We hope that you are keeping safe and well. We have some updates for you:
- PSA Parliaments Annual Conference 2022: Extra Online Panels!
- PSA Annual Conference 2023 in Liverpool & Online
- Urgent Questions with Felicity Matthews
- Welcome to Ruxandra Serban!
- PSA and Specialist Group Membership
- New Parliament Thematic Research Lead: Congratulations to Rick Whitaker!
- IPSA RCLS Online Seminars on Legislative & Parliamentary Committees
- Petition against Job Losses at Birkbeck
- Recent Publications that have Caught Our Eye
- Recently on the Blog
If you have any notices/messages you would like us to circulate to our prizewinning group, please let us know.
We’ll see you in 2023!
Best wishes
Stephen, Seán, Caroline, Chris and, for the first time, Ruxandra.
1. PSA Parliaments Annual Conference 2022: Extra Online Panels!
After a very successful annual conference in Birmingham at the start of November, PSA Parliaments will be holding two extra online panels in the new year.
Our first panel is on representatives and representation and will be held on Wednesday 25th January 2023 at 2pm (GMT).
Full details of the panel, including how to book tickets (for free) can be found here.
Our second panel is called Parliaments & Parliamentarians in Context and will be held on Wednesday 15th February 2023 at 2pm (GMT).
Full details of the panel, including how to book tickets (for free) can be found here.
2. PSA Annual Conference 2023 in Liverpool & Online
Registration has opened for the 2023 PSA Annual Conference being held in Liverpool and virtually in April 2023. Early bird registration ends on 4 February 2023, and accepted paper-givers must register by then to guarantee their place. Full details of the conference and how to register can be found on the PSA23 website.
The PSA offers support to UK based PhD students and early career researchers as well as scholars from the Global South. See the website for more information.
We are running at least four panels. More information will follow soon.
Whether in person or online, we hope to see you there!
3. Urgent Questions with Felicity Matthews
This month’s interviewee is Professor Felicity Matthews (University of Sheffield)!
Head over to Urgent Questions to read about Suede, architecture, cakes, pizzas and wood pigeons!
4. Welcome to Ruxandra Serban!
Welcome to Ruxandra Serban who joins the PSA Parliaments team as our new Membership Officer and Treasurer!
Ruxandra is a political scientist specialising in comparative legislative studies and UK parliamentary politics. She is an LSE Fellow in Qualitative Research Methods in the Department of Methodology at the LSE. She holds a PhD in Political Science from UCL, where she also worked as a Research Assistant at the Constitution Unit.
Ruxandra has published on procedures and practices of prime ministerial questioning in different parliaments, and she maintains a research agenda on parliamentary questioning procedures.
You can follow her on Twitter here (if it’s still working by the time you read this).
5. PSA and Specialist Group Membership
If you receive this newsletter and are not a PSA member, please consider joining. You enjoy lots of benefits as a PSA member, such as subscriptions and free or discounted access to events. More information on how to join can be found here.
If you are already a PSA member and enjoy this newsletter and our activities, could we kindly ask you to check that you have also formally joined our group via your PSA account.
Joining our group officially will help us with our funding and capacity to host events and support early career scholars, and we would greatly appreciate it!
For any questions, please contact our membership officer, Ruxandra.
6. New Parliament Thematic Research Lead: Congratulations to Rick Whitaker!
Congratulations to Rick Whitaker of the University of Leicester on becoming the first Thematic Research Lead on Parliament, Public administration and the Constitution.
The thematic research leads have been established by the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST) and the holders will each join new thematic policy hubs which will bring together staff from POST, the House of Commons Library and Select Committee teams, ensuring greater co-ordination and a better flow of research information through Parliament.
More details about the initiative can be found here.
7. IPSA RCLS Online Seminars on Legislative & Parliamentary Committees
Our very good friends on IPSA’s Research Committee of Legislative Specialists are holding two online seminars in the new year on legislative and parliamentary committees.
The first is On the Outskirts of Parliament – the Delegation for Women’s Rights where Claire Bloquet (Institute for Parliamentary Research, Berlin) will be discussing their prize-winning work about the French National Assembly. The seminar will take place on Monday 23rd January 2023, 14:00–15:30 UTC.
Full details of the event, including how to book your free tickets, can be found here.
The second is a book launch for Maya Kornberg‘s Inside Congressional Committees: Function and Dysfunction in the Legislative Process (Columbia University Press). The launch will take place on Monday 13th February 2023, 14:00–15:30 UTC.
Full details of the event, including how to book your free tickets, can be found here.
If you are not yet a member of RCLS, you can join (for free) here.
8. Petition against Job Losses at Birkbeck
You may have already heard the depressing news about the potential job losses at Birkbeck, including up to 7 in the Politics Department where PSA Parliaments has many friends.
You can read a BISA, UACES and PSA joint letter on the future of politics at Birkbeck here and you can sign a petition against the job losses here.
9. Recent Publications that have Caught Our Eye
John Connolly, Matthew Flinders, David Judge, Michael Torrance and Philippa Tudor have published an article, Institutions Ignored: A History of Select Committee Scrutiny in the House of Lords, 1968–2021, in Parliamentary History.
Anja Osei and Daniel Wigmore-Shepherd have published an article, Personal Power in Africa: Legislative Networks and Executive Appointments in Ghana, Togo and Gabon, in Government & Opposition.
And there are new issues of the Journal of Legislative Studies , the International Journal of Parliamentary Studies and Legislative Studies Quarterly out.
If you would like your published research to be featured in this section, please email Stephen with details.
10. Recently on the Blog
We published seven(!) great blogs this month:
- Multilevel blame and credit games: How is the European Union held responsible for economic crises? by Agni Poullikka
- There’s a time and place for prorogation — and this is it by Steven Chaplin
- How Sunak can restore integrity, professionalism and accountability by Meg Russell, Alan Renwick, Sophie Andrews-McCarroll and Lisa James
- Restoration and Renewal: Intimidation as a necessary evil? by Alex Prior
- Post-Johnson, constitutional combustion continues: But the fire can be extinguished by Andrew Blick and Peter Hennessy
- MPs, outside interests, and corporate boards – Too busy to serve? By Jack Newman and Matthew Smith
- Together and apart: Innovations in Prime Ministerial questioning in the Canadian House of Commons by Ruxandra Serban
If you have an idea for a blog on some aspect of parliamentary study, please get in touch with our communications officer, Chris.