Parties, rules and government legislative control in Central Europe: The case of Poland

A distinguishing feature of Central European polities is a strong policy-shaping role of parliaments. This article demonstrates how party political and procedural factors set the scene for the executive's loss of legislative control in Poland. Parties undermine the governmental grip because of their limited internal cohesion and competitive coalitional strategies. Parliamentary rules reinforce such party effects. The executive can shield its bills from amendments by relying mainly on partisan controls, not formal privileges. But, as an analysis of over 300 bills shows, when party discipline and coalition cooperation are in short supply, partisan controls are ineffective as instruments of legislative control.     

Genetic data on 10 STR loci a population of western Poland

Allele frequencies for 10 STRs included in the AmpFlSTR SGM Plus kit were determined in a population sample of 668 unrelated individuals living in western Poland. All loci met Hardy-Weinberg expectations. Exact tests disequilibrium analysis revealed two departures from independence out of 45 pairwise comparisons. The combined matching probability (MP) and power of exclusion (PE) for all 15 loci are 2.56 x 10(-13) and 0.99996, respectively.     

Improving public services by mining citizen feedback: An application of natural language processing

Research on user satisfaction has increased substantially in recent years. To date, most studies have tested the significance of predefined factors thought to influence user satisfaction, with no scalable means of verifying the validity of their assumptions. Digital technology has created new methods of collecting user feedback where service users post comments. As topic models can analyse large volumes of feedback, they have been proposed as a feasible approach to aggregating user opinions. This novel approach has been applied to process reviews of primary care practices in England. Findings from an analysis of more than 200,000 reviews show that the quality of interactions with staff and bureaucratic exigencies are the key drivers of user satisfaction. In addition, patient satisfaction is strongly influenced by factors that are not measured by state-of-the-art patient surveys. These results highlight the potential benefits of text mining and machine learning for public administration.     

Plurality support for democratic decay: the 2019 Polish parliamentary election

Abstract

The 2019 parliamentary election in Poland resulted in continuity of the incumbent PiS party-coalition. The election saw, for Poland, an unprecedented turnout of 62%. The 44% support for PiS translated into a 51% majority in the Lower House. The ability of the three opposition blocs (KO, SLD and PSL) to coordinate their political campaign for the upper chamber resulted in their victory – PiS lost the majority in the Senate. This post-2019 period thus starts as parliamentary cohabitation. The preceding four years had witnessed repeated violations of the constitution by the government (including attempts to dismantle the separation of powers and to turn public media into a partisan propaganda machine) accompanied by a general anti-liberal and anti-European stance. The electorates of the two major party-blocks have polarized in terms of their socio-demographic features. The new government does not differ much from the pre-election one, with the same PM and most ministers. The first weeks of its governing indicate that the government’s general as well as sectoral policies will be continued, including the controversial, illiberal ones. Finally, the election though free, was unfair, if for no other reason than the simple one of the partisan nature of the public media.     

Procedural Change in the UK House of Commons, 1811–2015

Recent research has shown an increasing interest in the historical evolution of legislative institutions. The development of the UK Parliament has received particularly extensive attention. In this article, we contribute to this literature in three important ways. First, we introduce a complete, machine-readable data set of all the Standing Orders of the UK House of Commons between 1811 and 2015. Second, we demonstrate how this data set can be used to construct innovative measures of procedural change. Third, we illustrate a potential empirical application of the data set, offering an exploratory test of several expectations drawn from recent theories of formal rule change in parliamentary democracies. We conclude that the new data set has the potential to substantially advance our understanding of legislative reforms in the United Kingdom and beyond.     

Coalition Government and Committee Power

Recent research suggests that committees in parliamentary democracies may, at least partly, be endogenous to the prevalence of coalition government. In this article, I examine the conditions under which parliamentary majorities reform legislative rules to expand or reduce committee power. I expect that, ceteris paribus, the greater the conflict inside the governing coalition, the higher the probability that parties in government will adopt reforms expanding committee power and the lower the chance that they will implement changes reducing such power. These expectations are tested using original new data on the reforms of committee agenda powers undertaken in eight European states within 20 years from democratic transition. I find some evidence to support the endogeneity of committee power to the ideological heterogeneity of parliamentary government.