Vote as the Last Speech Act in Parliamentary Debate

The British journalist J.A. Spender offers an anecdote of a Chinese visiting him and telling him that in the Chinese parliament, members talked and talked, “but nothing happened” (The Public Life, 1925, vol. II, 3). The relationship between debate and vote remains problematic and the Westminster practice is not obvious for outsiders. In the Westminster tradition “Motion, Question and Decision are all parts of a process that may be called the elementary form of debate,” as Gilbert Campion formulated it in 1929. The vote is thus the last move in the debate. The debate has its sense in the resolution presented in the motion itself, and a vote will then taken after the end of the debate. The amendments alter the resolution, and before the final vote a decision between the original motion and the amendment will be made. I shall discuss Westminster-related sources (procedure tracts, rhetorical writings, political theory) from different perspectives (types of debate and vote, stages and modes of debate), manners of interrupting and terminating debates and so on in order to give a more precise historical and conceptual vision of the singular Westminster type of relationships between debate and vote and discuss its political significance.