Category: News

News

Get involved

Post author By psaparliaments
Post date April 11, 2016

Attendees at the Legislatures in Uncertain Times conference, 17 November 2017, on a tour of the Scottish Parliament chamber

Blogs

We publish blogs on parliaments or legislatures each week, and always welcome new posts addressing topical issues or sharing new research. We also welcome blog posts or ideas from practitioners working within a parliament or legislature (for example, the inside look at the House of Lords Library by Matthew Purvis). Our blog includes posts on legislatures from across the globe, at national, sub-national and supra-national levels of governance.

We are very keen to increase the diversity of contributions to our blog, in particular, the number of blogs we publish from women, or people of colour. Blog submissions from early career researchers are also especially welcome.

If you have an idea for a blog and would like to discuss it further, please get in touch with our blog editor, Gavin Hart, at: g.hart@hud.ac.uk

We also publish overviews of national parliaments. Check out our current list, and contact us if you would like to contribute.

Twitter

If you’re on Twitter, you’ll know that we have a twitter account: @psa_parl. We are always happy to tweet/retweet news about our members’ work with parliament, so do copy us in, or use the hashtag #PSAParliaments, which we check regularly.

We welcome members tweeting from our own account for a day to cover specific events. If you (or one of your students) would like to cover a specific event through our Twitter account for a day, please get in touch with us. A few ideas: State Opening of Parliament, the new devolved legislatures, Prime Minister’s Questions, a specific select committee hearing, a specific debate/vote, a conference/workshop on parliaments and legislatures, etc., etc. – it’s whatever you would like to cover as long as it is relevant to the study and understanding of parliament(s). If you want to do this, please get in touch with us!

Tags legislative studies, social media, Twitter

Events News

Workshops on Methods

Post author By psaparliaments
Post date April 11, 2016

At our Annual General Meeting, we discussed the possibility of holding small workshops at a range of universities on methodological issues and training in legislative studies. Any of you could host one of these workshops, and we have funding available to help put these together. They do not need to be large workshops, and could comprise small groups of 6 or so people (or a larger group!). Similarly, it does not need to be a full day activity – a 1h30min workshop would be just as useful as a full day/afternoon one. The idea is that it explores a specific methodology issue in legislative studies. This is to build on the workshop we held last year (details here), and the feedback showed that it would be useful to do more of these but focused on specific approaches/techniques. Stephen Bates (Birmingham) has offered to run a workshop on quantitative analysis for legislative studies, for example.

If anyone else would like to run one in a different area, we would love to hear from you – just get in touch with us. As soon as we have details for workshops, including the one in Birmingham, we will circulate details.

Do get in touch, even if you just want more details about what we have organised so far and/or discuss a possible idea.

Tags legislative studies, methodology

Events News

Success at the PSA Annual Conference

Post author By psaparliaments
Post date April 4, 2016

We just wanted to share the great success that we had at the PSA Conference in Brighton last week – having held a range of panels and talks throughout Tuesday and Wednesday of the Conference.

Tags #psa16, PSA

News

Newsletter, 16 February 2016

Post author By psaparliaments
Post date February 17, 2016

Hello everyone,

A quick newsletter today. Please see information below on the following:

Our events at 2016 PSA annual conference
Our plans for 2016
Essay competition
On the blog
Committee inquiries
Impact conference at Warwick

If you have any notices/messages that you would like us to circulate to the group, let us know – it could be about disseminating an event, new research, new publication, etc. Please avoid sending attachments. Where possible, we would prefer circulating more substantive information through web links instead.

Best wishes,

Cristina (@estrangeirada), Louise (@LouiseVThompson) and Marc (@marcgeddes)

News

PSA Parliament Week

Post author By psaparliaments
Post date December 3, 2015

Over the course of Parliament Week, members of our specialist group organised workshops around the country from the University of Surrey to the University of Strathclyde to spread knowledge about the role of Parliament, and to seek ideas for the improvement of the way our parliamentary democracy works.

Tags Parliament Week

News

Parliament Week at the University of Strathclyde

Post author By psaparliaments
Post date December 3, 2015

For Parliament Week, the University of Strathclyde held a workshop as part of Parliament Week. One student offers his reflections here.

Tags Parliament Week

News

Essay Competition 2016

Post author By psaparliaments
Post date November 5, 2015

Following the success of our Essay Competition 2015, we are pleased to announce the launch of our Essay Competition 2016! The winner will be presented with a prize of £150. Last year’s winner was presented the award in the House of Commons by the Clerk of the House.

Tags essay competition, legislative studies, parliamentary studies

News

Research Impact and Parliament

Post author By psaparliaments
Post date November 5, 2015

On Monday, 02 November, the Research Impact and Parliament event was held. This was a great success, with great positive feedback. The event was about how academia’s research can have an impact on Parliament, which included some of our Specialist Group members who were there to showcase their research.

Tags academia, evidence, impact, Outreach, parliament, POST, public engagement, ref, research impact, universities

News

The Real X Factor: Voting past, present and future

Post author By psaparliaments
Post date October 27, 2015

Event hosted by Parliamentary Outreach and Politics and History at the University of Huddersfield

In May 2015 millions of people around the country voted in a General Election. This autumn millions of votes will be cast from computers and phones around the UK for reality TV shows. Cinema goers will also see Suffragette, which tells a story of the women who demanded the right to vote.

Tags history, voting