An electoral calculus? Dual incentives and committee assignment in the UK’s mixed-member legislatures

Although mixed-member electoral systems offer an apparent opportunity to observe how different rules shape politicians’ behaviour, ‘contamination’ between the SMD and PR-list tiers has frequently confounded academic work. Investigating Scotland and Wales’ mixed-member legislatures by exploiting their different chamber sizes and an unusual dual candidacy prohibition in Wales, modelling of committee assignments uncovers a split finding. Controlling for membership of the lead governing party, list members have a higher committee workload than their constituency colleagues, and members with previous employment experience in justice and health are more likely to be assigned to the corresponding subject committee once elected. Elsewhere, expectations that members might seek assignments that best suit theorized re-election interests are not found. The hypothesized influence of electoral rules is strongly conditioned by the small size of the legislature in Wales.     

The threat of autocracy diffusion in consolidated democracies? The case of China,Singapore and Australia

The majority of today’s authoritarian regimes have little hope of promoting autocracy beyond their own borders, let alone to consolidated democratic countries. However, China and Singapore are two prominent examples of non-democratic countries whose soft power arsenals have given them some global appeal beyond that enjoyed by most authoritarian regimes. But to what extent has China’s and Singapore’s power of example influenced consolidated democracies in terms that the latter wanting to replicate some political practices or even norms in these non-democratic regimes? In this article, we engage recent works to examine this question in relation to how Australians perceive the political example offered by China and Singapore. Focusing our analysis on several prominent polls conducted recently by the Lowy Institute for International Policy, we suggest that at present there is little evidence of a causal impact of the rise of authoritarian powerhouses such as China and Singapore on how Australians view democracy at home. Through these case studies, this article sheds some light on the theoretical as well as practical questions about the inherent impediments of authoritarian diffusion in consolidated democracies.     

Fighting Housing Discrimination in Europe

ABSTRACT

There is no exact European equivalent to the U.S. Fair Housing Act. The member states of the European Union (EU) have transposed into law the EU Racial Equality Directive of 2000 that prohibits discrimination in, among other things, access to the supply of goods and services, including housing, on the basis of race. Most housing discrimination case law so far comes from nonbinding decisions of the European Court of Human Rights and European Committee of Social Rights under the revised European Social Charter of the Council of Europe. This article explains how the European context of discrimination and segregation differs from the American, reviews the major legal conventions establishing equal rights in housing, protected classes, and key precedents. It discusses how mixing policies in social housing are the primary mechanism to reduce residential segregation in Europe. The special case of extreme discrimination against the Roma is presented, before concluding with some comparative observations.