Resumen de Prorogation: Comparative Context and Scope for Reform

Thomas G. Fleming, Petra Schleiter

• In August 2019, the UK government’s attempt to prorogue parliament for five weeks raised the question whether the UK’s prorogation rules ought to be reformed. We place this discussion in comparative perspective by contrasting the UK’s prorogation rules with (i) equivalent procedures in 26 European democracies and (ii) recent changes in other areas of UK executive–legislative relations. These comparisons suggest that the UK’s current prorogation rules are increasingly anomalous. They give governments significantly more power to suspend parliament than comparable European democracies, and are at variance with recent efforts to counterbalance the executive’s wide ranging discretion in the UK.