Australia’s Labor Party’s revolving door leadership
In June 2010, Australian Labor Party leader and Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, was ousted by his caucus in a leadership challenge won by Rudd’s Deputy Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, who then became both party leader and Prime Minister. Less than two years later, history appears to be repeating itself, with Rudd now challenging Gillard’s leadership [...]
Electoral Reform and DPR Voting, Part 2
(Note: Back in April of this year, I wrote about Direct Party and Representative Voting, an electoral voting system invented by Stephen Johnson. That post continues to get regular hits on this blog, and recently, Mr. Johnson contacted me asking if I would be interested in revisiting the topic. He provided me with a few [...]
Electoral Reform and DPR Voting, Part 1
(Note: Back in April of this year, I wrote about Direct Party and Representative Voting, an electoral voting system invented by Stephen Johnson. That post continues to get regular hits on this blog, and recently, Mr. Johnson contacted me asking if I would be interested in revisiting the topic. He provided me with a few [...]
Report on 2010 elections for positions in the House
The UK House of Commons Procedure Committee released a report on 31 October 2011, which reviewed the elections held, for the first time, in most cases, to fill various positions in the House. It is an interesting report as it provides more detailed information into how exactly these elections proceeded. In the dying months of [...]
On pairing
Pairing is a parliamentary practice whereby two members of parliament from opposing political parties may agree to abstain where one member is unable to vote, due to other commitments, illness, travel problems, etc. The rationale behind the practice is to maintain the relative distribution of seats in the House so that a party’s strength is [...]
Speaker Bercow and accusations of bias
British House of Commons Speaker John Bercow annoys many MPs. There have been a rash of articles over the course of the past year hinting at behind-the-scenes plots to get rid of him. Having regularly livestreamed proceedings from the UK House of Commons, I find it difficult to assess why there is such animosity towards [...]
More on open primaries
In a previous post proposing ways to increase the role and power of backbench MPs in Ottawa, I suggested that parties use open primaries to select their candidates in each constituency. By this I meant letting all registered voters in the riding vote for which candidate they prefer, rather than limit the vote to members [...]
Ministerial responsibility
Ministerial responsibility takes two forms — collective cabinet responsibility (or ‘cabinet solidarity’) and individual ministerial responsibility. Both concepts are governed by conventions inherited from Westminster and both are central to the working of responsible government. Cabinet is collectively responsible to the people, through the Parliament, for determining and implementing policies for national government. Broadly, it [...]
Filibusters in the House of Commons, part 2
In my first post on this topic, I explained that filibusters are very rare in the Canadian House of Commons because various rules have been introduced over time to both strictly regulate proceedings in the Chamber, and to allow Government to introduce measures to curtail debate when they deem it necessary to do so. As [...]
Filibusters in the Canadian House of Commons
(See follow-up post here.) I discussed the issue of filibusters in a previous post, focusing primarily on the UK House of Lords as it tried to filibuster the Government’s Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill earlier this year. In that post, I wrote that filibusters in the Canadian Parliament were quite rare. The reasons why [...]
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On procedure and politics by Radical Centrist is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
