Seeing so many of you at our Annual Conference in November was an enormous pleasure. Despite Storm CiarĂ¡n interfering with travel plans, the early career symposium we held for the first time (co-organised with the PSA Early Career Network), the drinks reception and the conference were a great success. We had around 50 participants attending the conference in person and another 20 online. There was a fantastic lineup of presentations organised in five panels covering a wide range of relevant topics and parliaments in the UK and across the globe.
Thanks to Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey for hosting us at the LSE Department of Government, and to the Department and the journals of Parliamentary Affairs and British Politics for their sponsorships to help us make the conference a success and everyone well catered for.
The day kicked off with a few welcoming words from our Co-convenor Sean Haughey, the formal welcoming of our new Co-convenor Diana Stirbu and Communications Officer Jack Liddall, and a warm farewell to our outgoing Co-convenor Stephen Holden Bates. Thank you, Stephen, for all the time, ideas and positive energy you have dedicated to the group for over three years!
We then handed out awards to the winners of our annual undergraduate essay competition. You can read Phoebe Legard’s (University of Edinburgh) and Cameron Dasgupta’s (QMUL) winning essays here. Thank you, Alexandra Meakin, for judging!
The academic programme started with an insightful panel on the challenges and experiences of inclusion and (mental) well-being in the parliamentary workplace. The second panel featured the latest research on executive-legislative relations in the UK House of Commons, Scottish Parliament, Welsh Parliament and Israeli Knesset. The third panel focused on comparative perspectives on parliaments, with presentations on the UK, Germany, Central-Eastern Europe and Afghanistan. In the fourth panel, we explored the method of go-along interviews, seldom-heard groups’ perceptions of petitioning parliaments and the role of parliamentary turnover in authoritarian regimes. The programme was rounded off with a panel discussing legislative behaviour, procedures and select committees.
Thank you everyone for presenting, discussing and attending! If you have any feedback or suggestions for next year, please take a couple of minutes to fill in our post-conference survey or feel free to contact any of us.