Carol Harlow has suggested that Parliamentary accountability is ‘the form of democratic accountability to which greatest weight is attached by the public as well as theorists'.1
Using a ‘conventional' or ‘classical' approach, it is thus the first item for discussion when accountability is considered in a constitutional setting.2 Considered in a broad sense, the term ‘Parliamentary accountability' encompasses the accountability of the legislature for its (and its members') actions and decisions, as well as the accountability of actors to the legislature.
The centrality of this notion may well be demonstrated by the public concern surrounding the ‘expenses' scandal which affected the Westminster Parliament in the run-up to the United Kingdom general election in 2010. In the UK, which forms the primary focus of this essay, accountability to Parliament encompasses such notions as ministerial responsibility and/or accountability, Parliamentary questions and debates, and the role of Parliamentary committees. Accountability of Parliament is encompassed in legal form via judicial review of executive action allegedly authorized by legislation and scrutiny of the meaning and limits of legislation more generally, and through political channels via debate and questioning as well as public and media scrutiny. The priority one accords to different forms of accountability will, it will be suggested in this essay, depend upon the underlying account of legal or political constitutionalism to which one is committed. On this basis, and by reference to practical examples, it might be said that a mixture of techniques deriving from the political and legal constitutionalist positions underpin accountability of and to the legislature.Argument about accountability and the legislature is conventionally discussed with reference to procedures within Parliament, parliamentary select and Standing Committees and parliamentary questions. These classic political accountability mechanisms have been subjected to much high-quality analysis,3 which need not be repeated here.
The focus of the argument in the present essay will instead be rather different, and will proceed in three stages. It will first be necessary to evaluate how we go about defining political and legal accountability. Such an exercise in methodology, to be conducted in the first section of the essay, provides a foundation for substantive analysis of accountability to and of the legislature. In the second section, substantive aspects of relevant accountability arrangements will be examined: in particular, and perhaps unusually, the role of parliamentary privilege will be emphasized given that political and legal accountability mechanisms cannot fully be understood without reference to it. The third section will contain an analysis of political and legal accountability conducted via a case study of the roles played by legislative and judicial actors in the field of national security. Given the centrality and sensitivity of this field in the politics of northern and western countries since 2001, national security provides a key example for such evaluation, and in turn for consideration of political and legal accountability.A.
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