Brexit and UK media representations of parliamentary power

The UK parliament has often been characterised as a weak legislature, notwithstanding its traditional ‘sovereignty’. One supporting argument was that sovereignty had been undermined by EU membership, which made strengthening parliament a mainstay of UK Eurosceptic discourse. But following the 2016 Brexit referendum, particularly in the context of a post-2017 minority government, parliament came to be seen as strong – reaching centre stage in the Brexit process and inflicting multiple defeats on the government. This paper investigates how the UK national media represented the power of parliament before and after the referendum, using a dataset of articles from 2013-19. It asks whether and how newspapers changed their depictions of both the level and the desirability of parliamentary power, and how this related to the newspaper’s ideological stance. It finds that a pre-referendum divide between newspapers of left and right over parliament’s actual level of power was replaced post-referendum by disagreements about the desirability of that power. A deeper reading of selected articles suggests that this change was explained in part by a pre-referendum failure by many newspapers accurately to distinguish between parliamentary and executive power.