Presiding officers of national parliamentary assemblies.

(Geneva: Inter-Parliamentary Union, 1997), pp. xiii, 120

The study of the Speakership is important for a number of reasons. If parliamentary procedure is essentially the method by which a legislature's constitutional responsibilities are discharged, examining the issues presiding officers face, particularly from an historical perspective, helps us trace constitutional and parliamentary development.

It is quite interesting for example to compare Alpheus Todd's 1840 treatise The Practice and Privileges of the Two Houses of Parliament, where he discusses the incident in Lower Canada in 1827 when the Governor of the province refused to approve Joseph Louis Papineau as Speaker, to W.F. Dawson's Procedure in the Canadian House of Commons, written in 1962 and shortly after the Pipe-Line Debate where he describes how the Speaker was caught in the middle between the desire of the opposition to have essential information and the clash of unrestricted debate vs. government subservience. These two books give snapshots of the office at different periods of constitutional development and re-enforce the fact that the Speakership is one that continues to evolve and change as the political system does.

If one wants to take a more behavioural approach, by studying decisions of legislatures, including Speakers' decisions, we may be studying the value patterns of society. For those looking at the Speakership this way, there is a belief that legislatures generally represent the public psychologically and reflect its goals and attitudes. Certainly, the studies by Allan Kornberg are in this vein. A third reason why it is important is the need to compare. This approach is clearly a learning process, based somewhat on abstract thinking, but it is only by comparing that we can really understand what is relative about institutions like the Speakerships and what may be universal.

It is difficult to study the Speaker from a world-wide perspective. It has been successfully done with Speakers whose legislatures have the same constitutional basis (for example, Philip Laundy's The Office of Speaker in the Parliaments of the Commonwealth, 1984), but the challenges of trying to assess and make sense of the office taking into consideration the variety of states - industrialized, developing, "closed", "open", big and small - are formidable.

Bergougnous has made an excellent contribution to the literature on the Speaker. It is fitting that the IPU brings this book out, given...