The Debate on Annual Parliaments in the Early Seventeenth Century

SUMMARY

In this article Pauline Croft examines the change in English feelings about the survival of their parliaments on the accession of the Stuarts. In the last parliament of Elizabeth, confidence was expressed in the vitality and usefulness of the institution. From the first parliament of James VI and I in 1604 there was a collapse of confidence. The future of Parliaments was seen as being at risk in the changed political atmosphere in England and against the background of the observed decline of representative assemblies on the Continent. The article traces the development of references to the statutes of Edward III which prescribed annual sessions of parliament. These are referred to in the House of Commons in 1610, and this was the beginning of a continuing campaign for a statutory assurance of regular parliamentary sessions. This reached its climax in the Short Parliament of 1640, where there was a petitioning campaign calling for guarantees, probably encouraged by developments in the Scots' parliament after 1638. The campaign came to a succesful conclusion in the passing of the Triennial Act of 1641, the first major legislative achievement of the Long Parliament.     

Die parlamentarische Vertretung von ethnischen Minderheiten und das österreichische Verfassungsrecht

SUMMARY

The representation of ethnic minorities has remained an issue in the parliament of the Austrian Republic at the end of the twentieth century, just as it had been in that half of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy a century earlier. However, in modern Austria theoretical discussions of the problem have not yet led to any attempt at a practical solution. Whereas the Dual Monarchy's system was based on the majority principle, so that the size of constituencies could be ‘gerrymandered’ to secure more seats for ethnic minorities, the republics since 1918 have been committed to proportional representation. The much smaller ethnic minorities in the twentieth century gave rise to little interest in their representation until after 1955, when the state undertook new obligations under international law, albeit in rather general terms committing it to ‘equal elections’ and ‘the rights of minorities’. The federal constitutional court had to consider these matters once the Slovenian minority in Carinthia brought a case in 1979 complaining of their non-representation in the provincial parliament. The court would not accept the argument that formal equality of votes did not lead to equality of representation. None of the subsequent proposals to alter the legal or constitutional framework so as to meet the demands of minorities in Carinthia or elsewhere in the Republic overcame the problems of misuse by those for whom the measures were not intended or the changing nature of minority groupings. Heinz Tichy concludes his review by arguing that present Austrian constitutional law guarantees equal rights for individuals, not collective groups, and merely allows for, but does not require, modifications to the electoral laws to secure representation for ethnic minorities. He warns that a special parliamentary mandate for relatively small national minorities might create more problems than it solved, and suggests instead following the Danish model of using lobbyists to represent minority interests.     

Entitlement failure and deprivation: a critique of Sen's famine philosophy 1

This paper insinuates the conceptual foundation of Sen's entitlement approach by pinpointing its major weaknesses. First, Sen's critique of FAD is inadequate because speculative, not actual, supply and demand forces determine short-run commodity prices. Second, Sen's idea of ‘exchange entitlement’ is inconsistent with the principles of capitalism, since this economic system operates on the conceptual and legal framework of voluntary exchange. Third, if food is considered as an entitled commodity, other basic necessities of life, such as healthcare, education etc. could claim the same status. Finally, the approach is founded on a hidden hypothesis that income distributions in non-communist states are economically and politically optimal.     

Culture,Contiguity and Conflict: On the Measurement of Ethnolinguistic Effects in Spatial Spillovers

Research on ethnolinguistic heterogeneity has so far mostly focused on domestic measures, while little attention has been paid to ethnolinguistic relations between nations. In this paper, I propose a way of measuring ethnolinguistic affinity between nations. This index measures the degree of similarity two randomly drawn individuals from two different populations are expected to display. I show that this measure has several attractive theoretical characteristics, which make it particularly useful. Subsequently, I construct the measure for all countries in Africa and use it to show that civil conflict in Africa is likely to spill over between contiguous ethnolinguistically similar countries.     

Natural Disasters,Human Development and Poverty at the Municipal Level in Mexico

This article analyses the effects of natural disasters on human development and poverty levels at the municipal level in Mexico. Using several sources, we build a panel of data in order to uncover if different natural shocks can affect social indicators. After controlling for geographic and natural characteristics which can make municipalities more hazard prone, as well as for other institutional, socio-economic and demographic pre-shock characteristics, in addition to using fixed effects, we find that general shocks, especially from floods and droughts, lead to significant drops in both types of indicator.     

Reinventing urban government in the Netherlands: an American perspective

National agricultural policies intended to stabilize farm price and income may have different impacts on different agricultural sector of a state or a region. A policy which influences a region's agriculture also may affect the general economy of that region, depending on the degree to which agriculture is linked to the general economy. This study evaluates the economywide impact of the Flexible Planting Program (FPP) -- a recent policy designed to encourage farmers to respond more to market than to the government incentives. The study employs an integrated modeling framework which links the national and state farm sectors to the region's non-farm sectors. Because of reductions in real U.S. market prices and, in turn, Tennessee market prices of some farm commodities under FPP, production of most agricultural outputs are expected to decline in Tennessee by 1995. Study results indicate that as a result of price reductions, the agricultural sector will lose about 15 percent of output, income, and employment. These losses cause significant negative impacts on the business-related service sector. The service sector suffers a loss of 31 million dollars in total output and 523 jobs. The total income lost by the service sector (18 million dollars) will be much higher than agriculture sector (11.99 million dollars). Thus, though the FPP may deliver its intended good at the national level, the policy has the potential to cause undesirable impacts on certain regions.     

Forging the agenda: the 1819 select committee on the criminal laws revisited

This article revisits a crucial episode in the early nineteenth century criminal law reform debate: the appointment and report of the 1819 House of Commons select committee on capital punishment. This committee, which helped shape the reforms of the 1820s and 1830s, has traditionally been interpreted as the result of the campaign for penal reform in parliament over the preceding decade. This article argues that its origins and significance can only be understood by reference to the political circumstances of 1819 and the scandal surrounding the crime of forgery. This contextualized reading suggests new ways of approaching and understanding the early nineteenth century penal reform discourse.     

Hadrian's Perpetual Edict: Ancient Sources and Modern Ideals in the Making of a Historical Tradition

This article examines the historical afterlife of the Perpetual Edict commissioned by the Roman emperor Hadrian during the second century AD. Accounts of the institution by Roman jurists and historians are inconsistent, which has led legal historians to adopt positions of remarkable variation. The relationship between historical sources and interpretations demonstrates that from the sixteenth century onwards contemporary legal ideas of codification of law were transposed into the history of the Perpetual Edict. In particular, the use of the model of a modern systematic codification is explained as an expression of phantom modernity, the tendency of scholars to modernise the classical world as a continuation of the long-established glorification of the Antonine Roman empire.     

Suppressing Vote-Buying: the ‘War’ on Electoral Bribery from 1868

Electoral bribery is an ancient phenomenon, but its manifestations and pathologies can only be understood in the context of particular electoral norms and political practices. The spark for electoral bribery in the Westminster tradition was the shift from parliamentary service as a duty to a privilege, whilst its paradigm forms of treating and crude vote-buying are traceable to a shift from buying a seat to buying the voters. The gradual move from cultural acceptance to legislative and ethical condemnation of electoral bribery is attributable to a concern with the rising cost of elections and developing notions of fair electoral competition. This article focuses on the seminal period in the ‘war’ on electoral bribery from 1868 to the early twentieth century, giving a taxonomy of the various forms of bribery and judicial responses to them, as well as an explanation of the role played by statutory developments. The ultimate success of this war on corruption is shown to lie in a confluence of politico-legal techniques – election courts, tighter legislation, the secret ballot and the mass franchise – and institutional developments, in particular the rise of centralised, professional parties.