The modified issue: Turning around parliaments, politics as usual and how to extend issue-politics with a little help from Max Weber

Abstract

Ordinary political institutions such as parliaments remain under-explored in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and the conceptual resources for studying politics are far less developed than for science. But sites like parliaments are far more interesting than are their received images. This article argues that novel re-combinations of the issue-literature in STS and the works on parliament and objectivity by the German scholar Max Weber can provide us with analytical resources for grasping parliamentary politics with new lenses. In fact, reading Weber in light of the issue-literature provides for a better understanding of his work, and points towards how Weber’s accounts are crucially about parliamentary politics as work – on and with issues and the matters at hand. In addition, Weber may improve STS’s accounts of politics by his way of including the ordered and procedural side to issue-politics: Issue-politics is both about ‘opening up’ an issue as well as coming to decisions and take action. The article underlines this by discussing an often-misread part of Weber’s work, namely his work on objectivity and points to how political procedure was a key inspiration to his understanding and developing of this notion.