In parliamentary politics, atechnical group ormixed group is a heterogeneous group of elected officials who are of differing ideologies, comprising multiple smallpolitical parties,independent politicians, or a combination of both. They can be distinguished from more conventionalparliamentary groups which have a coherent political ideology (such as all members of the group being from the same political party). Technical groups are formed for technical reasons, so that members enjoy certain rights or benefits that would otherwise remain unavailable to them outside a formally recognized parliamentary group.
InDáil Éireann (thelower house of the Irish national parliament, theOireachtas), prior to 2016, only parliamentary groups with sevenTDs or more had full speaking rights under the house'sstanding orders. This meant that smaller parties andindependent politicians would be unable to speak as often as parties with enough deputies to form their own groups. Prior to 1997, a technical group automatically came into being if there were seven or more independent TDs.[1] From 1997, a group of TDs must agree to form a group. Under standing orders, only one technical group could exist at any time,[2] with at least seven members and comprising a majority of deputies who are not members of another group in Dáil Éireann.
In the wake of the2016 Irish general election, which saw a significant increase in the number of TDs elected as independents or from small parties in the32nd Dáil, the Dáil standing orders were extensively revised to reduce the minimum number for formation of a parliamentary group from seven TDs to five, and to allow multiple technical groups to exist in parallel.[3]
Recent examples of technical groups include:
Political groups of the European Parliament are required by that parliament's standing orders to have a coherent "complexion" of political principles. Despite this rule, a "Technical Group of Independents" comprising members from dissimilar political ideologies has been formed on two occasions:from 1979 until 1984 andbetween 1999 and 2001. Such was the mixed nature of the latter group that it drew the disapproval of theCommittee on Constitutional Affairs, which attempted to disband the group within months of its creation; after legal appeals, the disbandment was finally confirmed by a ruling of theEuropean Court of Justice, making it unlikely that technical groups will reappear within the European Parliament in the future.
In France, during the nineteenth-century and first half of the twentieth century, most French national politicians were independents, that is elected without formally belonging to a campaign party.
The first modern French political parties date from the early 1900s (foundation ofAction libérale and theParti radical). The first legislation on political parties dates from 1911, though it was not until 1928 that parliamentarians were required to select a political party for the parliamentary register (either by formally joining a group, or by loosely working with one as anapparenté, or associate), and not until after 1945 that structured political parties came to dominate parliamentary work.
However, long before this the development of parliamentary committees during theFirst World War created an incentive to belong to a parliamentary party. As there were fourteen main parliamentary committees, and spaces for them were distributed to parliamentary parties first and independents last, the smaller parties and independents began to either attach themselves informally to a main political party (such loose associates of parliamentary parties were termedapparantés), or to band together to create ad-hoc technical groups for the duration of the legislature. In 1932, for instance, the French Chamber contained four technical groups: the left-of-centreIndependent Left, with 12 deputies drawn from theAlsatian regionalCommunist and Radical parties as well as independent deputies of socialist or Radical temperament; the centre-right conservative-liberalIndependents of the Left, with 26 deputies; the right-wingagrarianIndependents for Economic, Social and Peasant Action, with six deputies; and the far-rightmonarchistIndependent Group, with 12 deputies. These four technical groups thus accounted for almost 10% of parliamentary seats.