Committees are messy. Few, if any, routinely reach mainstream media attention (see Section V). Less generate political traction. And when committees become important, they not so infrequently become televised, more politicized, and then largely ignored by stakeholders. Consequently, when deciding on a normative lens, the study of House of Commons committees should rely on Deborah Stone’s polis model specifically because of its focus on realpolitik instead of the idealism rejected in the introduction. While her polis model is incorporated throughout, this section provides a more rigorous defence, ideally topical, and applies her model of social constructionism through first defining the relative contrast, identifying the positivist elements,
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Contrary to the rational-actor theory that she sets as a contrast, where independent political actors decide on actions based exclusively on rational thought and logical cost-benefit analyses, her polis instead distinguishes between the “political community” and “cultural community,” respectively the citizens of a nation and the plethora of mutually affiliated subgroups inside the state. Instead of exclusively prioritizing the political community, Stone’s polis model fixates on the bilateral relationship between policy makers and their broader societies – both politically and culturally – in composing publicly-accepted stories. Committees, naturally, play into Stone’s theory more so than Parliament as a whole: special interest groups and other subgroups, after all, are essentially optimized to interact with committees openly through expert interviews, the focus more on public hearings instead of in camera, and formal lobbying. This underlining narrative consequently guides committee decisions and policy acceptance; it relies on the basic assumption of a political community iterations more complex than Stone’s throw-away example of Robinson Crusoe landing on a beach with presumably little else than a fig leaf, an apple and rational decision-making. Bridging across communities simply requires political motives to be discrete enough to tie the various cultural communities and political entity within the
Contrary to the rational-actor theory that she sets as a contrast, where independent political actors decide on actions based exclusively on rational thought and logical cost-benefit analyses, her polis instead distinguishes between the “political community” and “cultural community,” respectively the citizens of a nation and the plethora of mutually affiliated subgroups inside the state. Instead of exclusively prioritizing the political community, Stone’s polis model fixates on the bilateral relationship between policy makers and their broader societies – both politically and culturally – in composing publicly-accepted stories. Committees, naturally, play into Stone’s theory more so than Parliament as a whole: special interest groups and other subgroups, after all, are essentially optimized to interact with committees openly through expert interviews, the focus more on public hearings instead of in camera, and formal lobbying. This underlining narrative consequently guides committee decisions and policy acceptance; it relies on the basic assumption of a political community iterations more complex than Stone’s throw-away example of Robinson Crusoe landing on a beach with presumably little else than a fig leaf, an apple and rational decision-making. Bridging across communities simply requires political motives to be discrete enough to tie the various cultural communities and political entity within the