A bouncy house? UK select committee newsworthiness, 2005–18

ABSTRACT

Traditionally, legislative committees have been regarded as quite unimportant in the UK. Some scholars contend that recent reforms have substantially increased the powers of select committees, rendering them genuinely important to policy and the scrutiny of government; others see little sign of change. We examine House of Commons select committees in regard to exactly one indicator of significance, their newspaper coverage. We detect significant gains in salience of some committees, as compared to the period just before the Wright reforms (2005–10). But committees vary dramatically in coverage levels and trends, and it is unclear if their newspaper profiles continue to grow.

KEYWORDS:

• Committees
• House of Commons
• newspapers
• parliament
• select committees
• Wright reforms

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the BiRmingham-llinois Partnership for Discovery, EnGagement and Education (BRIDGE) fund for financial assistance, and to Gustavo Diaz for research assistance. Gaines thanks the Department of Management, Strategy, and Innovation at KU Leuven for its hospitality in the spring of 2019.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Brian J. Gaines is a professor at the University of Illinois, with appointment in the Department of Political Science and the Institute of Government and Public Affairs. From 1997 to 2011, he was the faculty supervisor of the CIC Parliamentary Internship Programme, under which undergraduate students from the universities of Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin worked in the British Parliament.

Mark Goodwin is a lecturer at Coventry University. He was been a post-doctoral fellow at Cambridge and a lecturer at the University of Birmingham, and he has published work on parliament and policy.

Stephen Holden Bates is a senior lecturer in the Department of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham. He has published work on select committees and on parliamentary questions in the UK House of Commons in journals such as the European Journal of Politics and Gender, Parliamentary Affairs, the Journal of Pragmatics and British Politics.

Gisela Sin is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois. She is the author of Separation of Powers and Legislative Organization (Cambridge, 2015), and the co-author of Congreso, Presidencia y Justicia en Argentina (Temas, 1999).

Notes

1. The parliament of the United Kingdom is, much of the time, either peripheral or totally irrelevant. It might as well not exist.

2. The maxim is voiced by Lord Henry Wotton to the painter Basil Hayward in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890 [2008]).

3. We selected 50 stories at random from roughly 5000 results for ‘Foreign Affairs Committee’ over the period 2005–18. Sixteen stories were not at all about British politics or the Foreign Affairs select committee of that name; the remainder were ‘true positives’, employing wording that omitted ‘select’ for the committee.

4. We also uncovered isolated examples of seemingly botched dates, which can also foil de-duplication. For instance, we found two Lexis-Nexis records of an Observer article that made reference to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, ‘David Cameron Under Fire over ‘Paltry’ £50,000 Aid to Libya…’. One is dated April 2, 2016 and the other June 24, 2016. The former date appears to be correct; the latter could be a data-entry error wherein a stray ‘6’ corrupted ‘2.4.16’.

5. In this case, we do not claim to be matching the protocol of Dunleavy and Muir, as we did not locate or obtain a description of their exact search procedure.

6. As the reforms were implemented in 2010, it is not obvious how to break annual data. Media mentions can be counted for finer units of time, such as months, but the added granularity is of little assistance for such a simple test. Here, we take the conservative approach of potentially mixing a small number of ‘treatment’ cases (late 2010) in with our ‘control’ period.

7. This drop is almost certainly a function of the fact that this committee was heavily involved in attempting to deal with the aftermath of the 2009 parliamentary expenses scandal.

8. Concomitantly, the relative lack of prominence given to the Foreign Affairs and the International Development Select Committees may be due to the (increasingly) parochial nature of (much of) the UK media (and politicians).

9. Of course, newspapers are not synonymous with media. Further replication and extension to broadcast and online-only coverage would also be very useful.