Prime Minister’s Questions as Political Ritual at Westminster

Abstract

Although Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) are the best-known item on the British parliamentary agenda, there is surprisingly little recent scholarly work on them by political scientists. Patrick Dunleavy et al. (1995) and John and Bevan (2011) concentrated on the accountability function and policy content of the questions. Mark Franklin and Philip Norton’s (1993) Parliamentary Questions, published shortly after parliament was televised, included systematic and extensive accounts of PMQs in the early 1990s. Oral questions to ministers, of which PMQs were once a part, have been the subject of some scholarly attention. Bird’s (2005) essay excepted, this work predates or ignores concerns about the effects of the political environment in parliament on women’s representation and takes no account of its impact on the public (Chester and Bowring, 1962; Bird, 2005; Martin, 2011; Saalfeld, 2011).