Rethinking Parliaments with Cristina Leston-Bandeira
Exploring modernization, citizen engagement, and the future of legislative institutions
Hello from Lisbon!
We’re excited to introduce a new content series at ModParl: interviews with experts and practitioners in legislative modernization. Through these conversations, we aim to bring you valuable insights from those working on the front lines of parliamentary reform—from legislators to academics and beyond.
Our first interview features Cristina Leston-Bandeira, Professor of Politics at the University of Leeds and a leading figure in parliamentary studies, with over thirty years of experience working with parliaments worldwide. She chairs the International Parliament Engagement Network and previously led the UK Study of Parliament Group. Cristina is also co-editor of Reimagining Parliament, a book we reviewed last year.
In our conversation, we discuss:
Her Path to Legislative Modernization
Key Lessons in Modernization
Academia and Practice
AI and Parliaments
Citizen Engagement
Her insights deeply inspired me, and I hope you find them just as valuable!
Beatriz Rey, Ph.D.
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Beatriz: I thought we could start with you introducing yourself and sharing a bit about your background and what led you to specialize in legislative modernization, if I may list this as your expertise.
Cristina: The way I came to this was actually by my first studies were in the Portuguese Parliament, because my family is Portuguese. I approached it from the perspective of a new democracy (because in the late 1980s, early 1990s, Portugal was a new democracy). The more I looked at parliament and democracy – what is an effective democracy, what is a good democracy – that led me to the idea of reforming parliaments and their relationship with citizens.
What makes a good parliament for new democracy?
What should the role of a parliament be in connecting between citizenry and and governance?
As I developed my studies, this thing called the Internet also developed. So my first studies on parliament were before the Internet existed, which is quite scary! The Internet has had a huge impact in all society, but in parliaments specifically because it’s made them much more visible. They used to be very much closed institutions that you could only get to know if you actually managed to get inside there. With Internet depth, little by little they are obliged to be online. With social media that’s increased even more.
As parliamentary visibility increased and public expectations grew for participation beyond election periods, I became increasingly drawn to exploring how parliaments engage with citizens between elections. How do parliaments do that? Many parliaments are still quite poor at maintaining relationships with citizens during the period between elections. There’re a lot of parliamentarians who follow the principle that we are the representatives. They do in general do a good job of keeping in touch with the people, but that doesn’t mean that citizens can get involved in saying how they feel about specific things during the time between the elections. Because that’s an area that not many parliaments do or do very well it sort of naturally leads to modernization. That’s why I think you’d see me as someone who’s looking at modernization. A lot of those processes are about modernizing the way parliament conducts its business.
Beatriz: From your experience working with legislative modernization projects, what do you say are the most valuable lessons you’ve learned? And here I’m talking not only about cases of success, but also cases of setbacks.
Cristina: One of the key things is to keep Members on board. There’s often a danger that staff will run with particular projects, ideas, things that look quite nice, but they don’t have the Members on board. And if that happens, then that path just doesn’t happen, really doesn't embed and has no legitimacy. Something else that can happen is that sometimes you have what I refer to as Member champions – Members who really believe in modernization and have loads of ideas. But it doesn’t mean that those people stay in parliament because they get elected and then lose elections. Not doing modernization with other Members can lead to setbacks very easily because it means it’s not embedded in practice. It’s not backed up by the institution. It's really boring and nerdy, but it is really important to institutionalize processes of modernization in core committees, core commissions within the parliament that deal with administrative issues. Because if you don't do that, then modernizing whatever the processes are can die off really quickly. An idea that people had can be seen like a gimmick, not something to take it forward. And sometimes you have the people who are in these core administrative roles and commissions committees as very traditionalists. That’s the case in the UK Parliament. It’s not always easy.
Beatriz: It's almost like if you don't get Members on board, efforts are not taken seriously.
Cristina: Yeah. Because then it might be seen as something fashionable or something that someone thought was a good idea, but now they’re gone and so there’s no need to do it.
Almost like a counterbalance, it’s also really important to create spaces of experimentation within parliaments where you can experiment things, you can pilot things. Because parliaments are very risk averse, usually they don’t like to try new things. When they bring new processes in, there’s almost a sense that this needs to be perfect. There’s no sense of “it's ok to fail or it's ok just to try it out and experiment.” When we look at parliaments that made big strides in terms of modernization, it was always through experiments. So I'd say it’s a counterbalance between those two: having spaces for experimentation, innovation, but also taking on board the core organization bodies that make the institution.
Beatriz: That is very tricky. Do you think that academic research has any role in helping parliaments find the right balance between these two?
Cristina: Academia on parliaments and many other issues is quite disconnected from reality. There’re so many studies on really, really tiny specific issues that actually don’t really matter for the way parliaments are run and and then there’re so many areas that there's just no look into it at all.
Beatriz: Could you give me one example of areas that you think would be worth looking at that academics are not paying attention to?
Cristina: The whole area of relationship with citizens. It's partly because in political science you have a huge branch which looks at electoral behavior, voting behavior. They look at elections endlessly. The people who look at parliamentary studies or legislative studies look at the institution or what drives MPs in terms of the way they are elected. There’s very little work on actually what happens within parliaments. And then the relationship with citizens just completely missed out because it’s not seen as important for parliaments because parliaments are there to represent the people. There’s a whole area of rational choice approach to legislative studies which tends to focus very much on minute things which actually have very little relationship or importance to reality. And that does drive me a little bit mad. And that's partly why I actually like to work with practitioners, because I like my research to be problem-driven rather than theory-driven.
Beatriz: This gives us a good transition into my next question, which is about Reimagining Parliaments, a book I highly recommend to anyone who’s reading this. You wrote a chapter about the engagement between citizens and parliaments. We ran a post on how Brazil’s Senate uses AI to simplify the language of bills so that citizens can understand what they’re saying and got replies from people saying, “you're assuming that people actually want to know what’s in the bills, but they don’t.” That caught me off guard a little bit, and I wanted to hear your thoughts.
Cristina: This doesn't surprise me at all. Normal people don’t wake up in the morning interested to know what’s happening in politics. We do it because we’re interested in politics. We’re not normal in terms of representation of the people out there. The way that parliaments can become more relevant to people is by talking about the issues that matter to people. It’s not through the processes that you'll get people paying attention to what happens in parliament. It's through parliaments discussing the things that people want to talk about. It’s through the issues that you’ll bring citizens to parliaments. And it’s not easy to do that because other things have more visibility. The media has far more visibility. The Executive branch has far more visibility. But that’s the way to engage beyond the usual suspects.
I do think that AI can play a role here. For instance, AI can help simplify and decomplex information. Parliamentary language is quite complex and complicated and AI can play a role in translating that into a simpler version. AI can also be used to try to highlight the issues that matter to people, the topics that people are interested in.
But until parliaments are more sort of embedded within society, which is an odd thing to think about, there’s no reason why people will think about parliament because it’s just an institution of playing the distance. It’s about parliaments talking more about the issues that people are talking about, but it's also about parliaments being embedded in society, in schools, in the third sector, in civil society. If citizens have a problem in health, where can they go within parliament who would be able to look after the issue in health? You do that by equipping parliament better in terms of education tools, in terms of how it uses the AI and all that. But you also do that by working with outside partners like civil society. Parliaments can’t do everything. They need to partner up with other organisations to do that.
Beatriz: When we think about high levels of political polarization and public frustration with democracy today, do you think it’s feasible to build those bridges?
Cristina: I tend to be optimistic. I think that if you open up for spaces of deliberation between politicians themselves, between politicians, citizens, between citizens, and you open up the space for people to reflect and see, to look at different points of view, then you can get to somewhere. It's a massive challenge to do that, but I'm a very strong advocate for slow processes. There's a movement of slow food, slow travel, which I’m a very strong advocate for.
And I think we need also slow politics. Politics is really fast, and it’s shaped so quickly by the 24/7 cycle of news and by people saying something, someone else reacting, too quickly. We need to actually invest in spaces. When I say spaces, I mean physical spaces and temporal spaces, time for people to actually to discuss things properly and to have a discussion and listen to different ideas.
Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies developed a project focused on educating young people, which I thought was interesting because they went beyond just teaching young people about how the legislative process works. They taught how politics works, how democracy works in terms of the need of listening to different points of view, discussing those points of view and then coming to a collective decision about that. In the last three years, we lost the sense of that. There’s very much the sense of some people are right, some people are wrong, some people are idiots.
We need to open more spaces of deliberation and discussions to see that actually people who might think very differently to you, they’re still human beings. They still have the same needs that you have but there’s just no space to talk about this. If I had a magic wand, that's what I would do. I would slow up time and build these up. I would want people to actually discuss ideas rather than just moving forward with one after the other, which I think just amplifies the polarisation, amplifies the distrust and doesn’t lead to anything in many ways.
Beatriz: Portugal’s National Assembly opened a sort of “Museum of Parliament” to teach people how parliaments work. And I’ve been advocating for other institutions to have that because it makes the work that parliaments do concrete and actually demystifies democracies and parliaments. What would you suggest for us to take that aura out of democracy and parliaments and make them closer to actual people, to real people?
Cristina: There’s places like that in Brussels and Denmark. It’s all money really well spent. A parliament should be the house of all people. So you should feel at home in that house. And what those centres or education programs are trying to do is to demystify. They’re not always very successful because quite often they are hierarchical or focus only on the legislative process. It's when they go beyond that and talk about how people can get involved or the different topics that parliament talks about that they matter.
There’s things like youth parliaments which are also valuable, but can be quite bad — it depends how they are. My favourite one is the Welsh Youth Parliament because it has time — it works over two years. And the young people who are elected are elected by other young people, but they also work with community organizations to make sure they represent areas of young people that would not usually get involved in politics. And then they discuss between themselves and choose about three topics that they want to explore throughout the two years. And then throughout those two years, they actually work with real MPs and they work together with the committees in parliament. They do their consultations and, in the end, they produce something.
And there's places like Zambia and Germany that have buses that tour the country to explain what parliament is about. You’re not expecting everyone to come to the capital, you actually go out to the community and try again to demystify that image of parliament being something far away that has nothing to do with you. Those programs have really been important.
Beatriz: What trends in legislative modernization are you most excited about for the future?
Cristina: Citizen engagement is something that really excites me because I think that there is still so much to do. So some parliaments do a lot already, but the vast majority don’t do a lot, or if they do, they don’t necessarily do it in a way that works out well. It's a bit hierarchical, distant from citizens.
AI can play an important role in that in terms of decomplexifying information, translating information, summarizing information. If there’re thousands of citizens submitting their views to parliament, AI can help parliamentary officials and parliamentarians to summarize the main points. But it can also help in an inductive way in creating and simulating new ideas. I’ve gotten involved with a colleague at my university who’s using AI to support discussions on climate change among citizens. So AI can be used in creative ways, like generating and reimagining futures. AI presents many challenges, particularly for parliaments. What concerns me most is that many parliaments are still far from being fully digitized or effectively using digital technologies, let alone adopting AI. Meanwhile, AI development is accelerating rapidly, and that progress won’t slow down. My fear is that a significant gap will emerge between what organizations outside of parliaments achieve with AI and how parliaments engage with and regulate these technologies — leaving them unable to harness AI’s full potential. That said, to answer your question, what truly excites me are trends where parliaments use technology to engage citizens more meaningfully—where people feel heard, and their input connects directly to parliamentary business, such as committee inquiries, legislation, or other decision-making processes.
Beatriz: Your point about the gap between parliaments makes me think about my last question, which is how you envision parliaments working differently in ten years. Now I wonder if we're going to see two types of parliaments (at the very least) in the future.
Cristina: I think so. I think in many ways we already have that. I'm working on an international project where we try and create these guides for parliaments on citizen engagement and we’re trying to include in there as many examples as we can from across the world. It’s really difficult to do that because there’re so many parliaments out there and it’s just impossible to find any information about them online, even a simple website. The gap is already there and I really worry that it’s just going to get bigger because you see the players with the most resources, the one that are really high up already in terms of having their process digitized, they're just going to get further and further and then and the gap is going to increase even more.
That’s where I see the problems of AI. AI in a world like that can be quite scary because there’re plenty of private institutions or groups that will be miles and miles away ahead of the core institutions, which are parliaments in terms of using AI. But I would hope that in ten years time, parliaments are more comfortable with the idea of interacting with citizens, because that’s not always obvious these days. Even when there are processes like petitions, it doesn't necessarily mean that they understand that citizens need to be listened to. It can’t be just an online process and there’s nothing happening. Citizens need to know what’s happening with the comments that they send or whatever it may be. So I would hope in ten years time that's a bit more developed and even across parliaments.
Beatriz: Is there anything I didn't ask that you think would be relevant for people to know?
Cristina: Maybe just emphasising the value of working with practitioners. That’s really important and that’s something that I’ve done increasingly so. A few of my last projects have been with petitions committees in specific parliaments to understand what are their challenges, what are the things they like to do so that the research is as relevant as possible. I get very frustrated with academic literature, which is so detached from reality, and a lot of academics are just really scared to actually talk to any practitioners because they have no idea where to get started.
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