Teaching Comparative Government

Legislatures in liberal democracies found a way to preserve voting rights of legislators a hundred years ago. It's probably time for something new. An obscure British parliamentary rule was broken. Here’s why it’s a big deal. Last week in the U.K.’s House of Commons, the governing party appeared to cast aside its “pairing rule,” a chamber practice that has been used to preserve voting rights of absent Members of Parliament (MPs) — including MPs out on maternity leave. This caused a huge outcry, with the minister for the Cabinet Office forced to respond to an urgent question in the House of Commons this week, promising that such errors would not be repeated. But the ensuing controversy also highlights the limitations of relying on informal legislative practices in increasingly diverse parliamentary bodies. This is how legislative pairing works Pairing is an informal arrangement between two legislative parties when an MP is sick, on parental leave, or otherwise not present to vote. ...

The complications involved in the progress toward Brexit keep growing. Did Brexit campaigners cheat? And if they did, what does that mean? Sanni If he knocked on your door, Shahmir Sanni might not be what you would expect of a campaigner for Brexit… Sanni is a young, hip, gay Muslim, a Pakistani Briton who studied economics at his university, loves fashion and is an American-style libertarian, a committed “euroskeptic.”… Once an anonymous college-age volunteer, Sanni is now front-page news in Britain, as a whistleblower who alleges that pro-Brexit campaigners in 2016 “cheated” — specifically that a prominent group run by top Tories, including now-Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, broke election law by coordinating campaigns among allied organizations to circumvent spending caps. The political firm at the center of the controversy is Aggregate IQ, a tiny Canadian firm closely connected to Cambridge Analytica… The week-long controversy over who did what and how in the 2016 Brexit vote...