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Approximately one-third of parliamentary democracies are or are typically ruled by a minority government - a situation where the party or parties represented at cabinet do not between them hold a majority of seats in the national legislature. Minority governments are particularly interesting in parliamentary systems, where the government is politically responsible to parliament, can be removed by it, and needs (majority) support in the parliament to legislate. The chapters in this volume explore and analyse the formation, functioning, and performance of minority governments, what we term the why, how, and how well. The volume begins with overviews of the concept of and puzzles surrounding mi...
This book makes the most comprehensive study of legislative debates thus far, looking at the politics of legislative debates in 33 liberal democracies in Europe, North America and Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. -- Résumé de l'éditeur.
"How can democracies effectively represent citizens? The goal of this Handbook is to evaluate comprehensively how well the interests and preferences of mass publics become represented by institutions in liberal democracies. It first explores how the idea and institutions of liberal democracies were formed over centuries and became enshrined in Western political systems. The contributors to this Handbook, made up of the world's leading scholars on the various aspects of political representation, examine how well the political elites and parties who are charged with the representation of the public interest meet their duties. Clearly, institutions often fail to live up to their own representat...
Key party goals serve to advance a policy brand and maximize seats in the legislature. This book offers a theory of how political parties assign their elected members -- their "personnel" -- to specialized legislative committees to serve collective organizational goals, here known as "party personnel strategies". Individual party members vary in their personal attributes, such as prior occupation, gender, and local experience. Parties seek to harness the attributes of their members by assigning them to committees where their expertise is relevant, and where they may enhance the party's policy brand. However, under some electoral systems, parties may need to trade-off the harnessing of expert...
This volume explores the role of national legislatures in shaping government formation in parliamentary regimes.
Decades of campaigns and policy efforts have brought significant progress in women's economic and political status and pushed gender equality up the global policy agenda. The goal of gender equality, however, still remains largely out of reach, as illustrated by the recent wave of women's protests against sexual harassment, assault and gender violence (e.g. #MeToo movement). Some European countries (e.g. Poland, Hungary and Lithuania) have even seen their performance on gender equality backslide in recent years, and in parallel to calls for increased equality, a wave of mobilisation against gender equality has appeared in the public discourse. Conservative, authoritarian and populist voices ...
This is an open access title available under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). It is free to read at Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and select open access locations. During the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, social policy was one of the most important strategies used by governments to help mitigate the crisis. European Social Policy and the COVID-19 Pandemic: Challenges to National Welfare and EU Policy provides an encompassing and longer-term analysis of the social policy responses of European countries, as well as the European Union (EU), to the challenges of the pan...
Northern Ireland’s power- sharing Assembly is understudied in the legislative studies literature. Having been suspended (or de facto suspended) for around 40% of its existence, conversation has tended to focus more on the wider political problems in which the Assembly has been enmeshed and less on its day-to-day functions as a legislature. This book is the first to examine how the Assembly fulfils the four core functions of a legislature: representation, linkage, scrutiny, and policy- making. Using Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs) as the primary unit of analysis, the book explores: who and how MLAs represent; their approach to cultivating links with constituents; their use of par...