Impact of House of Common hybrid proceeding on members participation during COVID pandemic

This paper explore how the adoption of hybrid proceeding during the COVID-19 pandemic affect MPs’ participation in the House. At the beginning of the pandemic, here were concerns that old age and family care duty may affect some MPs’ ability to discharging their function as representatives under the unprecedented circumstances. Using speech data from Hansard, this paper will analyse to what extend has gender and age affected MPs participation during the pandemic and to what extend has the hybrid proceedings mitigated the problem that arise from the pandemic. Moreover, hybrid proceedings and social distancing rules have significantly affect the working environment of the House by reducing the number of members present in the chamber and allowing remote contributions made through videoconferencing. Through textual analysis of data from Hansard, this paper would further explore if these changes of context under hybrid proceedings has affected the content and tone of parliamentary debate during the pandemic. Not only would these results shed light on whether the parliament was able to maintain its representativeness under the challenges of the pandemic, but it will also discover if and how remote contributions may affect the work of parliament should this become part of the proceeding moving forward.