are an inherent part of the procedures themselves. The conflicts are analysed in terms of their appeal to different accepted rules of procedure and then discussed by appealing to the higher parliamentary principles that underlie the individual rules.

The concentration of the present study on the procedural tracts of parliamentary politics leads to further questions. What subjects do the tracts regard as part of procedure? How are disputes on procedure itself and their political role in parliament thematised in the tracts? How did the conceptualisation of procedure and, through it, of parliamentary politics in general change in tracts from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries? How shall we assess the significance of the main procedural changes for parliamentary politics? Questions like these serve as the background for a thematic approach to conceptual change, one that revolves around the major topoi that have characterised these tracts on parliamentary procedure (for a similar approach see also Palonen 2006).

1.5 Procedure and conceptual changes

In parliamentary politics, votes are given specific content by the speeches that precede them and they are not really intelligible without them. Unlike in the Napoleonic division between the speaking ‘Tribunat’ and the silently voting ‘Corps legislative’ (see, for example, Garrigues 2007: 102-108), the understanding of the vote as the last speech act is characteristic of a parliament.

[23]A key point of this study on the politics of parliamentary procedure is to get rid of systems-theory thinking on parliamentary government, as represented by e.g. Niklas Luhmann’s thesis (2000) on the government vs. opposition divide as a code of parliamentary politics. The systems view of parliamentary politics subordinates procedural questions to questions of parliamentary government.

My suggestion is that we ought to take an action-oriented perspective on parliaments. The study of procedure must be distinguished from that of parliamentary oratory or eloquence. I shall deal in a separate study with the history of parliamentary eloquence and debate at Westminster as part of the parliamentarisation of deliberative rhetoric.

Before entering the thematic narrative, the history of the tracts themselves – their authors and contexts, and their changing character from the late sixteenth century to the present time – will be discussed, in the second chapter. The scope and character of procedural tracts have been subject to major changes. Within the thematic presentation, historical (temporal) layers involving the formation of procedure, the changes it has undergone and the struggles waged over it must be included. Also the order of presenting topoi must respect this history, at least in the sense that some of the topoi have a longer parliamentary history than others.

In this volume, I am connecting two different rhetorical instruments, the rhetoric of topoi and the rhetoric of inventio and dispositio. This terminology also provides the basis for this work as the interplay between inventio and dispositio, that is, for the interplay between intra-parliamentary politics and the outside world. Within each of the chapters, then, specific topoi are taken up for analysis.

The character of the topoi to a large extent follows the understanding of the concept that I employed in my book The Struggle with Time: A Conceptual History of ‘Politics’ as an Activity (Palonen 2006). Topoi are not to be understood as mere ‘commonplaces’. Rather they refer, in line with the original rhetorical sense of this concept, to certain regularly thematised ‘places’ of argumentation, in this case in the genre of tracts on parliamentary procedure. In this sense, they are more open-ended than ‘discourses’, which tend to normalise the extraordinary; my use of topoi, in contrast, is first of all an argument about the narrative that has thematically linked the tracts over the ages.

The topoi thus refer to themes regularly debated in the procedural tracts. Aspects and dimensions of a topos may be extended over time due to the changing character of the tracts and the debates taken up in them. Despite a high degree of inter-textuality, there cannot be many ‘real’ debates about what subjects constitute the topoi between tract authors from the sixteenth century to the present. The topoi are constructions of the scholar, but they are always based on debates that can be found in the sources. Although no direct comparisons[24] should be made between Thomas Smith and Gilbert Campion, for example, the very idea of parliamentary procedure or of having a procedural mode of regulating politics is based on the identification of definite parallels or contrasts, and these can be analysed to conceptualise the topoi of parliamentary procedure.

We need action-oriented perspectives on parliamentary procedure to estimate the horizon of parliamentary possibilities. In rhetorical terms, procedure calls upon dispositio and inventio, those aspects which Petrus Ramus and his followers left out of rhetoric (see Skinner 1996; Bassakos 2010).

The moment of dispositio, or the arrangement of items for debate, is a decisive aspect in distinguishing the role of parliamentary procedure from the practices of oratory. It includes the classification of issues into types of questions to be debated, the range of utterances into discrete speech acts, and the trajectory of items into an orderly journey of different stages on the agenda, with the vote being the final speech act. The transformation of issues into items on the parliamentary agenda has reference to the proceduralisation of politics, one that conditions and mediates the elocutio of rhetorical practice through and through.

Parliamentary procedure is related to inventio by way of agenda-setting. The crucial questions here are: how, when and by whom can items be put on the parliamentary agenda, according to procedure? Procedure decides what types of items can be put onto the parliamentary agenda at all, and what effect the agenda has in shaping and regulating the conditions of debate. In this respect, agenda-setting has a close link to the dispositio of the procedures for debate. One political question that arises out of this concerns the competence and tactics of members who use procedure for parliamentary inventio, including the possibility of questioning procedure itself.

The third chapter deals with inventio from the perspective of parliamentary powers, thematised in terms of the range of items on the parliamentary agenda. The point of departure is the understanding that the Westminster parliament is not a governing but a controlling institution and that parliament’s political activity is inseparable from how it presents and applies its own procedural resources.

The intra-parliamentary dispositio (Chapter 4) is concerned with the procedural core of the parliamentary manner of proceeding: debate. The chapter deals with the thematisation of debate pro et contra, the vocabulary of parliamentary debate, House and committee types of debate, ways of regulating debate and parliament’s self-understanding as a debating assembly.

Parliamentary politics is notably a politics of time, for it operates with a temporal subtext. Chapters 5 and 6 discuss it in terms of dispositio and inventio. The section on intra-parliamentary dispositio (Chapter 5) deals with the specific parliamentary concepts that distinguish moves in time, operating within the limits of time and attempting to control time, as well as amendments, adjournments,[25] the multi-stage character of parliamentary debate and the practice of using up as well as saving parliamentary time.

In Chapter 6, inventio refers to the politicisation of parliamentary time in the post-1832 reformed parliaments. Time became the main subject of struggles over parliamentary agenda-setting, including procedure, in the age of Erskine May. The Irish members’ use of obstructing practices around 1880 provoked debates over how to distribute parliamentary time between members and agenda items on a daily, weekly and annual basis. All of this is, of course, connected to the relationship between parliamentary government and parliamentary procedure, which Redlich claimed was resolved in favour of the former. The procedural literature of the twentieth century seems to take a more detached view.

In the narrative of the chapters, besides distinguishing the topoi, I present the specific contexts and dates of thematising conceptual changes. The net result is a ‘decentralised’ history of the politics of the conceptualisation and transformation of parliamentary procedure. This narrative is opposed to those approaches that view procedure as following upon and derivative of political and constitutional events, as well as to Reinhart Koselleck’s well-known thesis of a single Sattelzeit in conceptual change (e.g. Koselleck 1979). However, Koselleck’s lesser known instrument for analysing conceptual change, namely, temporal layers (Zeitschichten) (Koselleck 2000), is explicitly thematised in the second section of Chapter 7.

I conclude in Chapter 7 by discussing temporal layers on two levels, first as manners of accommodation between the old and the new, then as a major narrative dealing with the politics of the agenda and the politics of debate. I distinguish two stages in the latter, that of the historical momentum initiated by the 1832 Reform Act and the consequent acute shortage of parliamentary time, and that of the responses to it in procedural tracts from Thomas Erskine May onwards.

The final section deals with the adversarial and dissensual conceptions of parliament as a deliberative assembly. The adversarial view focuses on the people who defend the opposite view. The dissensual view argues that, even in the absence of adversaries, parliamentary procedure applies a methodological principle that encourages the construction of perspectives from which to dispute any uncontested view. I examine how these two views have been expressed and relate to each other in the procedural tracts, in particular after parliamentary time became a serious issue.

My Weberian style of thinking and addressing this book mainly to political theorists make it necessary to add a comment on the use of concepts. I am using for example the concept ‘chance’ in the formal Weberian sense (discussed in Palonen 1998 and 2010b) that cannot be translated by a single word but refers to possibility, opportunity, occasion, realisability – but not to hazard or accident. [26]I also speak on ‘parliamentarians’ in the typological sense, not in the provincial English seventeenth-century sense. ‘Publicity’ for Bentham and others discussed here corresponds to the German concept of Öffentlichkeit and has, of course, nothing to do with advertising.

Some years ago this study could not have been written without considerable difficulty. The Internet sources that have become available within the last decade have made my analysis possible. Besides the primary sources of parliamentary debates (the Hansard collection and the House of Commons Parliamentary Papers), I have used databases such as Early English Books Online (EEBO), Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), the Internet Archive, the Online Library of Liberty and other corpora. As my interest lies in the conceptual and rhetorical aspects of the texts and their political significance, I regard the online editions as sufficient for my purposes. My use of the online sources is, however, somewhat pedestrian, as of someone whose learning of textual analysis took place long before the Internet age.