Parliamentary Committees: Scrutiny of the Administration

LLM Thesis, Central European University, 2002

This study is inspired by the attempts undertaken in Britain to reverse the alleged decline of Parliaments by their institutional improvements and especially by introduction of parliamentary committees, authorized to exercise rigorous control over the executive. It does not assume that the weakness of parliaments vis-а-vis the executive is necessarily problematic, but is interested in the attempts to strengthen the legislature that were motivated by such assumption, and especially in the tools employed and the results achieved by the reforms with the intent ‘to restore the balance’. Therefore it explores the theoretical possibilities and the actual attempts to improve the decision-making and oversight capacities of the parliaments and especially of the House of Commons by such institutional enhancements. It hypothesizes that by internal changes of the organization of the parliaments (i.e. the introduction of the British Departmental Select Committees in 1979) its capacities to control and influence governmental policy can be increased and its standing vis-а-vis the Cabinet can be redressed. The broader conclusion from a positive result of this hypothesis will be that by internal transformations within one of the branches of the government external changes in its constitutional context can be achieved. The method of testing this hypothesis is to identify, by theoretical speculations and empirical analysis of an existing strong legislature (US Congress), the factors that make a system of parliamentary committees stronger and to analyze the results of the implementation of these factors in weak legislatures (the British House of Commons and the Canadian Parliament), in deliberate attempts to improve them despite the unfavorable environmental factors.

For that purpose the study will focus on British departmental committees and the oversight of the administration they perform compared with the congressional committees in US and parliamentary committees in Canada. Hence amongst all institutions that may or were used by reformers to redress the balance it will analyze only the parliamentary committees. As British committees’ powers are limited to ‘scrutiny of the administration’ the study will generally be limited to that function of the legislatures of the two countries. However it also will draw conclusions for the impact of the oversight committees to the overall strength of their parent chamber and its position vis-а-vis the executive. The American committees will be used only for the purpose of identifying the committee-enhancing factors and accordingly their analysis will be limited to these characteristics.

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