What Do Voters Want From Their Local MP?

This article summarises the findings from a study of what constituents want from their local Member of Parliament. 1 We make use of a survey technique known as conjoint analysis, wherein we present a national sample of British voters with profiles of hypothetical MPs who vary randomly in their characteristics, activities and behaviour. We find that voters like MPs who are independent from the party line and who do not focus exclusively on national policy work. MPs' gender and experience matter far less to constituents. Overall, voters want a Parliament made up of strong‐minded MPs who see their role as that of a constituency representative. This has important implications for parliamentary democracy in Britain.     

Educational business cycles

Strong institutional constraints and better-informed voters may lead re-election seeking incumbents to shift the use of political business cycle mechanisms away from monetary and fiscal policy towards other policy domains that are more easily manipulable, targetable, and timeable. We investigate teacher employment patterns at the state level in Germany and find strong evidence of cycling mechanisms, in the form of electioneering and honeymooning. Against a backdrop of a continuously shrinking total teachers’ pool, German state-level incumbents accelerate the hiring of new teachers during election periods and partly reverse this during politically safer points in the electoral cycle. Cycles are mediated by issue salience: heightened attention to German public schooling after the notorious PISA-2000 tests further strengthens the manipulation of new teacher hiring for electoral purposes.     

The political economy of global tree plantation expansion: a review

This contribution analyses the recent global expansion of different types of tree plantations. A literature review collates accounts from recent academic publications and by NGOs, and is accompanied by field research and interview observations about the causal processes, central features and likely futures of contemporary tree plantation expansion. I will analyse the political and spatial causalities explaining varieties and commonalities in expansion style and pace, with elaboration on the applied and empirical significance of these findings for peasant studies. The literature on environmental and developmental impacts of tree plantation expansion is also surveyed.     

The role of debt,death and dispossession in world-ecological transformations: swidden commons and tar capitalism in nineteenth-century Finland

ABSTRACT

This article theorises about the ways in which commodity frontiers replace forest commons. New insights are offered into the role of debt, enclosures, the death of human and extra-human natures, and the role of the state in historical processes through an analysis of historical material and recent scholarship on eastern Finland's role in global capitalist expansion in the nineteenth century. The article contributes to the general study of commons and the expansion of capitalist world-ecology. We discuss how swidden commons were more sustainable than generally assumed. The article provides an original theoretical framework for studying world-ecological transformations. We argue that a study of debt, death and dispossession – which we call the three work-horses of tar capitalism – can shed new light on the expansion of commodity frontiers.     

Das System des deutschen Artenschutzrechts und die Auswirkungen der Caretta-Entscheidung des EuGH auf den Absichtsbegriff des § 43 Abs. 4 BNatSchG

Das Artenschutzrecht ist eine ausdifferenzierte, völker-, europa- und nationalrechtlich geprägte Rechtsmaterie. Ausgangspunkte einer Prüfung sind Schutzstatus der Art und die Handlung, die vorgenommen werden soll. Bei Eingriffen in besonders geschützte Arten durch Land-, Forst- oder Fischereiwirtschaft sowie durch zugelassene Eingriffe ist § 43 Abs. 4 BNatSchG eine Schlüsselnorm, die absichtliches Handeln voraussetzt. Absichtlich sind gezielte Beeinträchtigungen von Tieren und Pflanzen, nicht absichtlich sind Beeinträchtigungen, die sich als unausweichliche Konsequenz rechtmäßigen Handelns ergeben. An dieser Auslegung hat sich durch die Caretta-Entscheidung des EuGH nichts geändert.     

Constituency Demands and Limited Supplies: Comparing Personal Issue Emphases in Co‐sponsorship of Bills and Legislative Speech

Parliamentary party groups typically comprise members of parliament (MPs) with diverse preferences and different personal issue emphases. At the same time, speaking in plenary debates is a scarce resource controlled and allocated by parliamentary party group leaders. This has led recent research to investigate how speakers for plenary debates are selected. This contribution connects with this literature by asking whether MPs’ personal issue emphases deviate from their parliamentary party groups’ issue emphases. In order to answer this question, the issue emphases which individual MPs devote to a set of issues in an open access parliamentary instrument is measured and compared to the emphases MPs devote to these issues in speeches. The results for the 2005–9 legislative period of the Norwegian Storting indicate that MPs differ in how closely aligned their issue emphases are in these two instruments and that these differences vary in a way consistent with theories on candidate selection and individualized MP behaviour.     

Fear and Anger in Great Britain: Blame Assignment and Emotional Reactions to the Financial Crisis

While we know that emotional reactions are important influences on political behavior, we know far less about the sources of these emotions. This paper studies the causes of fear and anger in reaction to a negative stimulus: the financial crisis. Anger should have been experienced among individuals who believed a specific actor was to blame for the crisis. Moreover, individuals should have been particularly angry if they blamed an actor who should be accountable to them, for example the national government. I test these expectations using a panel survey run in Britain between 2005 and 2010. This data shows that British citizens experienced anger if they held an actor responsible for the crisis. Moreover, they felt particularly angry if they held the Labour government (and to a lesser extent the European Union) responsible. These findings underline the importance of studying the causes of emotional reactions and show how these may be linked to common institutional distinctions between political systems.