Structure and Ideology: Change in Parliament in Early Stuart England
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Description
Institutions are limited in the kinds of things they can do. Parliaments, as “representative” institutions having relatively little control over their memberships, generally find it difficult to organize themselves to participate actively in government. The relative equality of members makes difficult the development of internal mechanisms of coordination and control that would permit a collective body to take rapid and effective action. Not surprisingly, such institutions find it easier to specialize in legislative or deliberative activities than in administrative or governing ones. This specialization, however natural, is a matter of degree, and legislatures have played a greater governmental role in some circumstances than in others. Historians have sometimes argued, indeed, that there is an inexorable trend in this direction: that we should see in parliamentary history a series of generally successful attempts to grasp “the initiative” from nonelective institutions. This view—that the democratic impulse is immanent in human history—is no longer so popular among historians as it once was, both because of the implausibility of linear theories of history in light of modern events and because of some critical failures of evidence to support it. As social scientists, however, without embracing linear theories, we might nevertheless expect that there might be specifiable conditions under which legislatures would be more powerful participants in government. This is the issue we begin exploring here.
Source Publication
Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions, and Political Change
Source Editors/Authors
Judith Goldstein, Robert O. Keohane
Publication Date
1993
Recommended Citation
Ferejohn, John A., "Structure and Ideology: Change in Parliament in Early Stuart England" (1993). Faculty Chapters. 520.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/520
