The Economist UK - 27.07.2019

52 International The EconomistJuly 27th 2019

2 inspired by the School of Surgery in Paris.

To stand at the lectern in a hemicycle is to

take the place of a dissected cadaver.

In 1941 the House of Commons was de-

stroyed by bombs. Two years later the

prime minister, Winston Churchill, argued

for it to be rebuilt precisely as it had been.

Political theorists like hemicycles, he ex-

plained. But they encourage politicians to

slide sideways, from one political grouping

to another. To keep parties strong and dis-

tinct, you need opposing benches. And the

Commons must be small, Churchill ar-

gued—too small to fit all the mps in. This

heightens the drama and encourages quick

exchanges. “Scenes and rows”, he said, “are

better conducted at close quarters.”

Britons carried this conviction over-

seas. William Ivor Shipley, the architect in-

vited to design a parliament for newly in-

dependent Malaysia in 1963, objected to the

horseshoe shape in which members of the

Dewan Rakyat (the lower house) were then

sitting. In a two-party system you need op-

posing benches, he maintained.

Churchill overstated his case. Political

parties are weak in some countries where

politicians sit in hemicycles, such as Italy,

but strong in others, such as Germany. As

for disputes and rows, fan-shaped seating

has not prevented Taiwan from developing

a famously pugilistic parliament. And ar-

chitecture alone cannot transform politics.

Despite Shipley’s efforts, Malaysia did not

develop two-party politics. Until an elec-

tion last year, it was a single-coalition sys-

tem. A decade ago the Dewan Rakyat quiet-

ly turned back into a horseshoe.

The Scottish Parliament, which moved

to its purpose-built home in Holyrood in

2004, was supposed to be a consensual sort

of place. One way its architects tried to

achieve that was by putting the politicians

in a hemicycle. It has not worked. Holyrood

has become just as tribal as Westminster,

though the dividing line is different (the

Scottish nationalists versus everyone else).

But there is one big contrast, says Lord

Foulkes, who has been both an mpand a

member of the Scottish Parliament. In Ho-

lyrood, politicians tend to prepare and read

speeches and even questions during First

Minister’s Questions—a far cry from the

knockabout of Prime Minister’s Questions

in Westminster. Debates are stilted affairs.

“There isn’t as much cut-and-thrust as in

the House of Commons,” he says.

Seating politicians in a hemicycle

seems to encourage them to talk in a care-

ful, ponderous way. Speeches are often de-

livered from a central lectern, which en-

courages people to drone on—so strict time

limits are needed. The German Bundestag

introduced a thrice-yearly Chancellor’s

Questions in 2018. It wanted Prime Minis-

ter’s Questions but got something like a po-

lite press conference, with questions and

answers limited to 60 seconds. The Bun-

destag is enormous, which probably keeps

things cool. When Australian mps moved

to a larger chamber in Canberra in 1988, one

complained that members could no longer

see the whites of their opponents’ eyes.

Say cheese

With politics televised, seating also affects

how parties are seen by the public. In hemi-

cycles it is natural to think of politics in

terms of wings and blocs. Arguments over

seating are usually about who sits next to

whom, and who is pushed to the edges.

This year the Swedish People’s Party occu-

pied the middle of Finland’s fan-shaped

parliament, stranding the Finns Party on

the far right, to its fury. In the German Bun-

destag, nobody wants to sit next to Alterna-

tive for Germany, a far-right party. In the

House of Commons the battle is over prom-

inence. In 2015 it saw a “seat war”, with La-

bour and the Scottish National Party fight-

ing over sitting rights in a stretch of the

opposition front bench.

When political parties can decide who

sits where, seating becomes a tool for en-

forcing discipline. In Malaysia’s now-u-

shaped Dewan Rakyat, mps sit in party

blocs. Some seats are seen as worse than

others. New mps start far from the Speaker

and are promoted to better seats if they be-

have themselves.

The best proof that seating arrange-

ments matter comes from a country that

has tried to make it not matter at all. In Ice-

land’s small parliament, all seats not occu-

pied by ministers are allocated through the

drawing of lots. A member could end up

sitting with allies or enemies, or both. So it

is possible to test whether having neigh-

bours from other parties makes a politician

less beholden to his or her own tribe.

Alessandro Saia, an economist at the

University of Lausanne, finds that it does.

Between 1991 and 2017 a politician who sat

among others who did not hew to the party

line was 30 percentage points more likely

to rebel. Over time, Mr Saia finds, parlia-

mentary neighbours even began to use

similar words in speeches. Who sits next to

you seems to matter more than who is in

front or behind, perhaps because gossip is

easier if you do not have to turn round.

Hints of the same effect can be seen

elsewhere. A paper by Nikolaj Harmon of

the University of Copenhagen and others

finds that members of party blocks in the

European Parliament tend to vote like their

neighbours, especially if both are women.

That is not because like-minded people

choose to sit together: most are seated al-

phabetically. It is probably not a coinci-

dence that two Republicans who sit next to

each other in the usSenate, Susan Collins

and Lisa Murkowski, often vote together—

and against the party line.

So seating arrangements matter. What

is less clear is whether any arrangement at

all could endear politicians to voters. Even

before the Brexit vote in 2016 paralysed

Westminster, Britons believed there was a

lot of room for improvement. They particu-

larly dislike Prime Minister’s Questions,

where the Commons is most shouty and

adversarial. But nowhere is politics work-

ing splendidly. The Pew Research Centre’s

latest survey of 27 democracies—some

more perfect than others—finds that 51% of

people think democracy is not working

well; in 19 of those countries, pessimism

grew between 2017 and 2018. Americans’

opinions of Washington have been on the

slide since 2001. Arrange people different-

ly, and you might merely give people some-

thing different to complain about. 7

Seats of power

Source: XML Architects

Parliamentary seating arrangements

Britain France Malaysia Slovenia Russia

10 metres