Cripping the House: How Parliamentary Rules, Practices, and Buildings Maintain Exclusion and Inaccessibility

Parliaments are filled with rules, rituals, relics, and rooms. These different institutions act as vessels conveying the ideas, norms, and values that dominate politics. Everything from art to voting procedures is a reminder about power, dominance, and politics. These institutions are never neutral – they have been (re)designed to uphold, and sometimes upend, pre-existing power hierarchies.  This paper explores how parliamentary institutions shape the political representation of disabled people – how disabling and disempowering power hierarchies are reflected, reinforced, and sometimes reformed in political arenas. Building on the dis/ability complex, it draws upon the concepts of disablism, discrimination against disabled people, and ableism, discrimination in favour of non-disabled people, to differentiate between distinct institutional practices of in/exclusion. It explores how institutional dis/ableism has been maintained, challenged, and addressed through two dimensions: parliamentary accountability, as embedded in the electoral system and consultative mechanisms, and parliament as an organisation, with a specific culture, processes, and locations. This study compares how different parliamentary rules, practices, and political spaces have been designed in five different parliaments: Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, Scotland, the UK, and New South Wales. It reflects on the legacy of the Westminster model within multi-level governance, parliamentary and electoral reforms, and institutional ‘newness’. This represents one of the few cross-national comparisons into how parliamentary institutions relate to disabled people, it combines empirical experiences working within different parliaments, expert insights, and recent parliamentary audits. Research behind this paper brings together many different forms of data including parliamentary rulebooks, workplace regulations, accessibility audits, and architectural floorplans. Capturing a range of different institutional factors from electoral systems to weekly schedules to parliamentary buildings, it attempts to build an institutional snapshot of the different ideas, norms, and spaces shaping the political representation of disabled people, and how it varies, and how this might impact on political representation. Findings highlight the way that parliamentary institutions elevate certain norms of participation, promote inflexible practices, and tend towards symbolic forms representation rather than structural, institutional reforms. Despite calls for greater accessibility, and remote working during Covid-19, the emphasis remains on presenteeism – the idea that political representation requires intensive physical presence in the parliamentary space. Retrofitting existing infrastructure continues to be the preferred method for improving accessibility and the majority of parliamentary buildings remain inaccessible including debating chambers, committee rooms, and entrances. Most reforms are reactive, connected to feminist campaigning within parliament or the efforts of individual politicians and staffers. Broader institutional reforms have also been linked to more inclusive forms of nationalism or the push to open parliaments to the public. The paper presents individual institutional profiles and comparative benchmarks which help broaden academic understanding about the exclusionary design of parliamentary institutions. They also serve as a repository of reforms necessary to promote more accessible parliaments and address the underrepresentation of disabled people in politics.