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How and when is indigenous political representation institutionalised? This paper contends that such institutionalization occurs when there is philosophical agreement of the need to do so across actors. It develops Discursive Institutionalization in concert with the Narrative Policy Framework to demonstrate DI’s philosophical contestations as structuring both the deployment of NPF’s policy narrative strategies and their effectiveness. Comparing the indigenous representation proposals of Australia’s Voice to Parliament and Singapore’s Group Representation Constituencies, the article illustrates how they are relied upon by actors in “compound” and “simple” polities to obfuscate and convey, respectively, the policy narratives that act upon prospects for greater representation. Drawing on parliamentary Hansard records, public statements by policymakers, and cabinet papers, it addresses the narrative construction affecting the real-world policy problem of indigenous and minority representation. It concludes that examining national narratives and the coterminous macro-level paradigms using the NPF and relating it to DI as an “institutionalism” explaining change offers a compelling explanation for policy stasis/advancements in representation policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dominant way of thinking about the rule of law is that it is a constraint, a limit, on government. On this view the limitation applies with full force to all forms of government, democratic and undemocratic, and to both the executive and the legislative branches. The privileged institution for enforcing those limits is the courts. Democracy and the rule of law are, in effect, portrayed as though they were in opposition to one another. That, I claim, is a mistake (a) historically (for, in the Anglo-American tradition, the rule of law developed first as a restriction on an undemocratic executive, with a less undemocratic Parliament acting in concert with the courts to institute the rule of law); (b) in principle (for there is a strong argument that democracy needs the rule of law for its fullest expression, and the rule of law needs democracy); and (c) strategically (because it hinders us from mobilizing our full resources to protect both principles; this paper began its life as a response to populist movements, many of which, wrongly, are conceded to be democratic). In this paper I make that case, especially focusing upon its most controversial claim, namely that the rule of law needs democracy. This paper forms part of a larger project on democratic constitutionalism in which I reconsider key concepts in constitutionalism in a manner that takes democratic decision-making to be fundamental to contemporary constitutionalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Albanian customary law represents an unwritten set of rules, which were established ad hoc by courts of elders or assemblies and aimed to regulate social relations in various fields of life. The implementation of these norms, was provided by the force of tradition, social consciousness and the patriarchal authority of the people’s self-government bodies. It is created by people over the centuries, not from a particular person, or a special legislative body. It was a reflecion of the material conditions of life in human consciousness and therefore has a double character. The purpose of the research paper is to analyze that on one hand it preserves the characteristic rates of the old tribal order (common ownership), while on the other hand it regulates the category of private ownership with all its features (eg. property rights do not expire). The methodology I used for the research paper is the analytical method. The result of the research paper is that rates of Albanian customary law are summarized in canons, such as: the Canon of Leke Dukagjini (The Canon of the highlands), the Canon of Laberia, the Canon of Skanderbeg (Canon of Arberia), the Canon of Luma. These canons acted in different times and space: so the Canon of Laberia acted during 11th century in southwestern Albania, the Canon of Leke Dukagjini and the Canon of Skanderbeg acted during 15th century in the northern highlands, as well as central Albania, nonetheless they have many similarities. Women, according to these ancient rules, are considered to be of a lower social status: they do not share either the rights and privileges or the responsibilities of men. In conclusion, as severe and discriminating to women as it may seem, customary law has to be seen in a historical context. The preservation of customary law was one of the most important elements in helping the Albanian people to maintain their individuality over the centuries and under different invasions. Although customary law is inversely proportional to the rise and development of the modern state, it shows distinguished lawmaking capacities and laid the foundations of today’s positive law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role of the European Parliament as an international moral tribune for the promotion of human rights through a qualitative case-study design. It focuses on the emblematic Ayotzinapa case, which involved the enforced disappearance of 43 young rural students and the killing of other six civilians in Mexico in September 2014. The paper innovatively analyses the parliamentary diplomacy activity of four Members and their respective political groups: Franziska 'Ska' Keller (Greens/EFA, Germany), Josep-Maria Terricabras i Nogueras (Greens/EFA, Spain), Estefanía Torres Martínez (GUE/NGL, Spain) and Teresa Jiménez-Becerril Barrio (EPP, Spain), during the 8th parliamentary term (2014–2019). It addresses: How does the European Parliament, acting as an international moral tribune, exercise its role in promoting human rights in practice? Importantly, how do individual members and their political groups contribute to fulfilling this role? The research findings reveal that the phenomenon of parliamentary diplomacy on human rights is highly complex, challenging the mainstream notion that the European Parliament is a monolithic player acting as a moral tribune in international relations. Results also provide important insight for understanding the (micro-)processes of parliamentary diplomacy and their relevance for human rights advocacy within the European Union's external relations and its Member States'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reformers assert that lobbyists take advantage of legislators who lack adequate staffing and research to win policy outcomes for their interest group clients. However, in the United States, legislators usually determine their own levels of staff. This paper exploits the 1990 passage of California's Proposition 140 to test a situation when the legislature's capacity dropped. Proposition 140 immediately lowered legislative expenditures for the 1991–1992 session by 38%, which decimated the policy staff, particularly in the state's Assembly. Using bill analyses that identify which outside groups served as the source of legislation, we shows that group sponsored bills became more likely to pass than non‐group bills in the wake of Proposition 140. This effect is concentrated in bills introduced in the Assembly. We account for other factors that could explain this relationship, particularly direct and indirect effects of the term limits wrought by Proposition 140, but find they did not alter legislator relationships with outside groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do members of regional parliaments engage in EU policymaking? This paper examines how and why members of the Walloon, Flemish and Brussels regional parliaments vary in their EU-contacting activities, by adapting a German survey. Belgium makes a relevant case, as the 'in foro interno, in foro externo' principle entitles regions to conduct foreign policy, including EU affairs in those areas they possess internal competency. Our data show that the level of EU-contacting activities of Belgian regional parliamentarians is overall low, mainly directed towards informational activities and taking place in the direct environment of the parliamentarians. The variation in EU-related activities is best explained by individual-level factors such as the perceived salience of Europe for their own careers, their perceived influence on EU policymaking and their position towards European integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Devolution in the United Kingdom heralded a significant change in democratic arrangements including associated accountability mechanisms in the form of public accounts committees (PACs) in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. This paper investigates whether devolved arrangements have resulted in enhanced accountability. Based on documentary sources, survey data, and interviews with key stakeholders, this study finds that all three jurisdictions have a high level of public accountability, with Wales being the most effective PAC. While there are significant differences in the information and discussion phases of the committees' work, all three regions have comparable outcomes as a result of their deliberations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The argument that choosing a legislative model will strengthen Parliament's checks and balances in an emergency has not been proven in Indonesia. Due to the high president's constitutional legislative power, combined with his coalition supported by a majority of parliamentarians in Covid-19 emergency, left parliament to serve much of the executive's agenda. This paper compares the law-making process in the parliamentary period before and during the pandemic. Extreme partisan power will allow the executive to control the legislative agenda and weaken Parliament's legislative power under the pretext of the Covid-19 pandemic emergency. The 'legislative model' is no longer viable; instead, various laws have been passed, unrelated to Covid-19. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How should an excessively large parliament be effectively reduced in size without violating constitutional principles? This is a question that the German Bundestag has discussed since the introduction of the 2013 electoral reform measure. Facing a Bundestag consisting of 709 members and some public dissatisfaction, a reform measure to decrease the parliament's size was adopted in 2020. However, the 20 Bundestag, elected in September 2021, again increased in size to 735 members. The newly adopted electoral law still uses plurality voting to select the directly elected lawmakers. It is widely known that selection using the plurality rule is flawed because it violates the principle of majority decision. Aside from this aspect, this paper demonstrates that the plurality rule itself contributes to the excessive size of the parliament. By removing the flaws caused by the plurality rule and replacing this voting scheme with a Condorcet method (simple-majority rule), the targeted reduction of the size of the Bundestag can be achieved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do electoral institutions matter for subnational legislators' career choices in a multi‐level polity? The paper considers this question by analyzing candidacies of sitting German State MPs for the Federal parliament ("level‐hopping attempts"), leveraging cross‐ and within‐legislature variation in electoral rules (due to the widespread adoption of mixed‐member systems in Germany's subnational parliaments). State MPs elected via list PR can be expected to be more likely to attempt level‐hopping than those elected in the single‐member districts (SMD) tier, as the former face lower re‐election rates and the latter are more directly accountable to their constituency's voters. Empirical evidence from a novel dataset of over 8000 State legislators spanning 10 Federal elections (1987–2021) confirms this hypothesis. It is also shown that the difference in behavior across tiers is more marked when State MPs run for insecure Federal candidacies than when they are offered secure candidacies. The findings suggest that subnational electoral institutions play a role in enabling or constraining legislators' progressive ambition. Moreover, they highlight a previously overlooked dimension of the "mandate divide" between MPs belonging to different electoral tiers of mixed‐member systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Poland is a case of a state in which the role of legislative bodies in the political system has been gradually reduced at the various levels – national, regional, and local. Recently, this process has been related to executive aggrandisement observed in Poland, but the roots of this phenomenon can be traced back to the political transformation of this country observed after 1989. At the national level, the deteriorating legislative role of parliament manifests itself in four general processes: (1) The executive power treats the Sejm (lower chamber) as a subordinate institution. This involves formally introducing laws forced by the government in the form of proposals written by members of parliament (MPs) (as a way to shorten the legislative process and limit public consultations required by law); (2) Speeding up of parliamentary works – the Sejm is treated as a voting machine and not as a forum where debates and discussion take place; (3) Public consultations are superficial and the regulatory assessment impact is minimal; (4) The influence of the opposition on legislative processes is reduced to almost zero. Similar processes can be observed at the regional and local levels. The subnational legislative bodies are often under the control of executives. Instances of voting with no or limited discussions (favouring the governing majority) can be sometimes observed during the sessions of local and regional councils. This paper analyses the weakening of the legislative function in Poland at different levels, using a qualitative approach and data from desk research, media analysis, in-depth individual interviews and focus group interviews. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this special issue of the Journal of Legislative Studies is to explain and understand the era of profound change that has affected, and continues to impact, UK legislatures. This is an era of special change, wrought by the phenomena of Brexit, the Covid-19 pandemic, and forms of nationalism. The significance of these collected papers lies in the application of interpretive, decentred theory (Bevir, 2013; Bevir & Rhodes, 2003, 2010) as the framework through which each contribution interprets its particular subject - legislatures and elite narratives – in this era of rapid and tumultuous transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers a critique of the 'decentred state' and the working of the devolved Scottish Parliament in its legislative and political relations with the UK Parliament. It argues that analysis of relations between the devolved Scottish Parliament and the UK Parliament, requires examination of both the political culture and political narratives surrounding constitutional governance and the future of the domestic UK union. Both play a pivotal role in shaping interparliamentary relations in the devolved UK. The paper draws on empirical research from two projects that used both documentary analysis of parliamentary sources and interviews with 35 parliamentarians and officials as a Commons Academic Fellow 2016–2021 and Scottish Parliament Academic Fellow 2022–2023. Both the political narrative and culture of interparliamentary relations between the UK Parliament and Scottish Parliament have been impacted arguably even more by the outcome of the 2016 UK EU Referendum than by the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2023 Australian Indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum joined the 37 other referendums which have been defeated since federation, out of a total of 45 referendums. In contrast to the 1967 referendum on Indigenous Australians, which attracted a record majority of 90.8 percent, the Voice referendum gained just 39.9 percent support. This paper uses a large, nationally representative survey to explain voting in the Voice referendum and to compare it with the 1999 republic referendum. The results show that the absence of bipartisanship on the Voice resulted in voters prioritizing the potential risks of constitutional change over the prospect of better outcomes for Indigenous people. In the absence of bipartisanship, voters opted for safety over change – as they did in the 1999 republic referendum and in other unsuccessful referendums. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Incivility in parliaments is always prominently displayed in media reports, often with the implicit or explicit commentary that the situation is getting worse. This paper processes and analyses the records of verbal interactions in the Australian Parliament for over 100 years to provide a first approximation on the evolution of civility. It provides a framework for understanding the multidimensional nature of civility that examines both 'politeness' and 'argumentation', with the latter grounded in notions of public-mindedness. The analysis focuses on the interactions between parties of the orators and the party in power, the chamber of utterance, and the year. The results indicate that instances of impoliteness have increased since the 1970s but only modestly and remain highly infrequent. Minor parties, particularly those representing right-wing and Green politics are more likely to use dismissive or offensive language than the dominant centre-left and centre-right parties, although direct insults and swearwords are the particular remits of right-wing 'system-wrecker' parties. All these minor parties, nonetheless, also display higher levels of argumentation in their interventions. This combination of aggressive language and increased argumentation highlights the pressures on minor parties to convey their points in a forceful way, a challenge that is particularly pressing in two-party systems like the Australian one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current Australian carbon sequestration laws have been passed by State Parliaments in anticipation of the overarching national scheme. The Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, although not yet implemented, is a good indicator of future national policies. This paper analyses the current carbon sequestration laws which employ traditional property categories such as restrictive covenant, profit à prendre, chose in action and sui generis rights for forest property rights and carbon sequestration rights. Multiple problems and potential adverse effects of the current arrangement emerge from this analysis. None of the categories appear to be suitable to operate in the novel climate change scenarios. The other traditional property candidates such as easements in gross and long-term leases seem no better suited. After consideration of overseas experiences - that of the European Union and the United States - the solution to the current problems is found to reside in the Green Paper model proposed by the Australian Government in July 2008. However, the proposal has recurred neither in the White Paper nor in the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme Bill 2009 (Cth) introduced on 14 May 2009. The main features of the model are: creation of regulatory property rights; use of the National Carbon Accounting System and satellite monitoring; temporary carbon permits issued directly to landowners. The political, constitutional, economic and legal aspects of this model are discussed. It is argued that regulatory property achieves the market-based regulatory goals without any of the adverse effects of the current arrangement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shows that the Glorious Revolution of 1688 broadened access to Parliament for families needing rights to sell land in so-called estate bills. Bills were on average 14–27 percentage points more likely to be for gentry families and not aristocratic families in legislative sessions after the Revolution compared to sessions before. Regression and archival evidence suggest that parliamentary certainty was primarily responsible for improved access by altering families' entry calculus and brokers' recruitment of new business. More broadly, the paper provides insight into the ways in which political institutions affect access to and the provision of property rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops comparative case studies of the Virginia, Somers Isles, and Hudson's Bay Companies' colonies. The analysis uncovers significant historical layering through multifaceted and dynamic modes of production, class relations, corporate governance forms, land ownership schemes, and legal arrangements. Company colonies emerged as hybrid combinations of partially feudal company-owned plantations using white indentured servitude together with proto-capitalist stockholding and freehold land, nascent Black slavery, Indigenous dispossession, and illiberal legislative assemblies oriented to company prerogatives in a largely pre-Westphalian international order. Complex historical layering indicates that no single theoretical approach can fully capture all nuance; thus, the paper mobilizes its case studies to explore critical understandings of these companies through a company-state sovereignty focus, a Marxian view of privatized land and labour, and a Weberian perspective on early capitalist public-private institutional alliances. The paper concludes with connections to contemporary anti-colonial political struggles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents information on Samuel Richardson, an author and his plans for contracts as a parliamentary printer. At first, it was assumed that Richardson refers only to official government contracts. The contract involved was enormous—the task included printing not only recent transcriptions but also manuscript records of sessions dating back to 1547, so that Richardson was embroiled for the rest of his life in a massive Shandean catch-up operation that was only nearing completion in 1761, the year of his death, when the proceedings to November 1757 had just appeared.

The European Union of Aquarium Curators (EUAC) boasts a membership of 150 dedicated individuals, standing as a vital cornerstone within the European public aquarium community. Since 2004, the EUAC Conservation Fund has granted over a quarter of a million euros to approximately 50 conservation projects spanning the globe. These initiatives, diverse in nature and scale, have yielded tangible impacts on local populations and their focal species. This paper delves into the outcomes of these conservation endeavors and proposes enhancements to ensure that the funding is unequivocally channeled towards conservation efforts. One resounding observation gleaned from the array of projects spotlighted in this study is the profound community engagement that emerges, irrespective of the final project outcomes. These endeavors serve as a catalyst for local communities, shedding light on subjects that would otherwise remain shrouded in obscurity. Furthermore, the EUAC-backed projects illuminate the expansive reach of public aquarium initiatives, transcending the confines of acrylic tank walls and institutional boundaries to resonate globally, heightening local awareness about the imperative to safeguard biodiversity. These findings underscore a prospective trajectory for both the EUAC and the public aquaria it comprises: an intensified advocacy and collaboration with legislative bodies to fortify in situ conservation measures. In essence, it is imperative that the public comprehends the pivotal role played by aquaria in preserving a multitude of species and acknowledges that their visits directly contribute to funding projects aimed at safeguarding species within their natural habitats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Convictions of political corruption depend on public communication, since for citizens, to perceive deviant behaviours, these must receive attention. In Spain, this type of behaviour is part of the agendas of citizens, media, and politicians and, to fight against it, accountability is essential. In addition to the judiciary and legislature (in their oversight role), the media and social media help voters, MPs and others to make informed decisions and press for action. However, the interrelationships between different agents, types, and forms of control for accountability are a rather unexplored research topic, especially when considering non-accountable institutions (those that have power, but are not directly accountable to the electorate, such as the monarchy). The debate on the inviolability of the emeritus presents a perfect scenario to describe what formulas and what kind of sanctions (legal, labour, reputational or personal) for accountability have occurred in Spain in the case of a non-accountable institution. This study explores the agendas of media, Parliament, and Twitter (and their inter-influences) during the Geneva papers scandal. We analyzed 189,037 tweets, 1,220 journalistic pieces and 78 parliamentary initiatives related to the former monarch. The main results show that the media, social networks, and Parliament have acted as agents of accountability with Juan Carlos I, as if it were an accountable institution. Online newspapers and Twitter have led the oversight, while the parliamentary initiative has been ineffective and has essentially served as an instrument of partisan communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public sources like parliament meeting recordings and transcripts provide ever-growing material for the training and evaluation of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. In this paper, we publish and analyse the Finnish Parliament ASR Corpus, the most extensive publicly available collection of manually transcribed speech data for Finnish with over 3000 h of speech and 449 speakers for which it provides rich demographic metadata. This corpus builds on earlier initial work, and as a result the corpus has a natural split into two training subsets from two periods of time. Similarly, there are two official, corrected test sets covering different times, setting an ASR task with longitudinal distribution-shift characteristics. An official development set is also provided. We developed a complete Kaldi-based data preparation pipeline and ASR recipes for hidden Markov models (HMM), hybrid deep neural networks (HMM-DNN), and attention-based encoder-decoders (AED). For HMM-DNN systems, we provide results with time-delay neural networks (TDNN) as well as state-of-the-art wav2vec 2.0 pretrained acoustic models. We set benchmarks on the official test sets and multiple other recently used test sets. Both temporal corpus subsets are already large, and we observe that beyond their scale, HMM-TDNN ASR performance on the official test sets has reached a plateau. In contrast, other domains and larger wav2vec 2.0 models benefit from added data. The HMM-DNN and AED approaches are compared in a carefully matched equal data setting, with the HMM-DNN system consistently performing better. Finally, the variation of the ASR accuracy is compared between the speaker categories available in the parliament metadata to detect potential biases based on factors such as gender, age, and education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Legislature–executive impasse is one of the challenges Nigeria's democracy has been facing since its transition back to civil rule on May 29, 1999. The polity has been witnessing conflicts between the legislature and the executive over budget matters. Despite certain provisions of the 1999 constitution aimed at rectifying some of the problems identified with legislature–executive relations in the previous Republics, the Fourth Republic also followed the confrontational and conflictual power relations between the executive and the legislature. This study seeks to look beyond a constitutional solution to manage the intermittent imbroglio between the legislature and the executive with a view to fostering good governance and development. The study relies on secondary data. The paper investigates the factors responsible for legislature–executive conflictual relations; and the effects of this impasse on budget, governance and development. It also examines the mechanisms for legislature–executive collaborative relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Like many liberal democracies, there is a gender gap in the Australian Parliament. While there has been growing momentum to increase the number of female parliamentarians in the national legislature, the Parliament of Australia continues to be a male dominated domain. This paper investigates the factors that contribute to maintaining the gender gap by focusing on the ambitions of young women to become a member of the national parliament. We find that the appeal of becoming a parliamentarian for young women is significantly curtailed by beliefs that the institution maintains stereotypical gender norms as well as a masculine, and misogynistic, culture. Furthermore, we find that young women believe they lack the skills and confidence required to occupy public office which further diminishes their political ambition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Women's Reservation Bill (WRB) in the Indian legislative ecosystem seeks to reserve 33% of seats in Parliament and state legislative assemblies for women, marking a critical step toward gender equality in the political domain. Since its introduction in 1996, the WRB's trajectory has been emblematic of the broader socio-political dynamics prevalent in India. Although successfully endorsed by the Rajya Sabha in 2010, the bill remains pending in the Lok Sabha. This research paper delves into the myriad reasons underpinning such protraction. Among these are apprehensions from certain regional parties fearing diminished representation for male politicians and the possibility of the bill undermining the representation of various socioeconomic and minority groups. On another front, the bill has garnered substantial backing, with proponents emphasizing its transformative potential for Indian politics by rectifying gender disparities. Furthermore, this study also examines the complexities introduced by trying to integrate the WRB into India's diverse socio-political milieu, which, while highlighting gender issues, also underscores the inter sectionality of various forms of marginalization. The paper thus provides a comprehensive analysis of the interplay between the apparitional ideals of the WRB and the pragmatic considerations of political strategizing, societal norms, and the challenge so free presentation in the world's largest democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 14th General Election in Malaysia was a pivotal turning point for the progressive parliamentary reform agenda. Recognising that parliamentary reform in Malaysia is highly complex, parliament plays a vital role in monitoring the SDG implementation. Therefore, the main objective of this paper is to analyse the roles of parliament in advancing the SDGs through its reform agenda. It will be of great significance in elucidating parliamentary reform and embedding the 2030 Agenda to advance the functioning of parliament. The analysis was conducted using a qualitative approach through analysing parliamentary documents. The paper proposes an independent select committee, re-introduce the Parliamentary Service Act, empower the opposition, amend Standing Orders, and institutionalise a Parliamentary Research Services. The incorporation of the SDGs in the parliamentary reform agenda is vital to support parliamentarians in carrying out their duties effectively, which in turn assist the parliament to represent the voices of the people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Expertise is a resource, which parliamentary committees organise to support the legislative work of their plenaries. Informational theories posit that expertise is gained from time spent on committee, so how does the committee system of the European Parliament (EP) react to high levels of membership turnover? Using qualitative interview evidence and CV data, this paper explores how expertise is utilised within the EP's committee system and provides some alternative accounts of its usage. This paper demonstrates that membership turnover, an inevitability of democratic legislatures and perceived as detrimental to committees from the loss of experienced policymakers, can have potentially positive benefits. I find that turnover can not only refresh the observed committees' institutional relationships but also clear away potential deadwood that is manifested as members who are past their policymaking primes. I argue that an injection of new blood is a resource that EP committees utilise to help maintain relevance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Migration has become highly contentious. Turkey is no exception. Turkey faces even further challenges as the host to the world's largest refugee population, with Syrians as the majority. Fear about loss of control over borders, and its subsequent political, economic, social and cultural repercussions lies at the heart of migration debates. Parliamentary deliberations provide a public venue for airing these concerns. The paper focuses on Turkish Parliamentary deliberations on the Syrians to assess its issue salience. To do so, an extensive coding of the Parliamentary debates from 2015 to 2019 is conducted. The paper's rigorous analysis of the Turkish Parliamentary debates on the Syrians reveals multiple findings, uncovering a divide among the five political parties in the Parliament—the AKP, CHP, MHP, Iyi Party and the HDP emphasizing different dimensions. The paper captures the commonalities and differences among these political parties with a systematic empirical study of Turkish Parliamentary debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historically, the emergence of planning law and the juridification of planning in Germany did not follow any planning theory, but a logic inherent to the constitutional state. Only in small number of cases did the legislature or the judiciary adopt elements of planning theories, most of which were developed much later. Law defines itself by its strict claim to be obeyed. Therefore, the requirements of planning law may conflict with the recommendations of normative planning theories and then claim precedence over these. Nevertheless, with regard to the viability of some proposals of agonistic planning theories, legal borderlines arise. This paper deals with these borderlines. However, the goal of agonistic theories of planning coincides with the basic function of planning law to pacify conflicting interests and to reach acceptable solutions. Opponents of state planning projects thus are entitled to participate in planning procedures and to file farreaching lawsuits. However, the legal order also sets limits to legitimate resistance to democratic planning and cannot refrain from distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate forms of rejection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes one of the first, direct approaches to understanding which factors shape which attitudes towards gender equality among political elites. We examine support for gender equality among legislators in 13 Latin American countries, using 10 new questions from the 2015–2018 wave of the Latin American elites survey (PELA). We argue that legislators' attitudes about gender equality fall into three distinct dimensions: holding egalitarian views, recognizing that gender inequality is a problem, and supporting state action to hasten gender equality. Overall, women express the more gender-equal orientation on all three dimensions, while factors like religiosity and ideology matter differently for different dimensions. These findings demonstrate the need for more nuance in measuring and analyzing attitudes towards gender equality, in order to better understand the link between descriptive and substantive representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The allocation of seats in a legislative body to groups based on their size is a crucial issue in legal and political studies. However, recent findings suggest that an optimal allocation of seats may not be proportional to the size of the groups. For instance, the European Parliament (EP) utilizes a subproportional system known as degressive proportionality. Unfortunately, current apportionment methods for the EP lack a rigorous axiomatic analysis and fail to adequately address equality. Building upon recent research on equality in subproportional settings, this paper proposed a novel generalization of existing axioms and divisor methods for proportionality to encompass subproportionality with relative equality. Specifically, we consider a function f (p) = a + b p γ on the standard number of seats for a group of size p, where a, b and γ are given non-negative constants, and a is an integer. This theory is exemplified through an empirical study focused on the EP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How political actors choose which politics to focus on helps shape the outcome of the policy process. While the policy agenda of the federal government has received widespread attention, there is much less known about the policy agendas of the U.S. states. In this paper, we describe how and why states choose to have similar agendas. We rely on the Twitter activity of every state legislator in America to measure the attention that states pay to the categories developed in the Policy Agenda Project (PAP). We develop machine learning tools to measure the proportion of tweets from every state legislature from 2017 in each of the PAP policy topics. Our results show that states that the public‐facing policy agenda of a state legislature is correlated with the level of legislative professionalism and the partisan and ideological politics of the state. These results further our understanding of state policymaking and agenda setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the ways in which the suspension of standing orders is being practised in the Dewan Rakyat (House of Representatives) of Malaysia during part of the 14th Parliament from 2018 to 2020, with regard to its ultimate goal in achieving legislative functions, rather than as a shortcut to advance legislative or other business. This paper examines the legitimacy of having specific provisions in the Standing Orders of the Dewan Rakyat that would allow a suspension of standing orders to be carried out. Comparable to practices in the Australian and the New Zealand House of Representatives, it is suggested that a clear procedure for the suspension of standing orders in the Dewan Rakyat needs to be devised as part of achieving the proper legislative function of Parliament. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces eight country‐level datasets with >50,000 observations that can be used to analyze novel comparative questions concerning party personnel strategies—how parties recruit candidates and allocate members across party, legislative, and cabinet positions. We make these datasets public to inspire comparative research, especially from an electoral systems perspective; electoral systems shape constituency representation and influence how parties recruit candidates and organize members in legislative and government bodies. In this paper, we first briefly review the relevant literature on electoral nomination and post‐election appointment and then describe our motivations for constructing multi‐country datasets that can be used to further comparative research. To illustrate the possibilities in these new datasets, we show how recruitment and placement of parliamentarians with particular personal characteristics correlates with their placement onto specific committees and cabinet posts. A conclusion identifies other areas of research that might benefit from using the party personnel datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the possibilities of deconcentrating the functions of governance of the Judiciary carried out by the CGPJ, thus bringing its activity closer to the State model. To this end, it begins by examining the traditional confusion between decentralisation and deconcentration of the governance of the Judiciary. It then discusses how, during the drafting of the Catalan Statute, the introduction of the councils of justice was being processed in the Spanish Parliament, and why that attempt was not successful, which had a direct impact on what would later occur with the statutory regulation of the Council of Justice in STC 31/2010, a ruling whose weak argumentation in this matter is also the subject of review. Nevertheless, the TC having established the possibility of the LOPJ providing for the Councils, the paper goes on to discuss how this would have to be implemented, arguing why it would first be necessary to address other problems of the CGPJ, such as the appointment of its members of judicial origin or the system of discretionary appointments of senior officials, in order for the introduction of the councils to be not only advisable but also realistic. The paper concludes by offering guidelines on how to implement the regulation of the councils in the LOPJ. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the wake of the recently emerged COVID-19 pandemic, legislatures were regarded as one of the important government institutions that can help cushion nations against the economic and social disruptions inflicted by the health crises, given the important roles they play in policymaking within political systems. This paper examines the roles played by Ghana's legislative institution in the management of the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper further explores some of the challenges to legislative activities during the height of the pandemic. From a content analysis of a variety of literature drawn from Parliamentary Proceedings, online journal articles, official documents, and news from credible media outlets, we found that Ghana's legislative institution was crucial to the country's management of the pandemic as they played important roles such as passing COVID-19 related laws, financial oversight, and providing a check on Executive actions. The main challenge to Parliamentary activities was the demand for rapid legislation, which weakened Parliamentary oversight and scrutiny functions. The study makes some recommendations to strengthen legislative responses to future pandemics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The unprecedented circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic have intensified the demands placed upon parliamentarians to scrutinize and evaluate evidence-based government proposals, making visible the parliamentary mechanisms that enable them to do so. This paper examines the steps that led two such mechanisms to become embedded in the institution of Parliament during from 1964 to 2001: the House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology (a scrutiny and information-gathering body) and the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (a legislative science and technology advice body). Drawing on official papers, Hansard records and unpublished archival material, this account complements existing studies of the relationships between government ministers and experts. It highlights how individual members of the all-party Parliamentary and Scientific Committee have influenced institutional change. In so doing it exposes some of the challenges confronting Parliament in the scrutiny of science policy from the mid-twentieth century to today. In particular, it reveals MPs' concerns about their ability to scrutinize science policy in the absence of a select committee on science and technology in the Commons during the 1980s. This shows that parliamentary scrutiny of science was compromised during the very period when the Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher set about making major changes to the organization and funding of government-sponsored research in the UK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does the experiential legacy of participating in autocratic legislatures influence how autocratic-era opposition parties and politicians want to use legislatures in a subsequent democracy? Do they learn to use legislatures to strengthen or undermine democracy? Given the frequency of institutionalized autocracies, of opposition party led post-transition governments, and importance of legislatures in democracies these are important questions. This paper addresses them by first drawing on research on authoritarian legacies, and on organizational and individual learning to identify three potential institutional lessons opposition parties and politicians could learn from their autocratic legislative experience about how to use legislatures in a subsequent democracy. It then uses data from a survey of almost 200 Egyptian politicians conducted during the 2011 elections to test which lessons parties and politicians learned by focusing on their support for protecting judicial independence from legislative interference in the future democratic regime. We find that (i) experienced opposition parties learn a democracy-strengthening institutional lesson, (ii) experienced opposition politicians learn a democracy-weakening institutional lesson, and (iii) membership in an experienced opposition party curbed the undemocratic institutional preferences of experienced politicians. Thus, authoritarian institutions leave diverse legacies among ruling and opposition parties and politicians with very different consequences for subsequent democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can delegates in authoritarian legislatures influence policy outcomes? The existing literature provides extensive knowledge on how delegates behave but relatively little evidence on how government processes delegate policy participation and whether such participation changes policy. Based on a unique dataset of government responses to delegates' policy proposals in China, this paper proposes a new distributive theory of authoritarian legislature and explains the conditions under which delegates can influence policy. The findings show that proposals requesting particularistic benefits are more likely to receive acceptance when they are made by delegates representing regime allies, whereas proposals requesting universalistic benefits are more likely to attain acceptance if they come from delegates representing the public. This finding can shed new light on authoritarian legislatures and their influence on policy. It also reveals a new theory of how autocrats make tradeoffs in allocating resources to accommodate competing policy demands and provide public goods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a dynamical approach based on the Gorini–Kossakowski–Sudarshan–Lindblad equation for a problem of decision making. More specifically, we consider what was recently called a quantum parliament, asked to approve or not a certain law, and we propose a model of the connections between the various members of the parliament, proposing in particular some special form of the interactions giving rise to a collaborative or noncollaborative behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the ParlaMint corpora containing transcriptions of the sessions of the 17 European national parliaments with half a billion words. The corpora are uniformly encoded, contain rich meta-data about 11 thousand speakers, and are linguistically annotated following the Universal Dependencies formalism and with named entities. Samples of the corpora and conversion scripts are available from the project's GitHub repository, and the complete corpora are openly available via the CLARIN.SI repository for download, as well as through the NoSketch Engine and KonText concordancers and the Parlameter interface for on-line exploration and analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Strengthening the role of national parliaments in EU matters has triggered a broad discussion on whether the legislatures are effective and which parliamentary functions they should fulfil within the EU political system. The involvement of national legislatures can be measured by applying the concept of parliamentary strength based on a set of indicators. However, some important elements of parliamentary activities and functions are fully overlooked in the existing literature, especially the participation of national parliaments in the preparation for and administration of the Council Presidency within the framework of the 'parliamentary dimension' of the rotating Presidency. Despite the growing importance of the Presidency Parliament, which goes hand-in-hand with the broadening of the framework for inter-parliamentary cooperation, current research pays little attention to this topic, even though it is important for understanding parliamentary strength in EU policy-making. For this reason, this paper presents a summary of the current body of knowledge with the aim of proposing an analytical framework which can be used for future systematic research in this field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the consequences of the imposition of the ban on sale of internal combustion engine cars (ICE) decided by the Parliament of the European Union. By using a dynamical model of the circulation split between ICE cars and electric cars it has been shown that these consequences essentially depend on the attitude to the electric car of Government and Public Administrations on the one hand, and of the ICE owners on the other. The combination of favourable attitude of both Governments and ICE car owners leads, after the ban imposition, to quick disappearance of ICE cars from circulation. Instead the consequences in the case of unfavourable attitude is the permanence in circulation of ICE cars beyond the threshold that have occurred in the absence of ban. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do lawmakers resort to physical violence in some parliaments but not in others? Brawls not only constitute a stark break with democratic norms and ideals, they also affect voter perceptions and have been seen as a bellwether for conflict and democratic backsliding. Yet, the phenomenon remains poorly understood. This paper introduces a new, original dataset recording reported incidents of physical fights in parliaments across the globe between 1980 and 2018 that includes almost four times more cases of violence than existing data. Theoretically, we argue that levels of democracy and the composition of parliament should drive violence. The analysis shows that fighting is most common in countries that are neither very autocratic nor very democratic, in fragmented parliaments, and in chambers with slim majorities. The findings have implications for the study of (de-)democratization, political instability, and the design of democratic institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the brief lifespan (1907–20) of ‘Two Act’ entrenchment, a curious constitutional law idea which emerged in Queensland in the early 1900s. Its origins lay in an argument formulated by Queensland’s then Chief Justice, Pope Cooper, qua defendant in criminal proceedings arising from his refusal to pay income tax on his judicial salary. That argument was that the Constitution Act 1867 (Qld) was a form of ‘fundamental’ or ‘organic’ law which could not be altered by legislation passed in the ordinary way, but which could be changed only by a Two Act legislative process in which the Legislature in Act 1 expressly empowered itself to alter the relevant provision and then in Act 2, again expressly, enacted the relevant alteration. The article considers how it was that an idea which had no textual basis in either Imperial or colonial legislation, for which there was no supportive judicial authority, and which had no precedent in Queensland’s legislative practice, was repeatedly upheld by Queensland’s Supreme Court and Australia’s High Court before being dismissed as wholly without merit by the Privy Council in McCawley v The King; but dismissed in terms which laid the foundation for the Privy Council’s subsequent approval of the proposition (in Trethowan v Attorney-General of New South Wales) that Australia’s State legislatures did indeed possess the legislative competence to enact judicially enforceable entrenchment devices to prevent certain laws being enacted through the ordinary lawmaking process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research argued that the colonial policy of community‐based representation in the legislative assembly strongly increases the risk of postcolonial ethnic warfare in former British and French colonies. This paper delves deeper into the relationship by using an updated dataset that codes the receipt or non‐receipt of communal representation for nearly all ethnic groups in former British and French colonies. The results confirm the war‐inducing effect of this communalising colonial policy and additionally find that such an effect applies relatively uniformly to groups that benefited from this policy as well as those that were excluded from it. In addition, based on sociological theory and previous research, it was hypothesised that a combination of precolonial receipt of communal legislative representation and postcolonial political exclusion would make an ethnic group particularly prone to postcolonial ethnic warfare. This hypothesis, however, was not supported by the data. This null result has theoretical implications for our understanding of the conditions that give rise to conflict‐inducing psychological strain in the field of colonialism and ethnic warfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the participation of religious groups in the political field of Paraná state, on the occasion of the proportional elections to the Legislative Assembly of Paraná state (ALEP) in 2018. We seek to problematize the defense of the so-called traditional Brazilian family, based on elements of the trajectories of religious candidates and their campaign jingles. We have used political-religious jingles published on Facebook by 06 candidates for ALEP, linked to 05 different Pentecostal evangelical denominations. We have identified the instrumentalization of religious representations in the public sphere, based on a position in relation to the traditional family defense, promoting changes in other fields of Brazilian society, which go beyond the religious one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) came into South African politics in 2013. Its inception came when most of the prominent leaders of the African National Congress Youth League (ANCYL), including Julius Malema, Floyd Shivambu and Sindiso Magaqa, were expelled and suspended from the mother body - ANC. The EFF's emergence was aligned with a robust Sankarist and Marxist perspective from ideology to their parliamentary uniform. Furthermore, it assumed a left-wing of the working-class approach to political, governance and human rights issues, which has conspicuously been missing in postapartheid South African politics. From the public to the private sector, the party has radically sent a strong message in an unpopular fashion against labour exploitation, poor working conditions, racism and poor governance, among other social issues. Therefore, the primary purpose of this paper was to critically debate the EFF's approach to upholding the government accountable to its constitutional and developmental mandate. The article adopted a secondary research approach whereby the available literature related to the topic was reviewed and analysed. The paper concluded by arguing that, despite being disruptive in their approach, the EFF has unquestionably transformed politics and significantly influenced the course of governance in South Africa. Furthermore, it has noticeably enhanced accountability from the national to the local sphere of government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]