Doing Politics: Collaborative Research and the Members of Parliament Project

This article gives an account of the `Members of Parliament Project' based at Nottingham Trent and Sheffield universities, which reveals something of the team's working practices and intellectual strategy and concludes with reflections on the benefits and costs of collaboration. It also covers the research undertaken: the creation of a database on Conservative Parliamentarians in order to undertake research on a range of socio-economic, ideological and political variables; the use of cohort analysis to study the socio-economic profile of the Conservative elite; the development of a typology of British Conservatism; and the use of attitude surveys to empirically investigate a novel `ideological mapping' technique.     

The 2015 Regional Election in Italy: Fragmentation and Crisis of Subnational Representative Democracy

In May 2015, voters in seven Italian regions went to the polls to elect new regional councils and governments. The final election result was apparently similar to that of 2010: centre-left coalitions won in five out of seven regions, as in the previous election, leaving the remaining two to the centre-right. Yet behind this picture of stability, dramatic changes have occurred in the internal composition of regional coalitions, cross-party equilibriums and levels of participation. Generally, regional party-based democracy seems to be experiencing increasing fragmentation and a crisis of representation and legitimacy.     

Administrative Discretion and Active Representation: An Expansion of the Theory of Representative Bureaucracy

Recent studies of the theory of representative bureaucracy have focused on active representation, whereby administrators in public organizations work to advance the interests of particular groups, achieving policy outcomes that directly address the needs of those groups. The concept of administrative discretion is central to these studies, as an administrator must have the discretion to produce results that reflect the values and beliefs of these groups. While the presence of discretion is often implied in these studies, few have examined it explicitly. Using data from the Farmer's Home Administration, we explore whether administrators who perceive themselves as having more discretion enact policy outcomes that are more representative of minority interests. The results strongly support the conclusion that administrators who perceive themselves as possessing significant discretion and who assume the role of minority representative in their agencies are more likely to enact policy outcomes that favor minority interests.     

Class Power and Participatory Equality: Attitudes towards Economic Democracy in Denmark and Sweden*

Proposals for capital sharing (i.e. the spreading of ownership rights to productive assets), also known as 'economic democracy', have been advanced by the trade unions in both Denmark and Sweden. In view of their redistributive intent, these schemes have met surprisingly little enthusiastic response in traditional labor constituencies. The article makes an attempt to explain why . An examination of wage earner attitudes (which goes into greater detail for Denmark) shows that the presently entertained proposals appeal in a cross-cutting manner to conflictual notions of class power and participatory opportunity. The result is a fragmentation of wage earner support.     

From Majoritarian Democracy to Vertical Separation of Powers: Sweden and the European Union

The key problem in constitutional politics in the established democracies may be said to pertain to finding the right balance between majoritarian democracy, constitutionalism and effective decision making. From that perspective this essay examines the Swedish polity before and after the accession to the European Union in 1995. From 1917 onwards majoritarian democracy and parliamentarism were the praxis of the Swedish polity. But this mode of goverment was not written into the 1809 Instrument of Government, which was characterised by the separation of powers between the king and the parliament. It was first in the new Instrument of Government, adopted in 1973–74, that the praxis of majoritarian democracy and parliamentarism was codified. But in the 1990s a new form of dualism was introduced into the Swedish polity as a result of the country's accession to the European Union. On the one hand, there is an Instrument of Government characterised by the principle of majoritarian democratic rule. On the other, accession to the EU involves a vertical separation of powers on a major scale. Two conflicting fundamental elements, majoritarian democracy and vertical separation of powers, are currently incorporated in the Swedish polity.