Shadowing the elected: mixed-member incentives to locally oriented parliamentary questioning

It is often suggested in the case of mixed-member electoral systems that legislators with close ties to the single member districts (SMDs) are more constituency oriented than those with weaker ties. This article investigates the effect of three career-related variables (mandate type, tier of candidacy and the number of formerly held SMD mandates) on the constituency orientation of national representatives. The analysis relies on a comprehensive database containing MP-level career information and the number of locally relevant written questions submitted between 2010 and 2013 in the Hungarian parliament. Contrary to expectations, the results suggest that SMD candidates who were elected on party lists tend to ask a larger number of questions with local relevance than SMD MPs. Furthermore, MPs with considerable SMD experience are found to be more constituency oriented only among those who gained their mandates in an SMD.     

Non est factum and stare decisis

Corresponding to the recent shifts on the significance of skills development in higher education, a peer mentoring scheme for international students by international students was integrated into the academic curriculum at Newcastle Law School. The aim of the scheme is to facilitate the development of skills and values of the appointed mentors that translate into the workplace and into life. This empirical article discusses, first, the place of skills today in institutions worldwide, and their influence in the globalised world of work and in the life of the graduates; second, the analysis of the relevant skills developed by mentors in their role as a mentor in the peer mentoring scheme; and third, how they transfer to the workplace.     

A Discourse Called China and the PRC’s Foreign Policy and Diplomacy

On the basis of the premise that China, besides being a powerful civilization and state, is also a powerful discourse, this essay will set forth, as a preliminary analytical step, a plausible definition of the ‘Chinese mind’ by describing certain essential characteristics that have been forged in China’s classical culture and thought. When placed in the more creative sphere of discourse construction, these essential characteristics become ideological compounds of the here theorized ‘discourse called China’, whose impact is weighed up as the focal analytical point in the discursive space of the PRC’s foreign policy and diplomacy.     

Job Satisfaction among Primary School Personnel in Madagascar

This article analyses the job satisfaction of primary school teachers in Madagascar. Based on the estimation of multilevel models, low wages and problems getting paid, job insecurity, lack of in-service training, high pupil-teacher ratios, and lack of basic infrastructure and teaching materials are identified as the main reasons for dissatisfaction. Principals’ control of teachers’ activities also adversely affects satisfaction, suggesting that, in Malagasy schools, neither school directors nor teachers have succeeded in adopting organisational cultures based on cooperation among their members. These results are likely to stimulate debates on educational policy, both in Madagascar and in many other developing countries.     

Government termination in multilevel settings. How party congruence affects the survival of sub-national governments in Germany and Spain

ABSTRACT

Past studies on government survival in parliamentary democracies have been limited to national governments. However, most societies live in a multilevel polity where different policies are decided at distinct governmental layers. So far, the conditions triggering sub-national governments’ termination have remained unexplored. Our paper makes a twofold contribution to the literature. First, we explicitly focus our analysis on the sub-national government level. Second, we expand the analytical scope by assuming a multilevel setting, in which the survival of sub-national governments is dependent on both the party composition of the national government (vertical congruence) and their sub-national peers (horizontal congruence). We test the impact of both congruence measures on the early termination risk of regional governments. Our analysis is complemented by including “traditional” factors from national government termination literature, such as structural attributes of governments and their bargaining environment, into empirical modelling. Analysing a novel dataset on 494 regional governments in Germany and Spain we find that the risk of sub-national government termination is related to varying levels of vertical congruence. Furthermore, we find interesting explanatory variation between the two countries with regard to the effect size of economic performance, regional authority and congruence.