Dramas at Westminster: select committees and the quest for accountability

Based on unprecedented access to the UK Parliament, this book challenges how we understand and think about accountability between government and Parliament. The book focuses on the everyday practices of MPs and officials to reveal how parliamentarians perform their scrutiny roles. Many adopt different styles of scrutiny, which chairs of committees attempt to reconcile and officials try to support. MPs and officials create a drama or spectacle of accountability and use their performance on the parliamentary stage to hold government to account. This book offers the most up-to-date and detailed research on committee practices in the House of Commons, following a range of reforms since 2010. The findings add new dimensions to how we study and understand accountability through the book's path-breaking empirical focus and theoretical lens. It is an ideal book for anyone interested in how Parliament works