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In their contribution, Bocking-Welch, Huzzey, Leston-Bandeira and Miller set out their historico-political approach to the investigation of petitioning as a practice over a one-hundred-year period. In this context, specific petitions or even public discussion of specific petitions provide trace data for exploring the practices which produced them. Rather than a single, stable set of practices, Bocking-Welch, Huzzey, Leston-Bandeira and Miller show those practices are embedded in, shape and are shaped by wider social, cultural and political contexts. By tracing petitioning outwards to these varied contexts, they expand the notion of the political by expanding our understanding of where politics happens and what is involved.

Legislative scholars are very good at explaining and analysing what legislatures do and how they do it. But the why question – why legislatures do what they do and why they matter – is often taken for granted or not even raised at all. Our objective in this paper is to focus attention back onto the 'why' question and to explore the grounds upon which legislative scholars, and others, might be encouraged to reconsider this basic question. In seeking to coax a reconsideration of the importance of legislatures, we direct attention towards processes of legitimation and why legislatures are invested in such processes across the world in the modern era. If, as we argue, an answer to the question of why legislatures matter is to be grounded in processes of legitimation, then deficiencies in those processes or the questionability of those processes also expose the contingent nature of such an answer.

Political scientists have a mixed record in predicting the political future; and so, as political scientists, we won't engage in expansive 'futurology' and 'guestimates' about the future of Parliament in this chapter. Instead, in exploring the future of parliamentary politics, we will invoke the words often attributed to Albert Einstein: 'The future is an unknown, but a somewhat predictable unknown. To look to the future we must first look back upon the past'. If we can identify what parliament was and is, and what it did and still does - which has been the central connecting thread interwoven in the preceding chapters - then we can provide a basis for exploring what we might expect parliament to be and do in the future. Individually, the 30 chapters of this book have explored what parliament does and why it does what it does. Collectively, these chapters provide an overarching assessment of the contemporary significance of the UK parliament in the UK's political system by revealing what it 'is' as an institution. Whilst it is not our intention to reprise the analyses of earlier chapters; it is our intention, however, to identify key puzzles implicit within these analyses which raise fundamental questions about what parliament is and why it exists. In turn, this will help us to identify the 'predictable unknowns' as starting points for the exploration of the future.