Consensual or Dominant Relationships with Parliament? A Comparison of Administrations and Ministers in Scotland

The study of administrations and ministers and their relationships with UK Parliaments has tended to focus on the issues of accountability and responsibility, levels of legislative dissent or broad performance indicators supported by anecdotal examples. This paper addresses the lack of systematic analysis of executive/legislative relations in the policy‐making process by examining the dominance of different administrations and ministers in the Scottish Parliament. Two questions are addressed. First, is there any variance in the legislative dominance of different administrations in the parliamentary arena? Second, do individual ministers make a difference to the degree of policy dominance? Controlling for both initial authorship and quality of amendments to Executive policy, we analyse the nature and extent of Executive dominance during the legislative process of the First Session of the Scottish Parliament. We find some evidence to suggest that Executive dominance varies both by administration and by individual minister.     

Supporting Accountability in the Field of Mediation

Over time, many fields of work - law, medicine, and teaching - matured from informal bodies of knowledge and skills, passed from one practitioner to another, into professions. In the process each began enumerating and affirming their intellectual and practical roots. Each also began testing practitioners to insure comprehension of relevant knowledge and an ability to demonstrate relevant skills. Family mediators in Canada have moved in this direction. In the United States, people who mediate interpersonal disputes also feel pressured to take additional steps to assure the quality of our work. This article summarizes what mediation organizations in the United States have done and could do to vouch for work in our field. But, taking additional steps calls for a clearer understanding of what a mediator should know and what they are expected to do. These two critical pieces of information remain nebulous. So, this article goes beyond describing ways of insuring accountability by also describing a recently completed job analysis, a tool frequently used in other fields of work to describe the skills and knowledge relevant to a particular job.     

The use of indigo derivatives to dye denim material.

Recently, attention was again drawn to the use of microspectrophotometry to distinguish between fibres dyed with indigo and seven derivative dyes. Under normal circumstances, fibres dyed with indigo (Vat Blue 1 or CI Number 73000) are not included in fibre-transfer examinations as, being ubiquitous, they do not usually have any evidential value. Indigo substitutes are used for fashion dyeing. If their use is widespread, the assumption that all denim material is dyed with Vat Blue 1 may need revising. A positive finding might make it necessary to reconsider the use of certain denim fabrics as capable of providing target fibres. Fibres from 160 samples of denim articles in current use were examined by microspectrophotometry to determine whether either indigo derivative dyes, or other dyes, had been used instead of the traditional indigo.     

Jurisprudential Regimes and Supreme Court Decisionmaking: The Lemon Regime and Establishment Clause Cases

In this research note, we apply the construct of jurisprudential regimes as described in our recent article in American Political Science Review to the area of Establishment Clause jurisprudence. We hypothesize that Lemon v. Kurtzman represented a jurisprudential regime in the Supreme Court's decisionmaking in this area of law. Our analysis shows that the predictors of the Court's decisions in the two periods differed in ways that are very consistent with the types of changes one would expect the hypothesized regime shift to produce.