In this month’s newsletter, we have the following announcements/information:
- Our Annual Conference: REGISTRATION OPEN
- Essay Competition Winner
- CfP: Advances in the Empirical and Theoretical Study of Parliaments
- Job Opportunity – Institute of Welsh Affairs
- News from our members
- Parliamentarian of the Year?
- Call for Evidence:
- Recently on our blog
If you have any notices / messages you would like us to circulate to the group, please let us know.
Best wishes,
Marc (@marcgeddes), Louise (@LouiseVThompson) Alex (@A_Meakin) and Seán (@S_Haughey)
1. Our Annual Conference – Registration now open
We are pleased to announce that our annual conference is now open for registration for everyone interested in coming along. It will take place on Thursday, 7 November (6pm-8pm) for a welcome wine reception, and on Friday, 8 November (9.30am-6pm) for a one-day event. The conference will take place at the National Assembly for Wales.
The theme of this year’s conference is ‘Parliaments: Coming of Age?’, and we are covering a range of panels and papers, including on scrutiny, comparative perspectives, changing forms of representation, and governance. We have papers on the UK Parliament and devolved parliaments, as well as international perspectives.
Please note, at our conference we will also have a keynote event (tbc) and our essay-prize giving (see announcement below!). We have also allocated time/space for our AGM to discuss where to take the conference next year (among other things!).
For more information and to register, please click here. Registration closes on Friday, 18 October.
If you have any questions, please contact us.
2. Essay competition winner
We are pleased to announce the winner of our essay competition this year: Joshua Wakeford, from the University of Manchester. The runner-up this year is Cynthia Njeri Mbuthia, from the Queen Mary, University of London. You can find out more about the winners, including copies of the winning essays, on our website. They will receive their certificates at our conference in Cardiff. All essays were anonymised and judged by a panel of academics and practitioners: Professor David Judge (University of Strathclyde and Chair of the Panel), Lucinda Maer (House of Commons) and Dr Daniel Gover (QMUL). For the winning essay, the panel explained:
“The winning essay is well-written, well-argued, and well-researched. It is rigorous in the collection and analysis of data, and provides a valuable contribution to understanding parliament by focusing on a crucial but less publicised accountability mechanism.”
On the second essay, the panel commented that it “provides an engaging and nicely presented analysis which utilises original data and, importantly, points towards a series of questions and issues worthy of further research”.
We would like to thank everyone that took part, and especially for the judging panel who gave up their time to read through all the entries we received this year.
3. CfP: Advances in the Empirical and Theoretical Study of Parliaments
The ECPR Standing Group on Parliaments and the University of Konstanz are pleased to announce the conference on Advances in the Empirical and Theoretical Study of Parliaments. The conference will take place in Konstanz, Germany, from 26 to 28 September 2019. Keynote speakers are Kristin Kanthak (University of Pittsburgh), Georg Vanberg (Duke University), and Alan E. Wiseman (Vanderbilt University).
The conference will feature three parallel workshops. Each of the workshops will be accompanied by one of the keynote speakers:
- Parliaments, MPs and Political Representation
Kristin Kanthak - Committees and Parliamentary Institutions
Georg Vanberg - Parliaments, Bargaining and Policy-making
Alan E. Wiseman
Both theoretical and empirical papers are welcome. We are open to different approaches and there are no restrictions on the geographical regions covered. The deadline for application is20 August 2019. You can apply for the conference by submitting an abstract online, as well as find out more information. Please follow this link: https://ecpr.eu/Events/142.
Please contact the conference organisers directly for any queries.
4. Job Opportunity at the Institute for Welsh Affairs
The Institute of Welsh Affairs (IWA) is looking for a proactive organisation or consultant to help deliver a substantive project proposal to enhance inter-parliamentary relations (IPR) in the UK. This is essentially a piece of focused research involving desk research and number of interviews with stakeholder. The scope of the projects is well defined, as are the research questions and the interviewees list. More information, including the tender:
https://www.iwa.wales/news/2019/07/new-research-commission-inter-parliamentary-relations-in-the-uk/
This might suit a PhD student, post-doc, early career researcher looking to establish a research consultancy profile.
5. News from our members
New research briefing
Congratulations to our member, Ruth Dixon, who has worked with the Parliamentary Office for Science and Technology and the House of Lords Library to publish a new research briefing: https://researchbriefings.parliament.uk/ResearchBriefing/Summary/LLN-2019-0100.
Congrats to our member
Congratulations to our member, Daniel Gover, for his appointment as Lecturer in British Politics at Queen Mary, University of London, which he will take up on 1 September.
Please remember to send us your good news items for us to celebrate in our monthly newsletter – accepted grant proposals, giving evidence to committees or stakeholders, large public events, finally published that book you’ve been working on … we’d love to hear it and share it with our members!
6. Parliamentarian of the Year?
Nominations for the PSA Awards have now opened, and we wanted to alert our members to one particular category that might be of interest: “Parliamentarian of the Year”, for “a domestic politician who has made an effective contribution in either the UK Parliament or devolved institutions”.
For more information, including eligibility requirements and how to submit your nomination, please click here.
7. Call for evidence
The House of Lords Constitution Committee has launched a call for evidence for its new inquiry into the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 and invites individuals and organisations to submit evidence.
The inquiry explores the workings and implications of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 ahead of the statutory review required in 2020. The Act was part of the Coalition Government’s constitutional reform agenda and had the overarching aim to move power from the Executive to Parliament, thereby removing the Prime Minister’s ability to call an election purely for political gain. This inquiry will examine how effective the Act has been.
Please see this link for a full list of key questions and to submit evidence.
The deadline for submissions is 5pm on Thursday 26 September 2019.
8. Recently on the blog
Some of our recent blogs include:
- Celebrating 40 Years of Departmental Select Committees: two-day conference in June Rebecca McKee (Constitution Unit) and Tom Caygill (Newcastle)
- Representing Women, Women Representing: A Corpus Analysis of Backbench Questions during Prime Minister’s Questions, 1979-2010 Stephen Holden Bates (Birmingham) and Alison Sealey (Lancaster)
- Spies in Parliament: not as unusual as you might think Andrew Defty (Lincoln)
- And a trilogy of blogs on select committees from Stephen Holden Bates (University of Birmingham), Mark Goodwin (Coventry University), Steve McKay (University of Lincoln) and Wang Leung Ting (LSE):
If you are interested in publishing a blog, please get in touch with our Communications Officer Alexandra Meakin (a.meakin@sheffield.ac.uk) for a chat about how to get involved.