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It is suggested that the lack of a critical moment at some point in history provided by military defeat, colonial independence or revolution, helps explain why the UK does not have a codified constitution.
A review of constitutional practice (section 2) demonstrates that Parliament has, to a great extent, legislated effectively to discharge the UK constitution's three minimum ‘constituting’, ‘legitimating’, and ‘limiting’ functions. But significant gaps and tensions remain.
6 REVIEW OF THE UK CONSTITUTION In this first paper we identify three key power relationships at the heart of the constitution that are currently under strain: • between the UK’s political institutions – including the UK government, parliament and the courts • between the devolved nations, regions and Westminster
- Introduction
- Theorising The Changing Concepts of The Constitution
- Methodology
- Charting Semantic Change in Constitutional Concepts
- Concluding Discussion
- Footnotes
According to a prevailing view in public law scholarship, the last two decades have been an extraordinary period of constitutional change for the UK.1 And there is good reason for this appraisal. In the late 1990s, Tony Blair’s ‘New Labour’ government launched a series of reforms that rearranged much of how public power in the UK is allocated and e...
As is typical of constitutions in general, it is difficult (and perhaps even impossible) to detach positive description of the UK’s constitution from normative evaluation. Certain constitutional principles and conventions loom larger than others in popular and scholarly imaginations, but people disagree about the meaning and relative priority of ev...
A. Word Embeddings in Semantic Space
Advances in computational methods have opened up new possibilities for the analysis of massive textual corpora. These methods are often grouped together under the banner of ‘natural language processing’ (NLP), and they encompass a range of tools, including relatively simple descriptive statistics of word frequencies and collocation, sentiment analysis and, more recently, machine learning algorithms for modelling substantive topics and other semantic properties in text or discourse. Predictabl...
B. The Corpus and Concepts of Interest
The texts of discourse chosen for this investigation are taken from Hansard’s records of parliamentary debate. There are good substantive reasons to focus on this material. Parliament is a salient and routine forum for discourse on constitutional affairs in the UK and, presumably, the notions of constitutional propriety that prevail there will be acutely influential on political practice. To paraphrase Griffith, Parliament is the most visible place where the UK’s constitution routinely ‘happe...
C. Processing and Dividing the Corpus
To make the corpus amenable to word-embedding analysis, some preliminary text processing was required. All punctuation was stripped from the corpus and all letters were converted to a single case (lower case) for the algorithm to recognise all instances of a given word (regardless of case) as the same word.94Furthermore, the text was processed so that phrases of interest would be assigned their own vectors. For example, because the algorithm needs to recognise that ‘the separation of powers’...
To estimate a concept’s constitutional resonance, I compute the cosine similarity between that concept’s vector and the vector for ‘british_constitution’. The expectation here is that these vectors will become more similar to one another as the concept in question becomes more constitutionally resonant. In other words, as a concept’s constitutional...
Walter Bagehot once observed that one of the great difficulties in writing about the UK’s constitution is that it is a ‘living’ object and thus subject to ‘constant change’.112This difficulty is even greater for contemporary scholars because the UK’s constitution is more complex and less settled now than it was in Bagehot’s day; the constitution co...
Technical Appendix: Model Validation
Scepticism about new methods is healthy, especially where the methods in question rely on mathematical abstractions to measure qualities that cannot be observed directly. No measure is perfect—we should not expect the map to be the territory—but we can rightly ask for some assurances that the measures we use are reasonably valid, ie that they probably track the qualities we want them to track. In this spirit of healthy scepticism, this appendix canvasses some validity tests to demonstrate tha...
The Committee is investigating the possibility of codifying – or not codifying – the UK constitution. This paper examines the existing constitution and the implications for this subject. It follows on from a literature review produced by the Centre for the Committee in 2011. [1]
Oct 5, 2021 · The UK constitution is presented as shaped by a set of constitutional principles, including state sovereignty, separation of powers, democracy, subsidiarity, and the rule of law, principles which set the overall structure of the constitution and inform statutes and the decisions of judges.
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6 Amendment:4 Constitutional laws and rules may be enacted, amended or repealed by Parliament using its ordinary legislative procedures. Possible alternative: There shall be a Commission for Democracy, which shall keep under review the operation of the Constitution. Amendments to the Constitution may be proposed by the
