Disaster concentrates the mind wonderfully. The Shelton tragedy forced M.P.s to grapple with mental illness once more in Parliament's spring term after a long lull in which national economic troubles claimed their attention to the exclusion of almost all else. Mr. Kenneth Robinson, the Minister of Health, finally agreed ?and to be fair, without too much reluctance?to hold the Shelton inquiry in...

The aim of this chapter is to analyze the worldwide diffusion of e-parliament and the role played by the Global Centre for ICT in Parliament (GCIP), within the framework of policy transfer. There are two main reasons why it is necessary to focus on the role of GCIP in the diffusion of e-parliament: 1) The GCIP is one of the most active actors in this process; and 2) Activities undertaken by the...

Members of parliament have more effective incentives to cater for the majority’s preferences when they are elected in districts with few seats in parliament rather than in districts with many seats. We empirically investigate this hypothesis by matching voting behavior on legislative proposals of Swiss members of parliament with real referenda outcomes on the same issues for the years 1996 to 2...

In this paper we present a model where agents can choose between 1 productive and rent-seeking activities.We consider two governance institutions: 2 autocracy and parliament rule. Under autocracy rent-seeking reflects the taste 3 of the autocrat for such activities. Under parliament rule rent-seeking depends 4 on parliament voting. We show that under parliament rule the size of rent5 seeking ma...

Effective communication between voters and members of parliament is a key success factor democracy. Fortunately, modern information technology is giving a lot of new channels to take care of this communication. Traditionally, Members of Parliament have maintained static www-sites, but nowadays more dynamic and interactive forms of communication, such as blogs, Facebook and Twitter are almost a ...

2. Clause 1 of the proposed Scotland bill is widely seen to fall short of the Smith Commission’s recommendations to make the Scottish Parliament permanent in UK legislation. Instead, the commitment is to “recognise” a Scottish Parliament as a permanent part of the UK’s constitutional arrangements, without containing sufficient provisions to actually render the parliament permanent, for instance...

This paper briefly reviews the history and development of compounds, tiltrotors and hingeless rotors. Largely through a quirk of history, the compound has been neglected for over three decades. The mission performance potential of the compound is re-examined based on basic aerodynamic principles and by surveying recent NASA and Army mission design studies. A rational case can be made that the c...

During the past three months Members of Parliament have had before them several Bills dealing with matters directly or indirectly connected with mental health. News of the progress of the Mental Health Bill itself is reported elsewhere in this issue. The Legitimacy Bill, a private members' Bill, was given its second reading on 30.1.59 and was referred to a Standing Committee. The main purpose o...