Performing Parliament: Executive Scripting, Symbolic Interaction, and the Social Life of Legislation in Sierra Leone

© The Author(s) 2025. Published by AMO Publisher. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Performing Parliament: Executive Scripting, Symbolic Interaction, and the Social Life of Legislation in Sierra Leone Mohamed Gibril Sesay Department of Sociology and Social Work, Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone, Sierra Leone Moiwa Momoh  Department of Sociology and Social Work, Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone, Sierra Leone Article History: Received: 23.08.2025 Revised: 22.09.2025 Accepted: 24.09.2025 Published: 01.10.2025 Abstract This article examines the dynamics of parliamentary performance in Sierra Leone’s 4th and 5th Parliaments (2012–2023), focusing on the interplay of formal rules, informal practices, and symbolic performances. Moving beyond frameworks of neopatrimonialism, electoral financing, and corruption, the study explores how executive scripting, ritualized deference, and symbolic acts such as walkouts, silences, and applause structured legislative life. Drawing on theories of symbolic interactionism and informal institutions, it demonstrates how parliamentary behaviour often reflected shadowboxing rather than substantive deliberation, creating an institutional culture marked by distrust, fragile alliances, and ritualized obedience. The analysis highlights the limits of colonial-era procedural legacies when confronted with postcolonial informal logic of loyalty and survival. It argues that Sierra Leone’s parliament functions less as a deliberative policy arena than as a contested stage of performance, where MPs navigate fatalistic outcomes through make-belief practices that signal loyalty, secure survival, yet erode institutional credibility. Keywords: Sierra Leone, Parliament, Executive scripting, Informal institutions, Political performance, Neopatrimonialism. Suggested citation: Sesay, M.G., & Momoh, M. (2025). Performing Parliament: Executive Scripting, Symbolic Interaction, and the Social Life of Legislation in Sierra Leone. European Journal of Theoretical and Applied Sciences, 3(5), 138-150. https://doi.org/10.59324/ejtas.2025.3(5).15 Introduction What makes a parliament function - or fail - is more than written rules or electoral arithmetic. It is also the everyday, often invisible, choreography of interaction among its members. In Sierra Leone, the 4th and 5th Parliaments (2012–2023) provide a striking case of how legislative behaviour is shaped not only by formal structures, but also by interpersonal trust, symbolic acts, factional alliances, and unwritten norms of political conduct. Central to this is a culture of cognitive scripting aligned with performative deference, where MPs anticipate and perform the executive’s preferences. This article examines how such informal and symbolic elements are structured legislative practice across two contrasting parliamentary terms. It explores how MPs navigated crossparty interaction, committee work, party loyalty, and leadership struggles - often in ways that strain to mimic formal procedure. To do so, it brings together Symbolic Interactionism, Informal Institutions Theory, and Institutional Culture as analytical lenses for understanding how politics is performed, negotiated, and sometimes paralyzed in the legislative chamber. The 4th Parliament, dominated by the AllPeople’s Congress (APC), projected coherence through centralized control and rigid party hierarchy, but stifled pluralism in the process. By contrast, the 5th Parliament emerged from a tightly contested election with a near-even split between the APC and the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP), plus smaller parties. This balance created structural potential for collaboration but in practice revealed the fragility of trust, the erosion of institutional norms, and the performative nature of power struggles. Leadership contests, walkouts, and committee breakdowns became rituals of confrontation, placing symbolic positioning rather than legality at the center of parliamentary life. Much of the existing scholarship on African legislatures has focused outward, emphasizing their relationship with the electorate and measuring representativeness and responsiveness (Mattes, Appiah-Nyamekye Sanny, & Aikins, 2024). These studies rightly ask whether legislators reflect popular aspirations, or how ethnic preferences influence elections (Kandeh 2003) but they rarely examine the internal mechanisms of power and meaning within parliamentary institutions themselves. Where scholars have turned inward, the dominant framework has been neopatrimonialism, which explains African political institutions as extensions of patronage, clientelism, and elite bargaining (Erdmann & Engel, 2007; Chabal & Daloz, 1999; Lindberg, 2003). In Ghana, Bob-Milliar (2012) and Acheampong (2021) show how factionalism and clientelistic ties shape parliamentary careers, while Ichino and Nathan (2022) demonstrate how party primaries themselves reproduce clientelistic logics. This study acknowledges these insights but goes beyond them. Rather than treating neopatrimonialism only as a macrostructure, it turns inward to the chamber to show how informal rules and symbolic gestures constitute a patrimonial micro-politics of executive scripting - where power is enacted through silences, walkouts, applause, and bodily performance, not only through patron–client networks outside the legislature. Another strand of research emphasizes the material and financial dimensions of party– parliament relations. Arriola et al. (2022), Demarest (2022), Koter (2017), Wahman and Seeberg (2022) and Lavali (2017) highlight how electoral campaigns and parliamentary survival depend on MPs’ ability to mobilize resources and contribute to party and patrimonial machines. Lindberg and Morrison (2008) similarly frame electoral outcomes as driven by resource exchange. While these analyses illuminate how money structures politics, this article shows how in Sierra Leone party– parliamentary relations were enacted less through financial flows than through symbolic performances of ritualized deference, choreographed applause, and scripted silence, and how these performances secured MPs’ loyalty in the eyes of party elites, particularly under the shadow of Section 77(k). In this sense, interactional performances often complemented and sometimes even substituted for financial contributions as the currency of survival. Classic accounts of African politics have also treated corruption as central to domination, a mechanism and soft bond that ties elites together (Reno, 1995; Bratton & van de Walle, 1997; Lemarchand & Legg, 1972). Such analyses capture how corruption provides the glue of patrimonial networks. This study draws from that framing, but shifts focus on other forms of bonding and their fragility. In Sierra Leone’s Parliament, trust, difference, and performative obedience operated as symbolic currencies that structured inclusion and exclusion. Yet, as will be demonsrated, the 5th Parliament revealed their limits: walkouts, ritualized refusals, and theatrical dissent show how these bonds could collapse even when patronage and corruption channels remained intact. Alongside these perspectives, other scholarship reminds us that African parliaments operate under formal rules rooted in colonial legacies of institutional design and political culture (Opalo, 2019). Parliamentary procedures, modes of address, and leadership rituals retain the imprint of Westminster formality. Yet as Helmke and Levitsky (2004) argue, informal institutions frequently override or re-script these rules. Sierra Leone’s Parliament exemplifies this dual logic: inherited rituals of procedure coexisted with informal rules anchored in party loyalty, symbolic gestures, and executive scripting. These informal logics did not simply undermine formal rules; they animated their very operation, producing a hybrid arena where colonial residues of formality and postcolonial inventions of informality interlocked to shape parliamentary practice. By turning inward to examine how intraparliamentary relationships were performed, scripted, and enforced, this article brings into focus the symbolic, performative, and procedural dynamics that structured Sierra Leone’s legislature. It moves beyond existing emphases on executive dominance or broad governance failures (Abdullah, 2004; Reno, 1995) to reveal parliament as an (in)formally distinct arena whose internal politics directly shaped wider governance trajectories. In doing so, it advances a critical argument: to understand how Sierra Leone’s Parliament really worked, we must turn to its social life - the ways MPs built alliances, staged loyalty, resisted exclusion, and enacted authority. Legislative effectiveness, in this framing, is not simply a matter of outputs or constitutional design, but of meaning-making within a contested institutional culture. In this sense, Sierra Leone’s Parliament could be understood as a space of executive scripting, where legislative action is less about deliberation in any substantive sense and more about rehearsed lines performed under the executive gaze. What passed for debate often resembled shadow boxing - gestures of contestation without the possibility of real impact. Civil society observers, in turn, frequently read these performances as unconvincing, a hollow theatre of deliberation that never persuaded its audience. From a Symbolic Interactionist perspective, such acts can be seen as invalid performances: MPs went through the motions of parliamentary practice, but the rituals carried little credibility as authentic exercises in lawmaking or representation. Yet, within this hollowed-out space, MPs were not passive. They tuned themselves to the dispositions of what they often saw as fatalistic outcomes - outcomes already foreclosed by executive preference or party decree. Their room for maneuvering was narrow, but not meaningless. Many participated in what might be called the make-belief of parliament: a contested yet valid process in which they could at least insert gestures, delays, walkouts, or applause that signaled their presence in the game. They grumbled under the weight of inauthenticity, recognizing the limits of their role, but saw survival in playing along. To endure, MPs treated parliamentary life as a performance that had to be shown - an enacted ritual of belonging, deference, and resistance, all at once. Theoretical Framework To unpack how Sierra Leone’s Parliament operated beneath the surface of formal rules, this article draws on three overlapping theoretical traditions: Symbolic Interactionism, Informal Institutions Theory, and the concept of Institutional Culture. These frameworks together offer a great lens for understanding how legislative outcomes are shaped by meanings, performances, and unwritten codes of conduct, as they are by structure and procedure. Symbolic Interactionism Rooted in the work of George Herbert Mead and developed further by Herbert Blumer (1969) and Erving Goffman (1959), Symbolic Interactionism centers the idea that social life is constructed through face-to-face interaction and shared meanings. Applied to parliamentary settings, it asks: how do MPs define and perform their roles? What gestures - speeches, walkouts, silences - signal loyalty, dissent, or credibility? In Sierra Leone’s Parliament, where institutional uncertainty and political contestation were frequent, symbolic actions carried outsized importance. For example, boycotts, committee withdrawals, and formal displays of unity often stood in for real legislative engagement. Parliament, through this lens, becomes more than just a place for deliberation. It is also a symbolic stage where actors perform authority, hierarchy, and opposition - both for their peers and the watching public. Informal Institutions Theory Where Symbolic Interactionism focuses on micro-level interaction, Informal Institutions Theory (Helmke & Levitsky, 2004) explains how power is structured through unwritten norms and parallel rule systems. Erdmann and Engel (2007) describe these systems as neopatrimonial, where personal loyalty, rather than bureaucratic rationality, underpins institutional function. Such systems foster cognitive scripting, where legislative actors pre-emptively align contributions to the president’s perceived desires, and in the process transform Parliament from a checking institution into a site for the legislative scripting of executive will. This tendency is reinforced by constitutional provisions such as Section 77(k), which empowers party leaders - often the president himself - to trigger the expulsion of MPs who deviate from the party line. This framework helps us see that legislative deadlock often has less to do with procedural ambiguity and more to do with competing informal allegiances and elite bargaining failures. In many African democracies - including Sierra Leone - these informal rules often override formal law. MPs may vote according to executive scripting enforced through informal sanctions, rather than reasoned debate. During the 4th Parliament, informal norms reinforced party dominance and discouraged open dissent. In the 5th Parliament, lacking a clear majority, informal institutions - rather than enabling flexible coalition-building - became sites of breakdown, as no shared norms could sustain trust across party lines. Patronage networks, internal factions, and personalistic bargaining often replaced transparent deliberation. Institutional Culture A third necessary lens is institutional culture - the set of embedded, often unspoken, norms that govern how people behave in each institutional setting. March and Olsen’s (1984) concept of the “logic of appropriateness” explains how actors behave not based purely on rational calculation, but on what they perceive as proper or fitting in their institutional environment. Pierre Bourdieu’s (1991) concept of habitus complements this, showing how individuals internalize institutional expectations and embody them in speech, movement, and posture. In Sierra Leone’s Parliament, this culture manifested in coded deference to seniority, rhetorical choreography, and the marginalization of “non-conforming” actors. The culture of plenary sessions often rewarded assertive performance and loyal repetition of party lines, and a deeper deference to executive scripting, in which parliamentary habitus is shaped by what the president wants articulated, not what constituents have mandated. Bob-Milliar’s (2012) analysis of Ghana’s Parliament shows that committee power, visibility in debate, and leadership access are not simply earned through formal mechanisms, but are deeply mediated by cultural cues, symbolic capital, and factional alignment. The same patterns were evident in Sierra Leone, especially in how performance and party proximity determined credibility and legislative influence. Considered jointly, these three frameworks illuminate the core argument of this article: that Sierra Leone’s Parliament was governed as much by culture, performance, and informal alignment as by law or procedure. They guide our reading of findings not as deviations from rule, but as the real social infrastructure of legislative life. Methodology A qualitative case study design was adopted, appropriate for exploring how context-specific, socially constructed meanings emerge within bounded institutional settings (Yin, 2018). The case study focused on the national Parliament of Sierra Leone as a single institution across two contrasting legislative periods - one marked by dominant party control (APC), the other by near-equal party balance (APC vs SLPP). The research employs an interpretivist, sociological approach to understanding how interpersonal relationships, informal institutions, and symbolic performances shaped legislative behaviour, collaboration, and breakdown. The focus is on meaning-making and power as enacted through interaction, rather than as fixed by rules. The interpretivist orientation aligns with Symbolic Interactionism (Blumer, 1969) and Institutional Culture theory (March & Olsen, 1984), which emphasize the subjective interpretations and routinized practices through which social actors make sense of their institutional environment. The study used three primary data sources: 1. Semi-Structured Interviews Twenty-five (25) interviews were conducted with Members of Parliament, parliamentary staff, civil society representatives, and media observers. Interviews explored participants’ experiences of collaboration, trust, exclusion, leadership contests, committee functioning, and public engagement. Respondents were purposively selected to reflect diverse parties, gender, seniority, and regional affiliation. 2. Document Analysis Hansard reports, parliamentary committee records, and public statements were analyzed to identify patterns of participation, symbolic performances (e.g., walkouts, procedural protests), and references to informal norms. These texts offered insight into both formal speech and its underlying institutional meanings. 3. Observational and Experiential Data While formal ethnographic observation was limited, some field-level insights were drawn from the researchers’ prior proximity to parliamentary processes, providing contextual and reflexive depth to the analysis. Observational notes focused on symbolic interactions during key events - budget debates, leadership elections, and moments of institutional tension. Thematic analysis was employed, and analytical attention was paid to how MPs defined roles and responded to institutional tensions - particularly through performance, allegiance, exclusion, and strategic ambiguity. The symbolic dimension of behaviour was treated as constitutive of parliamentary reality. All interviewees provided informed consent, and pseudonyms are used where appropriate to protect anonymity. Given the political sensitivity of parliamentary dynamics, data interpretation was reflexively managed to balance critical analysis with contextual empathy. Findings and Analysis: The Performed and the Unwritten in Parliamentary Practice The findings from this study show that legislative life in Sierra Leone’s Parliament is shaped less by formal laws and procedures and more by what happens between the lines - by gestures, silences, alliances, and unwritten codes. Parliamentary behaviour, especially during moments of political tension, was not merely rule-bound. It was also symbolically performed and socially navigated. The 4th Parliament functioned under the symbolic weight of dominance and deference, while the 5th was defined by fragmentation, mistrust, and ritualized confrontation. This section presents four key thematic insights that emerged from interviews, document analysis, and observations. Each theme illustrates how MPs enacted authority, negotiated legitimacy, and responded to institutional breakdown through performance, culture, and informal norms. The analysis links these themes directly to the theoretical frameworks already outlined: Symbolic Interactionism, Informal Institutions Theory, and Institutional Culture. Theme One: (Mis)Trust and Cross-Party Interaction 4th Parliament: Structured Distance and Controlled Engagement In the 4th Parliament (2012–2017), the AllPeople’s Congress (APC) held a comfortable majority, which allowed it to dominate parliamentary proceedings and enforce a predictable, vertically managed institutional rhythm. Cross-party interaction in this period was marked by powerless cooperation – a situation where opposition SLPP members often cooperated because they had no power in noncooperation. The opposition was given space to speak but rarely to shape outcomes. Trust, in this situation, operated internally, within the APC’s internal ranks and its leadership hierarchy. Interviews with APC MPs emphasized words like “discipline,” “line,” and “coordination.” One senior MP remarked: “We knew our roles. We had the numbers. You don’t need much talking across [to the opposition] if your side is aligned.” This reflects what March and Olsen (1984) describe as a “logic of appropriateness” - where behaviour is guided less by rational debate and more by alignment with institutional expectations and role performance. Opposition MPs, meanwhile, characterized the period as one of “being seen, but not included.” One SLPP MP explained that “debates felt rehearsed,” and that cross-party dialogue, when it occurred, was “informal and behind the scenes, not for public consumption.” These rehearsals followed an executive script - MPs were conscious of performing alignment with the president’s stance, rather than persuading the chamber or the electorate. These accounts highlight the symbolic performance of inclusion: opposition MPs could speak, but their contributions were largely procedural, not deliberate. Symbolic gestures substitute for actual engagement. For example, when opposition MPs raised counterpoints during plenary, the typical response was polite acknowledgment followed by a return to the dominant party line. The performance of the 4th Parliament was also reflected in its interactional tone. Interviews suggest a high level of what we may call ‘outcome detachment’ – a belief that outcomes have been determined, and deliberations are only performed so that parliament could be seen as deliberating. As one civil society observer put it: “You could watch a whole debate without knowing how committed these people are.” This perceived detachment illustrates Goffman’s (1959) concept of an invalid front-stage performance – a situation where attempts to perform deliberation fail to convince the audience, in this case, civil society. Interestingly, the trust that did exist across parties in the 4th Parliament was often grounded in non-parliamentary identities - shared school or university, seniority, or mutual history. One opposition MP recounted that “it was easier to find middle ground with someone you knew from university - even if they were APC.” This aligns with Blumer’s (1969) emphasis on meaning being situational and constructed through interaction - not necessarily by institutional design. In short, the 4th Parliament functioned as a space of controlled engagement. Cross-party trust was minimal, shaped largely by performative differences, institutional containment, and the secure hegemony of a majority party. Informal cooperation existed, but only at the margins. What appeared in the process of legislating was, in many ways, a detached performance backed by procedural dominance and interactional mimicry. Cross-Party Trust and Symbolic Fragility in 5th Parliament The 5th Parliament (2018–2023) presented an entirely different interactional terrain. With the APC and SLPP holding near-equal seats, and smaller parties like the National Grand Coalition (NGC) and Coalition for Change (C4C) holding swing positions, the chamber’s composition offered what seemed like a structural opportunity for pluralism. In theory, this fragmentation should have encouraged negotiation, consensus-building, and cross-party dialogue. In practice, however, it revealed the fragility of institutional trust and the limits of symbolic cooperation. Unlike the 4th Parliament - where the majority insulated the ruling party - here, power was up for constant contestation, and MPs across party lines were thrust into situations that required interaction but offered little assurance of reliability. As one SLPP MP put it, “You needed each other, but you didn’t trust each other. That’s a dangerous place.” Another from the APC side said, “Every handshake felt like a test. You watch your words, your tone - because anything could flip. MPs understood that under Section 77(k), a party leader’s displeasure could cost them their seat, making loyalty to the executive gaze more consequential than dialogue across the aisle.” This atmosphere of hyper-sensitivity translated into what Goffman (1959) would describe as a performance under surveillance. Every speech, absence, or gesture was interpreted as a signal of loyalty or betrayal - not just to one’s party, but to factions within it. MPs engaged in what one civil society informant called “surface diplomacy” - cordiality in the chamber masking deep suspicion and strategic positioning behind the scenes. MPs calibrated interventions to the executive script of their own party leadership - for ruling party MPs, that meant performing for presidential attention, for opposition MPs, scripting dissent in line with powerful faction leaders Walkouts became a recurrent ritual in the 5th Parliament. Unlike in the 4th, where absence was rarely used as protest, here it was a symbolic tool: a refusal to legitimize leadership decisions, committee appointments, or procedural processes perceived as unfair. These collective exits were often preceded by inflammatory speeches, carefully choreographed delays, or coordinated silence. From a Symbolic Interactionist lens (Blumer, 1969), these disruptions could be viewed as strategic performances meant to communicate withdrawal of recognition and institutional defiance. The Speakership election crisis early in the 5th Parliament exemplifies this. SLPP’s move to install its candidate as Speaker, amid a contested count, led to APC members walking out en masse. The act was performative, dramatic, and deeply symbolic: an assertion that “this Parliament is not neutral and is faking it.” Informal alliances - across region, seniority, or mutual political history - remained possible, but were thinly stretched. An NGC MP noted, “Sometimes, being from the same region helped. But that trust seemed forced and for show.” This points to what could be called conditional trust - trust based not on institutional stability but on shifting interpersonal calculations, emotional memory, and political fragility. Ultimately, the 5th Parliament was a case of forced proximity and a shadowy relational infrastructure. MPs were procedurally close but socially distant. Cooperation was necessary but rare; civility was expected but constantly threatened. The institution functioned as a stage of mutual suspicion. In sum, this section points up the article’s broader thesis: that institutional functionality in Sierra Leone’s Parliament is animated by the symbolic economy of mistrust, which, in the absence of stable norms, collapses into fragile performances and ritualized conflict. In the 5th Parliament, cross-party interaction was no longer absent - it was omnipresent, but haunted by distrust and uncertainty, performed rather than lived. Theme Two: Institutional Informality Committee Spaces and Informal Control in the 4th Parliament: Order Without Openness In the 4th Parliament (2012–2017), the APC’s clear majority translated into a tightly managed institutional environment, where committees functioned with relative procedural order - but under the firm grip of party control and informal hierarchy. While these committees were more technically focused than plenary sessions, they were not autonomous. Instead, they were structured by patronage, seniority, and elite deference, often replicating the formal dominance of the ruling party in informal ways. Interview data show that committee leadership was rarely contested, with MPs aware that dissent not only risked marginalization but, under Section 77(k), could be interpreted as ‘crossing the line,’ inviting removal from Parliament altogether. This legal shadow gave informal enforcement extraordinary bite. Chairs were typically handpicked by the ruling party executives or Speaker allies, not elected or rotated based on skill or merit. As one APC MP explained, “even when you lobby for committee positions; the leadership of the party controls, on the whim you where to go, and that was it.” This pattern aligns with Helmke and Levitsky’s (2004) framework of informal institutions: rules that are not written but are widely known, consistently enforced, and politically consequential. Moreover, party “strong men” or ‘borbor; (clients) of party and parliamentary leaders were strategically placed on key committees - Finance, Legislative, and Appointments. Even though committee rules allowed open participation, ‘borbor’ MPs and opposition members were structurally silenced by interactional dynamics. As Bourdieu (1991) would argue, the habitus of difference were embedded in everyday speech, turn-taking, and gesture. One SLPP MP recalled: “Even in committee, we knew who called the shot. You could talk, but talking against an appointment takes you no where. So you play along, and that brings its own rewards’. The culture of committees in the 4th Parliament was therefore one of controlled collaboration. While they offered space for some substantive engagement - especially on technical issues - the range of acceptable debate was popped through soft power mechanisms: leadership scripting and more turns given to leaders or ‘borbor of leaders’ to talk. Cross-party interaction in these spaces was dominated by these scripts and often geared towards advancing the executive’s script through committee outputs. The opposition party might be given the chance to play along, but should it seek to stall the process, it is cut off. This distinction reveals how committee work functioned as a backstage zone (Goffman, 1959), where the illusion of debate could be produced like some practiced ground for the same display in plenary. In summary, committee work in the 4th Parliament was a site of managed functionality. It provided the appearance of procedural diligence and some technical collaboration, but within the confines of informal dominance. Power circulated through patronage and seniority, not open deliberation. The performative calm of committee sessions masked a deeper political choreography, where access, voice, and influence were informally distributed. Informal Negotiation and Committee Breakdown in the 5th Parliament The 5th Parliament (2018 - 2023) opened with high expectations for dialogue and cross-party cooperation but quickly dissolved into bitter acrimony that stemmed from the controversial election of a speaker and violence against APC MPs in the Well of Parliament on the very day of the election of the speaker. This acrimony percolated to committees Interviews suggest that committee appointments by passed procedural norms. As one MP recalled, “Committee formation was a war. Every seat was a prize, not a responsibility.” While standing orders mandated equitable distribution, actual appointments were driven by informal deals, party retaliation, and perceptions of loyalty - a classic case of informal institutions overriding formal frameworks (Helmke & Levitsky, 2004). The Speaker’s controversial role in selecting committee chairs following the disputed Speakership election only deepened mistrust. APC members viewed many appointments as illegitimate and refused to take up certain committee roles. SLPP MPs, in turn, accused their rivals of obstruction. This breakdown transformed committees from spaces of “practical work” into contested sites of legitimacy. Inside committee rooms, the mood was tense and fragmented, and the committees were often described as “restless,” “unpredictable,” and “full of undercurrents.” Several MPs noted that even technical discussions - on budgets, bills, or oversight - could break down due to unresolved plenary-level conflicts. As one clerk explained, “The tension from the chamber didn’t stop at the door. It walked into every session.” That said, committees also provided moments of fragile, issue-specific cooperation - especially among MPs who shared some regional ties or personal history. One MP explained, “Sometimes we work across party because we went to school together or come from the same place. But it’s quiet cooperation - you don’t advertise it.” In sum, the 5th Parliament’s committee system became a microcosm of the broader institutional malaise: formally intact but functionally compromised. Committees offered spaces for potential compromise, but without shared rules of engagement or a foundation of trust, they became battlegrounds for symbolic control. As one senior MP reflected, “Committees were our best chance to fix things, but we brought the war with us.” Our discussion of committee dynamics in the 5th Parliament reinforces a central argument of the article: that informal networks and institutional culture do not merely complement or undermine formal procedure - they define the practical limits of parliamentary cooperation. In the 5th Parliament, committee work exposed both the possibility of relational governance and the persistence of symbolic division. Theme Three: Leadership Battles, Walkouts, and the Choreography of Resistance In Sierra Leone’s 4th and 5th Parliaments, leadership disputes and symbolic protests became central to how power was negotiated and challenged. These were staged confrontations, designed to signal either the withdrawal of legitimacy or the assertion of dominance. The 4th Parliament: Controlled Leadership and the Containment of Dissent In the 4th Parliament, leadership was settled early and remained unchallenged throughout the term. The APC, with a parliamentary majority and executive backing, installed and sustained its preferred Speaker and committee chairs without incident. There were no recorded walkouts or formal protests over leadership. However, this silence was containment rather than containment. Dissent was managed internally through party discipline, not through open contestation. APC MPs largely echoed party positions in public, and when disagreements arose, they were “handled inside,” as one MP put it. SLPP MPs voiced frustration with being “symbolically present but procedurally powerless.” Attempts to question leadership decisions were either ignored or dealt with through procedural deflection - motions ruled out of order, interventions cut short, or speaking time redistributed without notice. From a Symbolic Interactionist perspective (Blumer, 1969), this period reflects a politics of difference over disruption. The dominant party performed coherence; the opposition performed frustration - within the limits of permitted speech. The absence of walkouts or open protest was itself symbolic: the rules of the performance were tightly managed, and deviation was discouraged by informal party sanctions. The 4th Parliament’s leadership structure thus operated like a closed ritual, where legitimacy flowed from numbers and was buttressed by a culture of towing the party line. The very predictability of leadership procedures - and their immunity to disruption - became a way to reinforce dominance. Leadership in this period was theatrical: choreographed, silent, and symbolically unassailable. The 5th Parliament: Disputed Authority and the Performance of Defiance In contrast, the 5th Parliament was born in crisis. The disputed Speakership election - conducted amid a tense balance of seats between the APC and SLPP - set the stage for a Parliament defined by performative conflict. The SLPP moved swiftly to elect its nominee as Speaker while APC members boycotted the vote. This foundational rift created a symbolic divide that haunted every subsequent interaction. The APC’s walkout from the Speakership vote was more than a procedural objection - it was a ritual act of delegitimation, an attempt to mark the chamber as contested ground. According to Goffman (1959), such performative refusals to participate are powerful institutional messages. They declare, without needing procedural language, that the “scene” itself is invalid. Subsequent leadership appointments - committee heads especially - - were all contested through similar acts of symbolic protest. APC MPs refused to take part in certain votes, abstained from committee nominations, and staged further walkouts. SLPP members countered with their own performance of procedural legitimacy - insisting on voting records, constitutional references, and public declarations of compliance. These leadership struggles were performed through repeated cycles of challenge and counterchallenge. Presidential speeches at the annual state opening of parliament and budget readings by Ministers of Finance became stages for symbolic resistance, and every refusal to comply became part of the choreography. One MP remarked: “We were performing for our parties, for the public, for history.” But given MPs frequent reference to the leader of the governing party (the President of the Republic) heavy hand in selecting who gets nominated o contest