Aims and Seminar Outline

The aim of this seminar is to explore how the UK Parliament works and to discuss the role of this somewhat ancient institution in present day UK.

The seminar will be of interest to students who are interested in comparative approaches to politics; to students who wish to look at a substantive topic through the English language; and to students who are interested in a rather small island off the north-west coast of Europe.

Please note, the seminar will be taught in English. Materials in English will be used and the language of discussion will also be English.

The course will total 30 Unterrichtseinheiten over three weekends, Fridays and Saturdays:

Friday 14.00 - 17.30 (including a coffee break)

Saturday 10.00 - 17.30 (including a lunch break and times to pick up coffees)

The topics I plan to cover are roughly as follows, although things may change if something more relevant or interesting arises:

1. Introduction – course outline and requirements.
2. Historical Overview: where are roots of the UK Parliament and how has it changed?
3. Elections, constituencies and parties: how do these mingle and interact?
4. What exactly does Parliament do?
   1. Types of legislation.
   2. Bills and Acts – origins and progress through Parliament.
   3. Select Committees and Parliamentary scrutiny.
5. The role of ceremony and tradition.
6. Constitutional Issues:
   1. Devolution and the West-Lothian Question.
   2. The monarch and the House of Lords – dealing with non-elected stakeholders.
   3. The formation of the UK Supreme Court and separation of the judiciary.
7. The theatre of Prime Minister’s Questions: drama or farce?
8. Parliamentary ‘hot topics’:
   1. Is Parliament really representative? Gender/Minority representation.
   2. How transparent is our political process?
   3. The rise of the professional politician.
   4. Lobbyists.
   5. Post-Brexit and the UK’s ongoing relationship with Europe.

Assessment This is the bit you are interested in! You are required to undertake a small research project based on accessing articles available at the Parliamentary website (https://www.parliament.uk/business/publications/) and write this up in the form of a term paper (Hausarbeit) of approximately15 pages in length, to be written in English. More details about this will be given in the introductory meeting. This will count for 70% of your final grade. The remaining 30% of your grade will be based on your active participation in our weekly meetings. Typical activities will include discussing and presenting texts, and completing short tasks in preparation for, or following, a topic.

Materials

I will set up a resource online (either Moodle or Padlet) where you can access materials. The ThuLB also has some resources, which I will list for you. These include scholarly articles relevant to the topics listed above. However, the main focus will be the primary source, namely the UK Parliamentary website: https://www.parliament.uk/ The UK Parliament has a massive resource which includes: transcripts of debates; research papers that are produced prior to legislation being passed; information about the rules of Parliament (Erskine May) and reports from Select Committees. Indeed, one of your main tasks will be to learn how to navigate this resource and extract useful information from it to produce your term paper.

My main resource will be the comprehensive text: Politics UK (2018 ninth edition) edited by Jones, B., Norton,P., and Daddow, O. I will bring my copy of this text with me and you may loan it to access relevant chapters during our course. The newer, tenth edition is also available via the publisher’s website (Routledge) and Amazon. ISBN 9780367464028 (unfortunately, only the eight edition from 2014 is available at the ThULB).

Important: Preliminary meeting on Zoom, Wednesday April  5, 6 pm (local time!)

Zoom-Meeting beitreten

https://uni-jena-de.zoom.us/j/61912808176

Meeting-ID: 619 1280 8176

Kenncode: 028675