Legislative Committees and Deliberative Democracy: the Committee System of the South African Parliament with Specific Reference to the Standing Committee on Public Accounts (SCOPA).

[摘要] This thesis examines the status and role of parliamentary committees in democratictheory with a view to critically assessing the performance of one such committee, theSouth African version of the PAC, SCOPA. It advances a pluralist theory of popularsovereignty according to which there is no single institutional complex or site, whichexclusively expresses the will of the people. The latter is the case in monist theories,which reduce democracy to its practice in a single site. Rousseau and Weber are criticallyexamined in this connection. In the pluralist notion advanced in this thesis the popularwill is expressed and realized in a plurality of institutional sites and modalities ofexercise. On this perspective parliamentary committees perform a function vital to theconstitution of popular sovereignty itself. They are indispensable to the formation by thepeople of an accurate perception by it of what the Executive is doing in its name. Theirinvestigative work is thus constitutive of the formation of a democratic subject and will.Parliamentary committees are thus central to the satisfaction of the conditions of thedeliberative dimension of democracy. On this definition, parliamentary committees mustin addition themselves conform to the principles of deliberation in their own practice.This specifically deliberative conception of democracy is then further delineated bydistinguishing it from the aggregation – majoritarian perspective and defending it againsta variety of criticisms, including that of Chantal Mouffe.With this conceptual and normative framework in place, the British and Americancommittee systems are examined in order to establish some reference points in terms ofthe institutional practice of parliamentary committees. The focus then shifts to theparliamentary committees of the South African Parliament. The constitutional and legalfoundation for parliamentary committees (in the South African system) is examined withparticular reference to SCOPA itself and the first five years of the new parliamentarycommittee system identified as a period during which several South Africanparliamentary committees, including SCOPA, effectively exercised their 'oversight”function. Once the Government’s SDP entered the scene all things changed. This thesisexamines the formation of the JIT, paying particular attention to the exclusion of theHSIU and the interventions of the Speaker, Hon Frene Ginwala. It identifies in close detail all the flaws in the SDP procurement process as well as the contradictions andlacunae in the final JIT Report itself. These are of such a magnitude as to renderunreasonable any claim to the contrary and in endorsing the Report SCOPA thus clearlyfailed in its essential function. The notion of a threshold concept of reasonable adequacyis introduced as limiting the conditions under which committee decisions can legitimatelybe taken via majority voting. The argument is advanced that these were clearly not met inthe case of the SCOPA decision under discussion. The implications of this 'collapse” ofSCOPA for South African democracy more broadly are then identified and discussed interms of deliberative democratic theory.

[发布机构] University of the Witwatersrand