Pressure and Parliament: From Civil War to Civil Society

This volume considers the varied forms of parliamentary pressure in the period between the civil wars and the advent of universal suffrage in the twentieth century. The authors examine the ways in which parliament accepted, invited, or moulded channels of political pressure from those outside their ranks and outside the electoral process. As such, the essays consider a variety of interests, identities, or ideas whose pressure might be exerted upon legislators. In particular, these chapters highlight the technologies of growth of private and public petitioning, the pressure to act on new national and international questions, and the ways in which parliamentarians themselves orchestrated pressure. The result is a range of insights into the collaborative porousness of political pressures on parliament, not simply as the force of ‘pressure from without’.