Covid-19 and UK Universities

Universities UK (UUK) has suggested that there may be very significant losses to higher education as a consequence of Covid-19. However, losses are likely to be substantially lower than the potential losses estimated by UUK. But the magnitude of losses is very uncertain. The UUK’s proposal to restrict undergraduate enrolment per university to stop institutions poaching students is not in the interests of the most highly regarded universities, or that of students. Some rationalisation of the sector should be the price of further government support. Now is also the time to reconsider how university research is funded.     

Single-party government,Prime Minister psychology,and the diversionary use of force: theory and evidence from the British case

ABSTRACT

This paper develops expectations about the likelihood of diversionary conflict initiation by parliamentary democracies with single-party majoritarian (SPM) governments. While most of the literature on diversion and governmental arrangement claims that SPMs have little incentive and/or limited capacity to execute diversionary gambits, we contend that the structural and environmental impetuses for diversion in such states are in fact largely indeterminate. We posit that the psychological attributes of prime ministers under SPM – in particular, their level of distrust – is the most important predictor of how they view structural and environmental constraints, and thus of whether they will militarily divert from poor economic conditions. Distrustful prime ministers are predisposed to the use of force, will dwell on the costs of economic problems, and fear that co-partisan MPs (especially in the cabinet) have designs on their office. Thus, despite having a legislative majority, these leaders will choose diversionary conflict over economic policy fixes. We conduct a partial test of this hypothesis in the British case from 1945 to 2007, and our analyses provide robust support.     

Measuring the “personal vote” of members of Congress

This paper uses a pooled time series/cross sectional research design to measure the “personal vote” of three groups of members of Congress. The personal vote is defined here as that part of a candidate's vote share that is unique to him or her. It is measured using a legislator-specific intercept for each legislator in an equation predicting vote share. The other variables in the equation account for the effects of the election year environment and the tenure of the representative. Three cohorts of representatives are analyzed: 1) those whose careers ended before 1966, 2) those whose careers began after 1965, and 3) those whose careers began before 1966 but ended after. The mean legislator-specific intercept is nearly twice as large for the first group as for the second; it is 29 percentage points larger for the first than the third. A second stage regression explains these intercepts using legislator characteristics, party affiliation, region of origin, and number of terms served. The term effects increase at an increasing rate as tenure increases for all those whose careers end after 1966. Personal vote accumulates nearly twice as fast for those first elected after 1965 as for those first elected before 1966.     

The Advantages of Pure Forms of Parliamentary Democracy over Mixed Forms

It is often said that parliament shouldrepresent the opinions found in thepopulation and that government should beheld accountable for its political program.It is shown that these two goals rely ontwo different basic models of democracywhich are not fully compatible with eachother: the model of a pure representativedemocracy and the model of a pure two partycompetition. Unaccountable governments,voter alienation, strategic voting, andgovernmental instability are shown to beconsequences of this institutional mix.These problems may be avoided with reformsin the direction of one or the other basicmodel.