Democracy in Practice: Ceremony and Ritual in Parliament

This collection highlights the ways in which parliaments create and maintain powerful symbols of democracy and power. It explores how political and social hierarchies operate within parliaments through ceremonial spectacles, formal and informal rules and rituals, art and architecture. Members are socialized through everyday practices but such institutional disciplining is also challenged performatively - by refusal to participate, by subversion of norms or by rejection of rules. The contributions to this volume highlight that the everyday ritual practices as well as institutional ceremonies have significant political meaning, whether their focus is upon the spectacular or the quotidian. Chapters on opening ceremony, Prime Minister's Questions, on performance of debate and disruption, on the architecture and space of suggest that what has often been seen as the banal backdrop to politics proper, accumulated tradition or necessary rules of procedure, should in fact be the starting-point for our analyses of modern democratic parliaments.

Table of Contents:
Introducing Democracy in Practice: Ceremony and Ritual in Parliament; Rachel E. Johnson and Shirin M. Rai PART I: PERFORMING REPRESENTATION 1. Representing Democracy: Ceremony and Ritual in the Indian Parliament; Shirin M. Rai 2. Westminster Parliamentarians: Performing Politics; Emma Crewe 3. Negotiating Gendered Institutions: Women's Parliamentary Friendships; Sarah Childs 4. The Emergence and Impact of First Female Speakers; Faith Armitage, Rachel E. Johnson and Carole Spary PART II: DELIBERATION AND DISRUPTION 5. Proceduralising the Plenary as a Public Sphere; Victoria Hasson 6. Prime Minister's Questions as Political Ritual; Joni Lovenduski 7. The Indian Parliament: Performing Decline Since the 1960s; Bairavee Balasubramaniam 8. Disrupting Deliberation? Comparing Repertoires of Parliamentary Representation; Carole Spary, Faith Armitage and Rachel E. Johnson PART III: SYMBOLIC SPACES 9. Space and Symbols: Transforming Parliamentary Buildings; Georgina Waylen 10. The Archi-texture of Parliament Nirmal Puwar 11. Pageantry as Politics: The Opening of Parliaments; Rachel E. Johnson, Faith Armitage and Carole Spary

About the Author :
Shirin M. Rai is Professor in the department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick, UK. She directed a Leverhulme Trust funded programme on Gendered Ceremony and Ritual in Parliament (2007-2011). Her research interests are in performance and/of politics, gender and political institutions and gender and the political economy of development. She is the author of The Gender Politics of Development (2008) editor of Ceremony and Ritual in Parliament (2010) and co-editor (with Janelle Reinelt) of The Grammar of Politics and Performance Dr Rachel E. Johnson is a historian of South African politics. She is currently a Research Associate at the University of Manchester, UK. From 2009-2011 she was Research Associate at the University of Sheffield for the Gendered Ceremony and Ritual in Parliaments programme. From September 2014 she will take up a post as Lecturer in African History at Durham University.

Review :
'An imaginative and most valuable collection of high quality essays exploring the role of rituals and ceremonies in articulating the identity and shaping the popular perception of Parliament, and more generally of democracy and political life. I know no other that comes anywhere near it in its range and depth.' - Bhikhu Parekh, University of Westminster, UK, and House of Lords 'This book sets an exciting new agenda for understanding the gendered nature of political institutions through taking performance, symbol, ritual and rhetoric seriously. The book is an interdisciplinary intervention that simultaneously pays attention to empirical detail and to comparative method. It is a compelling read.' - Shireen Hassim, Professor of Politics, University of Witwatersrand, South Africa