A whip is an official of a political party whose task is to ensure party discipline in a legislature. This means ensuring that members of the party vote according to the party platform, rather than according to their own individual ideology or the will of their donors or constituents. Whips are the party's "enforcers". They try to ensure that their fellow political party legislators attend voting sessions and vote according to their party's official policy. Members who vote against party policy may "lose the whip", being effectively expelled from the party.
The term is taken from the "whipper-in" during a hunt, who tries to prevent hounds from wandering away from a hunting pack.
Additionally, the term "whip" may mean the voting instructions issued to legislators, or the status of a certain legislator in their party's parliamentary grouping.
The expression whip in its parliamentary context, derived from its origins in hunting terminology. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the term whipper-in as, "a huntsman's assistant who keeps the hounds from straying by driving them back with the whip into the main body of the pack". According to that dictionary, the first recorded use of the term whipper-in in the parliamentary sense occurs in 1772. However, P.D.G. Thomas in House of Commons in the Eighteenth Century cites two examples of the use of the term that pre-date 1772.
It was within the context of such summonses to members out of town that the first known Parliamentary instance of the use of the term "whip" occurred. In the debate of 8 May 1769 on a petition from some Middlesex freeholders against the seating of Henry Luttrell instead of John Wilkes, Edmund Burke mentioned that the ministry had sent for their friends to the north and to Paris, "whipping them in, than which, he said, there could not be a better phrase". Although Burke's particular emphasis on the expression implied its comparative novelty, the hunting term had been used in this political context for at least a generation: on 18 November 1742 Heneage Finch remarked in a letter to Lord Malton that "the Whigs for once in their lives have whipped in better than the Tories".
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.
Party discipline is a system of political norms, rules and subsequent respective consequences for deviance that are designed to ensure the relative cohesion of members of the respective party group. In political parties specifically (often referred to as the caucus or parliamentary parties), the essential purpose of party discipline is to get all its parliamentary members to maintain the party line and vote in support of policies agreed to by a majority of the parliamentary members (or of the party leadership).
The Labour Party is a political party in the United Kingdom that has been described as an alliance of social democrats, democratic socialists, and trade unionists. The Labour Party sits on the centre-left of the political spectrum. In all general elections since 1922, Labour has been either the governing party or the Official Opposition. There have been six Labour prime ministers and thirteen Labour ministries. Since the 2010 general election, it has been the second-largest UK political party by the number of votes cast, behind the Conservative Party and ahead of the Liberal Democrats.
The Parliament of Australia (officially the Federal Parliament, also called the Commonwealth Parliament) is the supreme legislative branch of the government of Australia. It consists of three elements: the monarch (represented by the governor-general), the Senate and the House of Representatives. The combination of two elected chambers, in which the members of the Senate represent the states and territories while the members of the House represent electoral divisions according to population, is modelled on the United States Congress.