and Background: This is the penultimate empirical chapter of my dissertation (indeed, it is still structured as a chapter rather than a standalone paper). The dissertation itself investigates what factors lead Members of Parliament to toe the party line or to dissent. In the aggregate, this amounts to asking what factors foster or undermine party cohesion. Previous chapters demonstrated that a ...

Aims: To explore how policy actors attempted to deliberately frame public debate around alcohol minimum unit pricing (MUP) in the UK by comparing and contrasting their constructions of the policy in public (newspapers), semi-public (evidence submissions) and private (interviews). Methods: Content analysis was conducted on articles published in ten national newspapers between 1 January 2005 and ...

In this paper we apply the information state update (ISU) machinery to tracking and understanding the argumentative behaviour of participants in a parliamentary debate in order to predict its outcome. We propose to use the ISU approach to model the arguments of the debaters and the support/attack links between them as part of the formal representations of a participant’s information state. We f...

look for the political in the wrong place, on the wrong floors and on the wrong pages of the newspapers. Those decision-making areas which had been protected by the political in industrial capitalism – the private sector, business, science, towns, everyday life and so on – are caught in the storms of political conflicts in reflexive modernity. (Beck 1994:18) We have been brought up with a clear...

All electoral systems have an electoral formula that converts proportions of votes into Parliamentary seats.Pre-electoral polls usually focus on estimating proportions of votes and then apply the electoral formula to give a forecast of Parliamentary composition. We describe the problems that arise from this approach: there will typically be a bias in the forecast. We study the origin of the bia...

Party discipline is known to be di¤erent in Parliamentary and in Presidential democracies. Yet, the theoretical literature is silent about why parties adopt such di¤erent structures. We propose a setup where parties are brands. They strategically choose both their ideological position and their internal discipline. The latter introduces a trade-o¤ between the informativeness of the party label ...

This issue of Library Trends explores parliamentary libraries in different parts of the world in the past and present and also offers some thoughts about their future. We are grateful for having been given this opportunity to publish the papers presented at the World Library and Information Congress: 75th IFLA General Conference and Assembly, Milan, August 2009. The papers were presented in a j...

Parliamentary procedure of the sort codified in Robert’s Rules of Order is a widely used system of rules for group decision making. Unfortunately, in many settings where parliamentary procedure is used, unfamiliarity with the rules inhibits participation, working against the aim of giving due consideration to each member’s opinion. Unwitting deviation from the rules can impinge on fundamental r...

Using a quasi-natural voting experiment encompassing a 160-year period (1848-2009) in Switzerland, we investigate whether a higher level of complexity leads to increased reliance on trusted parliamentary representatives. We find that when more referenda are held on the same day, constituents are more likely to refer to parliamentary recommendations when making their decisions. This finding hold...