Contact

Send us your feedback

Thank you for your feedback. An email has been sent to the ESRC support team.

An error occured whilst sending your feedback. Please review the problems below.

ECRP07: collaboration led by Christoffer Green-Pedersen, University of Aarhus, Denmark - Legislative policy agendas in the UK

Grant reference: RES-062-23-0872

« View grant details

Conference paper/presentation details

Do executives keep their promises? : the transmission of the policy agendas of the speech from the throne to acts of UK Parliament
In the United Kingdom, the transmission between policy promises and statutes is assumed to be both rapid and efficient because of the tradition of party discipline, relative stability of government, absence of coalitions and the limited powers of legislative revision in the second chamber. Even in the UK political system such a transmission mechanism is not perfect since legislative priorities and outputs are susceptible to changes in public opinion or media coverage, unanticipated events in the external world, backbench rebellions and the practical constraints of administering policies or programmes. This paper investigates the strength of the connection between executive priorities and legislative outputs; measured in the form of the Speech from the Throne and Acts of Parliament from 1911 to 2007. These are categorised according to the policy content coding system of the UK Policy Agendas Project (www.policyagendas.org.uk). The paper finds through time series cross-sectional analyses that the transmission from the speech to acts is generally strong. However, this relationship has declined over time and is much stronger in the parliamentary year immediately following an election.
http://www.ecprnet.eu/conferences/general_conference/Potsdam/
Conference homepage
English

Primary contributor

Author Shaun Bevan

Keywords

Queen's speeches; legislation; public opinion

Additional details

No
ECPR General conference
Potsdam
5th

Files