We hope that you are keeping safe and well. We have some updates for you, including:
- PSA Parliaments Panel on Prime Minister’s Questions
- Roundtable on the Past, Present and Future of Parliamentary Studies
- PSA Parliaments Conference YouTube Playlist
- Other Events: EUGenDem Series of Online Workshops
- Congratulations!
- Recent Publications that have Caught our Eye
- Coming Soon on the Blog
If you have any notices/messages you would like us to circulate to the group, please let us know.
We hope you’re able to have a relaxing and restful time over Christmas and the New Year and, if you’re unable to make our panel on PMQs this month, we look forward to seeing you, hopefully in person, at some point during 2021.
1. PSA Parliaments Online Panel on Prime Minister’s Questions
A quick reminder that the second panel of our Online Annual Conference is at 2pm on Wednesday 16th December. We’ll be focusing on analysing PMQs and our speakers are:
- Stephane Revillet on “PMQs: Quieter and more civilized but not more accountable”;
- Mia McGraith Burns and Mark Shephard on “Issue ownership vs wave-riding: an evaluation of priority congruence between political parties and the public in questions to the Prime Minister”; and
- Mark Shephard and Daniel Braby on “Bringing in the constituents: do MPs use PMQs to refer to their constituents, and does the electoral context of constituencies help to explain this?”
All panels are free and all are welcome but please register beforehand in order to gain details of how to access the event.
Tickets are selling faster than hot cakes so you’d better hurry, hurry, hurry if you don’t want to miss out!
Full details of the other conference panels can be found on our website.
2. Save the Date! Roundtable on the Past, Present and Future of Parliamentary Studies
We have added an extra panel to our PSA Parliaments Annual Conference. On the 9th June 2021, we are holding a roundtable on the past, present and future of parliamentary studies and we have some very special guest speakers:
- Prof. Emma Crewe (SOAS, University of London);
- Prof. Shane Martin (University of Essex); and
- Prof. Michelle Taylor-Robinson (Texas A&M University)
This promises to be an excellent way to end our conference and celebrate getting to the end of a very difficult academic year. You can book your tickets here.
3. PSA Parliaments Conference YouTube Playlist
If, for some reason, you missed the first panel of our PSA Parliaments Annual Conference, then you can now watch the papers on our PSA Parliaments Conference YouTube Playlist.
Papers from subsequent panels will be added throughout the year.
4. Other Events
Starting in December 2020, the EUGenDem team are organising a series of online workshops for both academics and practitioners to debate ‘Gender, democracy and polarized politics in Europe’.
The first workshop ‘European Parliament’s political groups in turbulent times: New research avenues’ will take place on 15 December 2020 at 3PM (EET) on Zoom and feature some key research coming out of the EUGenDem project. The speakers are:
- Johanna Kantola: Gender and democracy in European Parliament’s party group practices
- Valentine Berthet, Anna Elomäki, and Barbara Gaweda: Political dynamics, power struggles, and intra-group policy formation in the European Parliament
- Cherry Miller: ‘Ethno, ethno, what?’ How Parliamentary Ethnography can help us to better understand Parliament’s Political Groups
See here for more details and to register.
The workshop sessions in 2021 will include talks by key scholars working on the European Parliament; gendered parliaments; democratic backsliding; gender policy issues; impacts of Covid-19 on parliamentary politics and gender policy; and parliamentary ethnography. The full program can be found here.
5. Recent Publications that have Caught our Eye
Edward Elgar have published a new Handbook of Parliamentary Studies, edited by Cyril Benoît and Olivier Rozenberg.
When buying the Handbook from the Edward Elgar website, members of the PSA Parliaments specialist group can receive a 35% discount by applying the discount code PARL35 before checkout (yet more proof of why it pays to be part of your friendly neighbourhood specialist group).
A new issue of Legislative Studies Quarterly has been published.
If you would like your published research to be featured in this section, please email Stephen with details.
6. Congratulations!
Congratulations to PSA Parliaments member, Tom Caygill, who has secured a lectureship in politics at the Department of Social & Political Sciences at Nottingham Trent University!
7. Coming soon on the Blog!
The blog has been taking a little break this month. It’s nothing to worry about. We just need to regain some poise after all the excitement of providing an excellent blended learning experience in a Covid-secure educational environment.
We’re going to be back in December with a vengeance so please keep an eye out for blogs on some of the papers from our first conference panel on the impact of Covid-19 on parliaments.
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.