Month: April 2016

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News

Job Opening: Lecturer/Senior Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh

The following job advertisement may be relevant to our members:

Politics and International Relations at the University of Edinburgh invites applications for a Lecturer or Senior Lecturer in British Politics.  While all sub-fields of British Politics will be considered, preference may be given to those with research and teaching specialisms in institutions, policy making and legislative studies.  You will have a research record with publications of international significance appropriate to the stage of their careers and must have a demonstrated commitment to excellence in teaching. With a research profile at the cutting edge of British Politics, you will further the School’s international reputation for research and its commitment to excellence in teaching, and administration.

Do feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

All good wishes,
Ailsa

Ailsa Henderson, PhD
Professor of Political Science
Head, Politics & International Relations
University of Edinburgh

For more information related to this lectureship, please click here.

 

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News

Get involved

Attendees at the Legislatures in Uncertain Times conference, 17 November 2017, on a tour of the Scottish Parliament chamber

Blogs

We publish blogs on parliaments or legislatures each week, and always welcome new posts addressing topical issues or sharing new research. We also welcome blog posts or ideas from practitioners working within a parliament or legislature (for example, the inside look at the House of Lords Library by Matthew Purvis). Our blog includes posts on legislatures from across the globe, at national, sub-national and supra-national levels of governance.

We are very keen to increase the diversity of contributions to our blog, in particular, the number of blogs we publish from women, or people of colour. Blog submissions from early career researchers are also especially welcome.

If you have an idea for a blog and would like to discuss it further, please get in touch with our blog editor, Gavin Hart, at: g.hart@hud.ac.uk

We also publish overviews of national parliaments. Check out our current list, and contact us if you would like to contribute.

Twitter

If you’re on Twitter, you’ll know that we have a twitter account: @psa_parl. We are always happy to tweet/retweet news about our members’ work with parliament, so do copy us in, or use the hashtag #PSAParliaments, which we check regularly.

We welcome members tweeting from our own account for a day to cover specific events. If you (or one of your students) would like to cover a specific event through our Twitter account for a day, please get in touch with us. A few ideas: State Opening of Parliament, the new devolved legislatures, Prime Minister’s Questions, a specific select committee hearing, a specific debate/vote, a conference/workshop on parliaments and legislatures, etc., etc. – it’s whatever you would like to cover as long as it is relevant to the study and understanding of parliament(s). If you want to do this, please get in touch with us!

Categories
Events News

Workshops on Methods

At our Annual General Meeting, we discussed the possibility of holding small workshops at a range of universities on methodological issues and training in legislative studies. Any of you could host one of these workshops, and we have funding available to help put these together. They do not need to be large workshops, and could comprise small groups of 6 or so people (or a larger group!). Similarly, it does not need to be a full day activity – a 1h30min workshop would be just as useful as a full day/afternoon one. The idea is that it explores a specific methodology issue in legislative studies. This is to build on the workshop we held last year (details here), and the feedback showed that it would be useful to do more of these but focused on specific approaches/techniques. Stephen Bates (Birmingham) has offered to run a workshop on quantitative analysis for legislative studies, for example.

If anyone else would like to run one in a different area, we would love to hear from you – just get in touch with us. As soon as we have details for workshops, including the one in Birmingham, we will circulate details.

Do get in touch, even if you just want more details about what we have organised so far and/or discuss a possible idea.

 

Categories
Blog

Essential Guide: Nine ways research gets into Parliament

Please note that this blog piece was originally posted on Sarah Foxen’s personal blog and a version of it was published on the LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog. The post is re-published here with their permission.

By Sarah Foxen

I recently attended an RCUK-funded training day on research and policy. Part-way through one of the breakout sessions, it became apparent that my peers were sharing my frustrations with the training. We had expected to gain practical insight into how research feeds into policy, but instead the training had a rather more reflective focus, with the majority of speakers using their lectern time to perpetuate or challenge discourses surrounding academic impact.

Continue reading “Essential Guide: Nine ways research gets into Parliament”

Categories
Events News

Success at the PSA Annual Conference

We just wanted to share the great success that we had at the PSA Conference in Brighton last week – having held a range of panels and talks throughout Tuesday and Wednesday of the Conference.

Continue reading “Success at the PSA Annual Conference”
Categories
Blog

The Scotland Act 2016: New challenges for parliamentary scrutiny

By Stephen Herbert

The process of parliamentary scrutiny of the recommendations of the Smith Commission and the subsequent Scotland Bill has provided insights into the challenges that implementing the now Scotland Act 2016 present. The Scotland Act 2016 provides for the devolution of a range of new competencies to Holyrood. However, the passage of the Act is significant not only for the powers it confers upon the Scottish Parliament and Government but also the shift in the structure of Scottish devolution that will be a consequence of the Act’s provisions. The 2016 Act will result in a shift from a system of largely separate and clearly demarcated boundaries in terms of the distribution of powers between Holyrood and Westminster to an increasingly shared distribution of powers in a range of policy areas, notably with regard to taxation and social security powers. This will result in a greater degree of inter-governmental working than has been the case to date and will also present challenges to legislatures in examining these relationships. The issues raised, in this regard, by this shift in the structure of devolution are considered here.

Continue reading “The Scotland Act 2016: New challenges for parliamentary scrutiny”