PARLIAMENT AND DEMOCRACY - Inter-Parliamentary Union

An effective parliament (I): The national level I 127
Effective oversight of the executive
Besides their responsibility for the legislative process, parliaments have a
key function in providing oversight of the government on behalf of the public.
The specific area of budgetary oversight and financial control will be
discussed in the following section. Here the more general task of oversight
over government policy and administration will be considered. This forms the
other dimension of accountability raised in the previous chapter: the accountability
of government to parliament, and through parliament to the electorate
as a whole.
Nowhere more obviously than here are issues of relational power more
relevant to a consideration of a parliament’s work. This is not just a matter of
the relative powers as between parliament and executive, but also of the
balance of power between parties and within them. Indeed, it is the configuration
of party power that can often determine the relation between parliament
and executive. In a presidential system, in situations where the legislature is
controlled by a different party from the presidency, parliamentary oversight is
not only typically rigorous, but party competition can easily degenerate into
obstruction and gridlock. In a parliamentary system, and in presidential ones
where the same party controls both branches of government, there is the opposite
tendency: oversight may be blunted through the way power is exercised
within the ruling party or coalition, or the way competition between parties
discourages internal dissent within parties from being publicly expressed. So
while the interest of opposition parties lies in the most rigorous oversight of
the executive, members of a governing party can use their majority so as to
ensure that ministers are not embarrassed by exposure or a critical report.
Political parties have many informal means of keeping their parliamentarians
in line, through the party ‘whips’: with the patronage of appointment to
key committees, the prospect of future preferment, membership of overseas
delegations, and so on; or the threat of loss of a favourable place on the party’s
electoral list, or even exclusion from the parliamentary party altogether. The
way in which these patronage and disciplinary powers may work to blunt
effective parliamentary oversight is detailed in the submission from the South
African Parliament:
Although all parties in Parliament are represented in any given
committee, party politics can undermine a committee’s ability to work
together to exercise oversight of a government department.
Furthermore, the presence of diverse interests within a party does not
necessarily mean that these interests will be expressed publicly. Party