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.     

Explaining Reforms of Parliamentary Minority Rights: A Theoretical Framework with Case Study Application

How can we explain institutional reforms that redistribute institutional power between the parliamentary majority and minority? This paper proposes an informal theoretical model to explain such reforms in European parliaments based on congressional literature and inductive explanations from case studies. The article argues that political parties as the relevant actors pursue institutional reforms based on their substantive goals, their current and expected future government status, transaction and audience costs of reforms, second-order institutions that regulate the relative influence of actors in changing parliamentary rules, and the institutional status quo. Hypotheses derived from this model are tested with a qualitative case study of all standing order reforms in the Austrian parliament from 1945 to 2014. The empirical analysis finds support for various hypotheses and their underlying causal mechanisms. As Austria constitutes a least-likely case, the evidence provides strong support for the theoretical model.     

The distribution of individual cabinet positions in coalition governments: A sequential approach

Multiparty government in parliamentary democracies entails bargaining over the payoffs of government participation, in particular the allocation of cabinet positions. While most of the literature deals with the numerical distribution of cabinet seats among government parties, this article explores the distribution of individual portfolios. It argues that coalition negotiations are sequential choice processes that begin with the allocation of those portfolios most important to the bargaining parties. This induces conditionality in the bargaining process as choices of individual cabinet positions are not independent of each other. Linking this sequential logic with party preferences for individual cabinet positions, the authors of the article study the allocation of individual portfolios for 146 coalition governments in Western and Central Eastern Europe. The results suggest that a sequential logic in the bargaining process results in better predictions than assuming mutual independence in the distribution of individual portfolios.     

The rules of the road, a universal visual semiotics

The rules of the road form part an international willingness to simplify the understanding of road regulations worldwide. There is still an attempt to harmonise all regulations, but some countries are reluctant to do so as they fear a loss of their domestic sovereignty. Indeed, with the increase in car use for private or professional reasons, accidents have become one the central issue in international politics; and one way to curb accidents is said to have a universal visual road semiotics. However as this cultural discernment of road signs in civil society (i.e. visual encoding) has become popular, many other forms of use have derived from it for other purposes than road regulations.