Researching Ritual and the Symbolic in Parliaments: An Institutionalist Perspective

Abstract

This article proposes a new research agenda for understanding and analysing legislatures and their activities together with some additional tools and approaches hitherto rather neglected within legislative studies that could be used more systematically to help us to unravel and answer key questions. In particular, it suggests that we need to broaden the approaches used in legislative studies so that they can incorporate not just a wider range of institutional approaches than are commonly used in the field at the moment, but also another missing dimension -ritual and the symbolic (R&S) -within that. It focuses on ritual within institutionalist analysis and argues that the incorporation of ritual actually fits in with recent developments in the wider field of institutional analysis that have focused on the centrality of rules, norms and both formal and informal institutions in understanding institutions. The development of this approach will enhance both institutional analyses and legislative studies.

Preaching to the Converted: Parliament and the Proscription Ritual

“…Georgina Waylen, similarly, draws on Lukes to locate ritual within the institutionalist literature, emphasising the working of rules and norms in formal and informal institutions. Here, she frames ritual as key to understanding ‘change, power and conflict’ and actors’ behaviours in ‘legislatures as institutions’ (Waylen, 2010: 353). Yet, one of the most prominent scholars on political ritual, Shirin Rai, critiques Lukes’ characterisation.…”

“…This concern is represented in a nascent but important scholarship on British politics (e.g. Atkins and Finlayson 2014;Crewe 2005;Lovenduski, 2012;Rai, 2014;Rhodes, 2005;Waylen, 2010); securitization (Oren & Solomon, 2015) and public policy (t 'Hart, 1993). Despite differences therein, for many of these authors rhetorical and performative analysis can be employed to reveal the 'symbolic, ritualised aspect of contemporary political and ideological practices' of Parliament (Atkins and Finlayson, 2014).…”