The Professor Will See You Now: Modes
Illustration by Tracy Worrall
4 min read
Lessons in political science. This week: modes
Among the distinguished parliamentary publications to launch in 1976 was Legislative Studies Quarterly. The very first article in its inaugural issue was by the great Tony King on what he called “modes of executive-legislative relations”.
His core argument was simple: people talk of executive-legislative, or government-parliament, relations – as in, “parliament is now so much weaker than the government” – but there is no such relationship. Parliament is not a monolith; instead what matters is a series of different relationships, or modes. To take the most obvious example: Westminster is fundamentally structured around the idea of conflict between the government and the opposition. And yet this – what King called the opposition mode – was rarely consequential. More significant was what he termed the intra-party mode – the relations between a government’s frontbench and its backbenchers. Brickbats from behind a minister matter more than those thrown across the Chamber. In a later piece, King called this “over-the-shoulder politics”, reflecting a minister’s need to turn around to face the people that matter most.
It’s a brilliant piece, both insightful and elegantly written, and still relevant after 50 years. I use it for teaching all the time; this term a student declared it dull and I reacted much as Jeeves did when he encountered a pair of Bertie’s brighter socks.
But we’re not in 1976 anymore, Toto. King captured the dynamics of the ‘old’ Westminster just as it was changing. His two core insights – that parliaments are complex organisations comprising different groups, and that relations inside the governing party are what matter most – remain valid, but much has changed.
To start with a topic close to my heart, the rise in backbench independence – with MPs increasingly willing to vote against their party whip – has made the intra-party mode more challenging. At the same time, the party system has fragmented. King’s model assumed the opposition was one party and that we could for practical purposes ignore what he called “the minor parties”. Yet as their numbers increase, and with no guarantee the opposition will all vote together, so the opposition mode becomes more complex. Ditto for the introduction of timetabling in the late 1990s. In 1976, King argued that the only weapons available to the opposition were reason and time; Tony Blair’s reforms mean that now all they have is reason – and you don’t have to spend long at Westminster to know that logic alone rarely gets you very far.
Brickbats from behind a minister matter more than those thrown across the Chamber.
But consider two other changes. Departmental select committees were established three years after King’s article was published, building on earlier, but abortive, reforms in the 1960s; as Julian Critchley put it, if the 1979 reforms had been a horse they would have been described as “by Richard Crossman out of Norman St John-Stevas”. King had been a bit sniffy about what he called the non-party mode – government and opposition backbenchers working together – because there were then so few opportunities for it to happen. We now have a thriving committee ecosystem; we might still note that select committees are perhaps not as powerful as they could be, but they are an obvious constraint in a way that did not exist in 1976.
And then last, and always overlooked, there is the Lords. It was King’s blind spot. Not only did the Lords go unmentioned, but throughout the article he used the terms ‘Parliament’ and ‘House of Commons’ as synonyms. Maybe this was excusable in 1976 (although the late 1970s saw plenty of government defeats in the Upper House) but the 1999 reforms fundamentally changed things, and perhaps not in the way many people expected. The ejection of the majority of the hereditary peers created a chamber in which no party had a majority, and one in which members felt more confident in challenging government policy. Modes of executive-legislative relations are now bicameral in a way they were not 50 years ago.
Further reading: A King, Modes of Executive-Legislative Relations: Great Britain, France and West Germany, Legislative Studies Quarterly (1976); M Russell and P Cowley, Modes of UK Executive-Legislative Relations Revisited, The Political Quarterly (2018)
