Meet the team…
Chris Monaghan, Sean Haughey, Alexandra Meakinv, Caroline Bhattacharya, Stephen Holden Bates
We are excited to tell you about what the PSA Parliaments Specialist Group has been doing this year. 2021 has been a very successful year for us and the group has undertaken some interesting activities and has collaborated with other groups and academics. The group continues to expand its membership with more than 500 PSA and non-PSA members, and we have attracted our 3,000th follower on Twitter. This all ensures that the group reaches both a national and international audience. The group is convened by Dr Stephen Holden Bates and Dr Alexandra Meakin. The group’s treasurer in Dr Sean Haughey, the membership officer is Caroline Bhattacharya, and the communications officer is Dr Chris Monaghan.
Our biggest project of 2021 was a global survey of parliamentary and legislative studies. The purpose of the survey was to map the sub-discipline in terms of the backgrounds and foci of scholars and the methods and theories they use. We received 218 responses from people based in 48 different countries. We supplemented the survey with a bibliometric analysis of three main sub-field journals (Journal of Legislative Studies, Legislative Studies Quarterly, and Parliamentary Affairs) and a roundtable on the past, present and future of parliamentary studies where three prominent scholars – Emma Crewe, Shane Martin and Michelle Taylor-Robinson – discussed their views of the sub-field.
The results of the survey and bibliometric analysis have already been reported in our newly launched working paper series.
In terms of conferences we have also been very busy! We hosted a fantastic programme of panels at PSA21, featuring exceptional research on parliaments across three continents. Our panels offered opportunities to early career researchers, including MA and PhD students, demonstrating the welcoming and supportive environment our Group provides. We continue to hold an annual conference, although we held two in 2021! We finished off the monthly-panels of the 2020 conference and we held our 2021 conference online in November. We ran three panels which featured presentations on parliaments in nine countries around the globe, including Asia and Africa. We attracted over 70 attendees, including sixth form pupils from Leighton Park School who came off timetable for the day so that they could attend.
We have expanded the range of events we organise. In addition to continuing to hold academic workshops, such as Parliamentary Studies is for Everybody (co-organised with Women & Politics and Race, Migration & Intersectionality), we have begun to (co)host book launches. Thus far, we have organised a launch for Parliamentary Committees in the Policy Process (co-sponsored with IPSA RCLS) and Cheryl Schonhardt Bailey’s Deliberative Accountability in Parliamentary Committees (co-sponsored with LSE). We are co-organising another two book launches for May and June 2022.
We are really excited about our undergraduate essay competition, which continues to go from strength to strength, receiving a record number of entries, demonstrating the respect for the Specialist Group within the discipline. Our guest judge, Alice Lilly from the Institute for Government, praised the high quality of the essays which made it difficult to select the winning entries. The winner and runner-up, both from Queen Mary University London, received £100 and £50 respectively. Both essays have been published on our website, offering them a wider audience to showcase their excellent academic writing. In terms of outreach we also spoke to students from Shenzhen College of Education, China about the UK select committee system as part of their politics club.
Our redesigned website attracted approximately 11k visits during 2021. We continue to publish topical blogs and add new contributions to our Overviews of Parliaments section with more being drafted at the moment. We also launched a new section, Urgent (and Not So Urgent) Questions, where we ask scholars of the sub-discipline questions about their upbringing, research career, milestones and disappointments, personal interests, favourite things and places, and yes, a few odd ones about their culinary preferences as well. It has quickly become a favourite feature, giving members of our community a chance to get to know each other better and showing different ways into academia and the different pathways academic careers can take.
Finally, we are contributing to the second edition of the successful Exploring Parliament textbook, which the Group led and published with Oxford University Press in 2018. Alexandra Meakin has joined the editorial team and we are hosting a roundtable to discuss the second edition at PSA22. The first edition has become a core tool in teaching politics in UK universities, and the revised edition will offer an even greater level of insight, explaining how the UK Parliament has operated through Brexit and COVID.
If you are not yet a member but would like to become one, you can join here. We would love to see you at our future events!
