Lobbying and uncertainty: Lobbying's varying response to different political events

Does political uncertainty affect whether lobbyists contact government officials? We suggest that the answer depends on the type of uncertainty introduced. Distinguishing between policy objective uncertainty—where organized interests and lobbyists are uncertain about the policy intentions of decision makers—and issue information uncertainty—where policymakers are uncertain about the technical details of issues—we hypothesize that whereas an increase in policy objective uncertainty leads to a decrease in lobbying, a rise in issue information uncertainty leads to more lobbying. We test the hypotheses with longitudinal data from the Canadian Lobbyists Registry measuring change in the number of times lobbyists have contacted government ministries each month from 2008 to 2018. The results suggest that lobbying intensity does respond differently to these types of uncertainty. Whereas events introducing issue information uncertainty have a statistically significant positive relationship with lobbying, events introducing policy objective uncertainty do not.     

Reimagining Gender Through Equality Law: What Legal Thoughtways Do Religion and Disability Offer?

Feminist Legal Studies - British equality law protections for sex and gender reassignment have grown fraught as activists tussle over legal and social categories of gender, gender transitioning,...     

Making Health Work for Peace in Humanitarian Situations

From the time of Florence Nightingale, humanitarian health and aid workers have dedicated themselves to the welfare of patients outside of their own communities, nobly sacrificing their own safety, economic well being, mental health, and sometimes even life. They witness and deal with the human consequences of violent conflict and care for those that are directly affected by it. Dedicated humanitarian professionals such as Albert Schweitzer, Henri Dunant, founder of the Red Cross, and James Orbinski, representing Médecins sans Frontières (MSF), all accepted Nobel Peace Prizes for such work.

The primary mission during natural and “human-made” disasters may be to assist persons in need, to shine a ray of hope, and to create humanitarian space, but health professionals in particular, are also potentially in influential positions to promote peace. With their direct involvement in healing they have a certain credibility with the global community, which can contribute to their influence as advocates for peace, whether through raising awareness of relevant issues with the general public or specific interest groups, or by influencing decision makers directly.     

Dominant party cohesion in comparative perspective: evidence from South Africa and Namibia

Africa's proliferation of dominant-party regimes is often regarded as an obstacle to democratization. Scholars and practitioners therefore face the task of understanding how and why constitutionally legitimate challenges to dominant party rule occur. This article asks: why do some presidential succession crises act as a catalyst to dominant party fragmentation when others do not? It argues that minority factions are more likely to defect from a dominant party when they have (1) been marginalized by the majority faction and (2) confidence in their mobilizational capacity. Factional purging is in turn traced to autocratic leadership and party under-bureaucratization, whilst high levels of factional self-confidence are linked to crises of dominance and the weakness of extant opposition parties.     

Democracy and corruption: a complex relationship

We argue that an ‘electoral democracy’ is not sufficient to reduce corruption. Our contention is that the institutions associated with mature democracy are crucial to successfully deterring corrupt behaviour. At the core of our argument is the idea that with well-functioning institutions, the probability of detection and punishment is sufficiently high to deter most decision makers from choosing to act corruptly. The empirical evidence we present supports this idea. The nonlinearity of democracy variables is tested to confirm that an advanced stage of democracy is crucial for combating corruption.