Welcoming the new Members of the Northern Ireland Assembly
The MSc Political Psychology class were invited to the NI Assembly on Thursday 12 May, to welcome the new Members (MLAs).
The MSc Political Psychology class were invited to the NI Assembly on Thursday 12 May, to welcome the new Members (MLAs). All 108 MLAs met to sign the roll of membership, with 29 newly elected members doing so for the first time. The number of females MLAs has significantly increased this year from 20 in 2011 to 30.
Dr Gary McKeown said about the visit: “This was a fantastic opportunity for students to witness first-hand the importance placed in ceremony and ritual in generating the legitimacy of a political institution, especially the historical linking of the current with the past and how that instils authority.
However, we also got to see behind the scenes in both a formal and informal sense. We visited the Hansard offices where the decisions are made about what gets written into the official record and where decisions are made about how to interpret MLA’s spoken words and convert them into written form in an official, impartial and accessible manner. More informally we observed the change in social interaction style between relationships between MLAs in the chamber and outside in the surrounding areas. Plenty to mull over from a political psychology point of view."
Learn more about the MSc Political Psychology.
