July 2020 Newsletter

1. Our Annual Conference: Call for Papers Deadline Fast Approaching!

This year’s annual conference will be held in Birmingham in the city’s Council House on the 12th and 13th November 2020.

The theme for this year’s conference is Parliaments in 20/20 Vision, allowing us to reflect upon the impact on legislatures of this year’s unprecedented events and to think about the past, present and future of parliaments and parliamentary studies.

Please see our website for our call for papers and for full details of the conference, which is co-sponsored by the School of Government at the University of Birmingham.

The deadline for submitting abstracts is 17 July 2020.

2. Parliamentary Media & Communication: Request for Academic Contacts

Are you an academic who works on parliamentary communications (e.g. media relations, broadcasting, levels of access to journalists, etc)?

If so, then Alasdair Rendall, Head of Broadcaster and Press Gallery Relations at the House of Commons, would like to hear from you. The Broadcaster and Press Gallery Relations team has recently established an Interparliamentary Communications Network that brings together communications teams from across the UK legislatures and, as part of this and other networks, the team would like to foster links with academics working in this area. If you are interested or would like more information, please email Alasdair.

3. Welcome to our New Membership Officer, Caroline Bhattacharya!

We are very pleased to have Caroline Bhattacharya join our team as our new membership officer. Caroline is a final-year PhD student at the University of Helsinki but lives in the UK. Her current research interests concern the parliamentarisation of EU politics, party discipline and unity, the German Bundestag, representation (in theory and practice), as well as mixed methods. In addition to considerable work experience as a research assistant, she has worked in the field of EU affairs in Brussels and Berlin.

4. Join our New PSA Parliaments Facebook Group

PSA Parliaments has a new Facebook group for all the latest news in the world of parliamentary studies. Join here!

5. Recently on the Blog

Thanks once again for the great contributions made to our blog by group members and from our wider network of scholars and policy-makers. Some of our recent blogs include:

Monitoring Westminster: who is watching parliament? by Ben Worthy and Stefani Langehennig;

(Re)-connecting parliamentary engagement: how storytelling can strengthen public-parliament dynamics in the UK by Alex Prior & Cristina Leston-Bandeira;

Liaison Committee: A Prime Ministerial Performance? by Mark Bennister

If you have an idea for a blog on some aspect of parliamentary study please get in touch with our communications officer Gavin Hart or message us on Twitter.

6. Recent Publications that have Caught our Eye

The Inter-Parliamentary Union has recently published a book to celebrate its 130th anniversary. The book outlines the IPU’s achievements over the past 13 decades and includes contributions from dozens of its Member Parliaments.

Caroline Bhattacharya recently published an article in Politics and Governance that uses discourse network analysis to analyse party control and (dis)unity in the German Bundestag.

Issue 2 of Volume 26 of The Journal of Legislative Studies is now out.

Issue 2 of Volume 45 of Legislative Studies Quarterly is now out.

If you would like your published research to be featured in this section, please email Stephen with details.