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.     

Cognitive Dissonance in Social Work

Cognitive dissonance is a state of tension occurring when a person holds two psychologically inconsistent cognitions. For this study, 21 social workers who facilitate transracial adoption plans for Aboriginal children in British Columbia were interviewed: 1) Do social workers who facilitate transracial adoption plans for Aboriginal children experience cognitive dissonance? If so, in what ways? 2) How does cognitive dissonance impact them? 3) In what ways do social workers reconcile a sense of dissonance? Findings suggest that social workers do experience cognitive dissonance, that they are adversely impacted, and that they find ways to reconcile the cognitive dissonance.     

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.     

Which Issues do Parties Emphasise? Salience Strategies and Party Organisation in Multiparty Systems

Party system issue agendas are formed by the topics that individual parties decide to address, and these salience decisions are likely to be strategic. Two key strategies are commonly discussed in the literature: parties’ focus on (1) issues that they have ownership over and (2) issues that currently concern voters. Yet it is not known what explains the extent to which parties pursue each of these strategies. This paper argues that aspects of party organisation influence which salience strategy is pursued. Parties that have more resources will be able to ‘ride the wave’ of current concerns while parties with fewer resources are more likely to focus on their best issues. Furthermore, policy-seeking parties with strong activist influence will be less likely to ‘ride the wave’ and more likely to follow issue ownership strategies. An analysis of 105 election manifestos from 27 elections in 17 countries shows that aspects of party organisation are indeed strong and robust moderators of issue ownership strategies. Limited, albeit mixed, evidence is also found that party organisation affects the use of ‘riding the wave’ strategies. These results have important implications for our understanding of electoral campaigns, party competition and voter representation.     

Parliamentary control of CSDP: the case of the EU's fight against piracy off the Somali coast

Parliamentary involvement remains a key tool for the democratic control of executive policies. This article explores the web of parliamentary involvement in decision-making on European Union (EU) military operations, using insights gained in an in-depth case study on the EU's anti-piracy mission Atalanta. We find that parliaments at all levels became involved only after key political decisions had already been made. At the member state level, we find highly uneven involvement with only some parliaments being very well informed and closely monitoring, if not influencing government policy. The European Parliament became active only after the launch of the mission but then scrutinised it intensely, profiting (in contrast to national parliaments) from its access to top military officials and key decision-makers. Finally, transnational parliamentary assemblies as well as more informal networks provided opportunities to transmit information across the boundaries of individual parliaments and party-groups thus potentially enhancing the ability of parliamentarians to scrutinise government policies.     

When benefitting a patient increases the risk for harm for third persons — The case of treating pedophilic Parkinsonian patients with deep brain stimulation

This paper investigates the question whether it is ethically justified to treat Parkinsonian patients with known or suspected pedophilia with deep brain stimulation — given increasing evidence that this treatment might cause impulse control disorders, disinhibition, and hypersexuality. This specific question is not as exotic as it looks at a first glance. First, the same issue is raised for all other types of sexual orientation or behavior which imply a high risk for harming other persons, e.g. sexual sadism. Second, there are also several (psychotropic) drugs as well as legal and illegal leisure drugs which bear severe risks for other persons. We show that Beauchamp and Childress' biomedical ethics fails to derive a veto against medical interventions which produce risks for third persons by making the patients dangerous to others. Therefore, our case discussion reveals a blind spot of the ethics of principles. Although the first intuition might be to forbid the application of deep brain stimulation to pedophilic patients, we argue against such a simple way out, since in some patients the reduction of dopaminergic drugs allowed by deep brain stimulation of the nucleus subthalamicus improves impulsive control disorders, including hypersexuality. Therefore, we propose a strategy consisting of three steps: (1) risk assessment, (2) shared decision-making, and (3) risk management and safeguards.     

A Comparison of Transition Capacities of New EU Countries: Public Administration as a Key Influence in Democratic and Economic Change

In the network of political and public administrative actors the public administration plays a key role. Countries previously influenced by socialism or communism, that joined the European Union in the two most recent accession waves, and are now undergoing strong change, are investigated to determine whether—and to what extent—public administrations influence transition processes to more democracy and market economies. With a regression analysis it is demonstrated that a qualitatively better functioning public administration makes a positive impact on transition, its effectiveness, and sustainability. The regression analysis also offers arguments for the view that public administrations are important actors when it comes to the implementation of EU standards.     

British Intelligence and the Jewish Resistance Movement in the Palestine Mandate, 1945–46

At the end of the Second World War, British and Zionist interests came into conflict over the issue of Jewish immigration to Palestine, which raised the broader issue of what sort of National Home could exist within the British Mandate. As a result, in 1945–46, the three Jewish armed groups in the Mandate, the Haganah, Etzel and Lehi, started a loosely coordinated armed struggle against British rule. Even the moderates in the Jewish Agency rejected their former partner against Hitler, Britain, and used force against it in order to achieve their political goals. This article assesses British intelligence on these developments, and demonstrates that it failed to anticipate or even to understand the threat until the destruction of the King David Hotel. The article demonstrates that these mistakes occurred because British intelligence relied heavily on the intelligence organs of the Jewish Agency itself for intelligence about political threats within Palestine. The article assesses this intelligence failure, and its heavy costs. However, it denies that bad intelligence caused British failures in the Mandate. On the contrary, that failure stemmed from deeper problems of policy.     

School Meals and Educational Outcomes in Rural Ethiopia

We investigate the relationship between providing school meals programmes and educational outcomes in Ethiopia. Using data from school catchment areas across rural Ethiopia, the paper examines the role played by programme modalities and their implementation. The results indicate that supplementing on-site school meals with take-home rations can be beneficial for concentration, reading, writing and arithmetic skills. The timing of the distribution of school meals is also found to play an important role.