We hope that you are keeping safe and well. We have some updates for you:
- PSA Annual International Conference 2022
- PSA Parliaments 2021 Conference: Parliament at a Critical Juncture
- Winners announced of our Undergraduate Essay Competition!
- New Overview of the Australian Parliament Published
- PSA Parliaments Working Papers Series
- Call for Applications: Leverhulme PhD studentships at the University of East Anglia
- Call for Papers: Recovering Europe’s Parliamentary Culture, 1500-1700: Concepts, Methods, Approaches
- Other Events: Study of Parliament Group Annual Conference
- Recent Publications that have Caught Our Eye
- Recently on the Blog
If you have any notices/messages you would like us to circulate to the group, please let us know.
1. PSA Annual International Conference 2022
Registration has opened for the 2022 PSA Annual Conference being held in York and digitally in April 2022 (early bird prices end on 24 January 2022). Full details of the conference and how to register can be found on the PSA22 website.
As announced last month, we are running five panels, plus a round-table event Exploring Parliament: Looking to the Future. The themes of our panels are:
- Parliamentary powers, prerogatives, and public engagement
- How MPs use old and new media and how old and new media affects MPs
- How to be a parliamentarian: how do Members participate?
- Comparative and inter-parliamentary analysis
- How to be a parliamentarian? Representation and roles
Whether in person or online, we hope to see you there!
2. PSA Parliaments 2021 Conference: Parliament at a Critical Juncture
Our annual conference, which was held online last month, was a roaring success, even if we do say so ourselves!
We had an excellent line-up of panels on the themes of:
- Representatives and representation;
- Accountability and transparency in Parliaments;
- Power(lessness), practices and conventions.
If you missed it, you can catch up on all the papers on our YouTube channel.
The five papers on the first panel are already available and the others will be added in the next couple of weeks.
3. Winners of our Undergraduate Essay Competition Announced!
We are delighted to announce the winner and runner-up of the 2021 PSA Parliaments undergraduate essay competition!
The winner, Callum Murphy who studied at Queen Mary University of London, won £100 for his essay on how Parliament engaged with the Universal Credit policy.
The runner-up, Dana Ali who also studied at Queen Mary University of London, won £50 for her essay on parliamentary scrutiny of air quality.
Congratulations to Callum and Dana! And many thanks to Alice Lilly from the Institute for Government for judging the competition.
You can read the prize-winning essays here.
4. New Overview of the Australian Parliament Published
Many thanks to Thomas Dray for writing an overview of the Australian Parliament.
If you would like to write an overview of one of the parliaments or legislatures not yet covered on our maps, then please get in touch with Chris.
5. PSA Parliaments Working Papers Series
We are very excited to announce that we are now accepting expressions of interest to contribute to our recently-launched working paper series, which publishes working papers across the sub-discipline of parliamentary and legislative studies.
You can read our first two working papers here and here.
If you are interested in publishing a working paper, please consult our submission guidelines.
6. Call for Applications: Leverhulme PhD studentships at the University of East Anglia
The Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia, UK, is seeking applications for PhD studentships in the Leverhulme Trust’s ‘Critical Decade for Climate Change’ doctoral training programme.
Three of the studentships are focused on the role of parliaments and politicians in climate policy making and implementation:
- Climate mitigation through the decision of courts: a critical evaluation
- How are publics’ climate change attitudes and behaviours influenced by politicians?
- Delivering net zero requires local political action: what will the role of local politicians be in the critical decade?
The studentships start in October 2022 with each scholarship covering: tuition fees (for both home and international students); a maintenance stipend (£15,285 per year in 2022/23); and a generous research and training support grant of up to £8,000 over the course of the 4 year PhD programme.
More information about all the individual projects and the doctoral training programme, can be found here.
7. Call for Papers: Recovering Europe’s Parliamentary Culture, 1500-1700: Concepts, Methods, Approaches
This interdisciplinary international conference will explore the culture of early modern Europe’s political assemblies, and ask how it was expressed in language, writing, images, institutions, and symbolic practices.
It will be held at Jagiellonian University, Krakow, 22-24 June 2022, and is partly supported by The Europaeum.
Deadline for proposals is 31 January 2022. More details about the conference can be found here.
8. Other Events: Study of Parliament Group Annual Conference
The Study of Parliament Group will hold their annual conference at Oxford and online on 7-8 January 2022.
The deadline for booking is Friday 10 December. You must be an SPG member to attend. More details from their website.
9. Recent Publications that have Caught Our Eye
Nokwazi Makanya has published an article entitled Progress with Parliamentary ‘Power over the Purse’: The Case of South Africa in Parliamentary Affairs.
Diana Stirbu has written a report for the Welsh Senedd on committee effectiveness: Power, Influence and Impact of Senedd Committees: Developing a framework for measuring committees’ effectiveness
Netina Tan and Cassandra Preece have published an article entitled Ethnic Quotas, Political Representation and Equity in Asia Pacific in Representation.
Tom Loughran and Sean Haughey have published a report on public opinion and power-sharing in Northern Ireland.
A special issue of The Journal of Legislative Studies on administering representative democracy has been published.
And, finally, new issues of Representation and Legislative Studies Quarterly have also been published.
If you would like your published research to be featured in this section, please email Stephen with details.
10. Recently on the Blog
We have recently published two great blogs:
- The Owen Patterson Scandal: Standards, Trust and Democratic Norms by Chris Monaghan, Caroline Bhattacharya and Alexandra Meakin
- Using the past to help us to understand the future of the Palace of Westminster by Alexandra Meakin
If you have an idea for a blog on some aspect of parliamentary study, please get in touch with our communications officer, Chris.