Parliamentary procedure
body of rules, ethics and customs governing meetings and other operations of legislative bodies and other deliberative assemblies
Parliamentary procedures are the accepted rules, ethics, and customs governing meetings of an assembly or organization. Their object is to allow orderly deliberation upon questions of interest to the organization and thus to arrive at the sense or the will of the majority of the assembly upon these questions. Self-governing organizations follow parliamentary procedure to debate and reach group decisions, usually by vote, with the least possible friction.
In the United Kingdom, Canada, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and other English-speaking countries, parliamentary procedure is often called chairmanship, chairing, the law of meetings, procedure at meetings, the conduct of meetings, or the standing orders. Erskine May's Parliamentary Practice is used and often referred to as "Erskine May" in the United Kingdom, and influential in other countries that use the Westminster system. In the United States, terms used are parliamentary law, parliamentary practice, legislative procedure, rules of order, or Robert's Rules of Order.
Rules of order consist of rules written by the body itself (often referred to as bylaws), usually supplemented by a published parliamentary authority adopted by the body. Typically, national, state, or provincial, and other full-scale legislative assemblies have extensive internally-written rules of order, whereas non-legislative bodies write and adopt a limited set of specific rules as the need arises.
History
The term parliamentary procedure gets its name from its use in the parliamentary system of government.
In 1377, the parliaments of England started naming the coordinator of parliamentary meetings as the Speaker.
“Parliamentary procedure” enters the record as body of rules, ethics and customs governing meetings and other operations of legislative bodies and other deliberative assemblies. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Parliamentary, procedure and body can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q221911. The Library of Congress control number is sh85098224. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1377.
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This entry incorporates text from “Parliamentary procedure” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.