Volume 3 • Issue 1 • 1000118 Social Crimonol ISSN:2375-4435 SCOA, an open access journal Open Access Agozino, Social Crimonol 2015, 3:1 DOI: 10.4172/2375-4435.1000118 Open Access The Whip in the House: Rituals of Social Control in Parliament and in Society Biko Agozino* Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA, USA *Corresponding author: Biko Agozino, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Blacksburg, VA, USA, E-mail: agozino@vt.edu Received Janaury 07, 2015; Accepted April 21, 2015; Published May 12, 2015 Citation: Agozino B (2015) The Whip in the House: Rituals of Social Control in Parliament and in Society. Social Crimonol 3: 118. doi:10.4172/2375-4435.1000118 Copyright: © 2015 Agozino B. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Abstract This paper will attempt a comparison of the role of the Chief Whip or its equivalent in Caribbean, British and Canadian Parliamentary systems of government with similar offces in the US legislature. This offce originated with the need to ‘whip in’ members of parliament from wherever they might be to save a crucial vote in a divided house. This offce has since acquired the connotations of the disciplinarian who whips members into the party line even while managing to keep the party cohesive through persuasion and rewards for loyalty and rarely exercising the option of excluding members who often resign by themselves or even change allegiance although most of the rebels lose at the next election. The paper will explore the role of the whip from country to country and the implications of such differences and analogies for theories of power and social control. Keywords: Whip; Parliament; Deviance; Social control Introduction A search of academic journal articles databases on ‘Chief Whips’ throws up hits on slavery especially when the search is narrowed down to the Caribbean, with a comma. Such is the powerful connotation of the word whip that it is amazing that British Parliamentarians ever chose it as the title for one of the most powerful ofcials in the House of Commons and even more surprising that Caribbean, African and Asian parliaments retain this inheritance or imposition uncritically. Other parliaments adopted the whip uncritically from the mother of all parliaments. In the Caribbean as elsewhere, the symbolism of the whip as a disciplinary fetish is part of popular culture and parents as well as children defend its legitimacy as a correctional tool. Even afer corporal punishment was abolished, the whip has remained as a symbol of authority in the halls of government in Britain and many other states around the world. Tis suggestive term, whip, is what attracted my attention to the topic of dissension, discipline and party cohesion in the parliamentary system of government. As a sociologist with special interest in social control, such issues are relevant to the ideas of law and order politics at the street level and I am interested in fnding out the extent to which the law makers themselves are subject to the whip. My goal in this paper is to fnd out if the methods used by the Chief Whip to attain or attempt cohesion in the face of dissension and discipline and in the face or threat of indiscipline could be borrowed for the construction of theoretical explanations of the problems of deviance and social control in general. Classical social theory will help to frame the problem of rebellious deviance and social control generally before we examine the specifc examples of how diferent parliaments deal with this problem. For instance, classical criminology with its emphasis on free will and just deserts would suggest that parliamentarians who breech rules of discipline are asking to be punished by their party leadership and that they will get the disciplinary measure that fts the seriousness of their deviation from party solidarity. Tis is a novel application of the classical school which focuses on criminal behaviour rather than on political dissension by elected parliamentarians. However, once the classical philosophy is turned back on the law- makers who crafed just desert laws, it is not surprising to fnd how analogical dissension is to deviance and how relevant the more lenient and more permissive ‘whipping’ of law-makers appears when they have to deal with their own members compared to when they have to deal with the poor street criminal. Te strange thing is that the punitive measure might be directed at the party leadership by rebel members who might be able to bring down the leadership or the government despite the eforts of the Chief Whip to suppress dissension and rebellion directly and indirectly, thereby challenging the assumption of classicism that it is only the government or the state that exercises a monopoly over corrections in a modern polity. Confict theory would suggest that a better way to understand the role of the Chief Whip in dealing with party discipline is to see it as an aspect of class struggle, albeit an internal class struggle among members of the ruling class. It is the emphasis on confict as an inherent part of the political process by confict theorists that appears most relevant in any analysis of the role of the Chief Whip in parliamentary social control over members. Te conventional idea is that the whip is there to enforce consensus among party members in parliament but the fact that the whip is always there is an indication that dissension is never completely absent as the confict theorists would insist. In sharp contrast with the confict theorists are functionalists who insist that a parliament could be likened to an organ in an organism which fulfls important prerequisites for the survival of the social organism or social system by working in tandem with other organs to maintain homeostasis or equilibrium despite the constant threat of chaos from the socio-economic-political environment. Te Chief whip would be seen from this perspective as working to maintain harmony, collective conscience, consensus and cohesion within parliamentary parties, otherwise government business would not be successfully handled by legislators. Tis makes the role of the Chief Whip close to what [1] is identifed as the democratic, participative or liberal leader who relies on the concurrence of the led. Research Article Sociology and Criminology-Open Access S o c i o l o g y a n d C r i m i n o l o g y : O p e n A c c e s s ISSN: 2375-4435