Parliament and political disengagement: exploring perceptions of Westminster's linkage function

This exploratory paper is part of wider research project that seeks to examine how the Westminster parliament is responding to political disengagement from traditional political processes and institutions, in the context of parliament’s linkage function and its relationship with the public. It examines evidence from recent extra-parliamentary Commissions on this issue, and compares their findings with those of the House of Commons Modernisation Committee. It draws on a short series on interviews conducted with MPs and peers, in order to assess how parliamentarians perceive the problem of disengagement, what they think parliament should do to address it, and what this tells us about how they view parliament’s linkage function, and its relationship with the public, at the start of the twenty-first century