On Her Majesty's Commercial Service: Bribery,Public Officials and the UK Intelligence Services

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Does the number of parties to place affect the placement of parties? Results from an expert survey experiment

Expert surveys are frequently used in comparative politics to measure the ideological locations of political parties. However, it is possible that increasing the number of parties to place systematically biases results as experts try to fit more actors onto a common space. We test this possibility with an experiment embedded in an “expert” survey – with graduate students serving as our pool of experts to ensure an adequate sample size – by varying the number of parties to be placed in the United Kingdom and Germany. We find some tendency for the variance of Labor and SPD placements to diminish when more parties are present, and for SPD placements to move toward the center given more parties. However, we find no consistent evidence that the number of parties systematically affects mean or median party placements. Our results support the reliability of expert surveys as an indicator of party ideology.     

The use of filtered light for the evaluation of writing inks analyzed using thin layer chromatography

Thin layer chromatography (TLC) is a scientific methodology that can be used to compare and characterize ink formulations. Occasionally, when evaluating chromatographic profiles on a TLC plate with ambient light, different ink formulations, or the same inks from different batches, may appear indistinguishable. The use of filtered light can be very effective to illuminate characteristics that are not readily apparent with ambient light. There are a diverse number of components commonly found in writing inks, and it may be that some of them respond to particular wavelengths of energy that are not visible to the unaided eye (i.e., colorless). There has been very little information published that addresses the use of filtered light for evaluating TLC plates. Twenty-nine ballpoint writing ink samples were selected for TLC analysis. Further evaluation using an alternate light source, coupled with the appropriate filter, proved to be an effective means for definitive discrimination in some cases.     

Reserves, quotas and the demand for international liquidity

The foreign exchange reserves held by emerging market economies rose significantly in the last decade. This increase has been attributed to a desire by these countries to self-insure themselves against financial shocks. The rise in reserves may also reflect their concerns about the size of their IMF quotas, which set limits on the amount of credit that countries could draw from the IMF, and the conditionality associated with borrowing from the IMF. We offer a model of the choice by central banks between quotas and reserves to demonstrate that emerging markets will choose to hold relatively more reserves than advanced economies. We then investigate the impact of IMF quotas on reserve holdings for a panel of countries during the period of 1980?C2006. In addition to finding evidence of precautionary and mercantilist motives for holding reserves in emerging markets, we also find that reserves in these countries have been inversely related to their IMF quotas.     

Conflict and gender: the implications of the Burundian conflict on HIV/AIDS risks

Sexual and gender-based violence in many conflict and post-conflict contexts are creating vulnerabilities to HIV. The paper is based on research conducted in Burundi in 2007–2008.The country experienced long-term civil war from the early 1990s until recently and has been the locus of post-conflict disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration programmes, providing a coherent and focused study. The research finds that the relationship between conflict and HIV/AIDS is a function of pre-existing gender relations that also regulate sexual life and determine critical female vulnerabilities. When put under stress by armed conflict, these vulnerabilities become amplified, creating conditions for the increased spread of HIV. Analysis of how gender relations and vulnerabilities change according to the specific social and economic circumstances generated by military mobilisation, organisation and deployment, in relation to civilian displacement and insecurity, in a range of distinct circumstances, provides a framework for understanding HIV vulnerabilities during and after the conflict.