PARLIAMENT AND DEMOCRACY - Inter-Parliamentary Union

184 I PARLIAMENT AND DEMOCRACY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
The study also shows that parliaments take seriously the challenge to
engage in an ongoing process of reform themselves, and to make their own
practices more open, accountable and responsive. Democratisation is not a
one-off event, but a continuing process, in both recent and long-established
democracies. In the IPU survey for this Guide, parliaments were invited to
report on some examples of recent reforms they had instituted. The main part
of this chapter will consider their returns, not so much for the content of
the reforms, but for what they tell us about the process and dynamics of
parliamentary reform, and some of the potential difficulties experienced.
A concluding section will consider how parliaments can contribute to
society’s planning for the future.
Sources of reform
The reform process
To judge from the submissions received, parliamentary reform has many
different sources, which vary widely from one parliament to another. It might
be useful, however, to offer a provisional map of the most typical sources of
change reported, to help make sense of these different reform experiences.
Naturally, these sources should be seen as often complementary and interactive,
as the diagrammatic presentation suggests, rather than as isolated points
of change.
For convenience these sources can be divided into extra-parliamentary and
intra-parliamentary ones. Among the chief extra-parliamentary reasons for
reform are the following:
■ Changing societal needs. These can be as various as are the different types
of society, and they constitute a typical source of new or revised legislation.
But they can also lead to changes in the way parliament itself works.
Example: the changing role of women in society leads to changes in
political representation and in the way parliament conducts its business.
■ Pressures from the public. Again these are enormously variable, but a
common element for many parliaments is the perception of a growing gulf
between parliament and the electorate, especially young people, which
leads to experimentation with new modes of public access to parliament.
■ Technological change. The most obvious example is the rapidly changing
world of information technology, with its consequences for how parlia-