The Influence of Political Parties on the Parliamentary Rules from Historical Perspective

One of the most important political developments that has influenced parliamentary rules, was the advent of political parties. In the Dutch case, the arrival of political parties in the last quarter of the 19th century meant that the division between liberals and conservatives was replaced by a situation in which multiple parliamentary groups existed, eventually leading to the current multiparty-system. With other developments, such as the growing state intervention, the introduction of parties had a great impact on the Dutch parliament and the way it conducted its business. Although political parties were in the Netherlands never formally recognized as a parliamentary actor and were not named in the Standing Orders as such, informally they (re)structured the way parliament worked. The paper will discuss the following aspects. It will focus on the introduction of political parties as an actor in the Dutch parliament, by describing the non-successful attempts to name parties in the Standing Orders but also the informal acceptance of parties which in practice did give them a very important role in the day to day procedures. By doing this the paper will furthermore try to clarify the relation between formal and informal parliamentary rules (and their legitimacy), the position of political parties in relation to the constitutional ideal (in the Dutch case) of the independent MP as the principal parliamentary actor, and how the viewpoints on the rules and how they could be used differed from minority and majority perspective. These questions will be answered using empirical data from the Dutch Second Chamber (i.e. Lower Chamber, the main parliamentary body), mainly from the last quarter of the 19th century but extended well into the 20th. The paper therefore will take a historical perspective, and focus mainly on the Dutch case.