373 research outputs found
What price an MP?
No full textThe MPs expenses scandal is prompting a sea change in attitudes towards the claiming of money by the UK's elected representatives and will cause the composition of Parliament to be very different in the future, says David Hencke Copyright (c) 2009 The Author. Journal compilation (c) 2009 ippr.
Deception and Britain's road to war in Iraq
No full textEver since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, there has been a widely shared public perception in the UK and beyond that the British government lied in making the case for war. One major theme has been the view that the Blair government lied about the strength of the intelligence about alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and the extent of the WMD capabilities claimed by that intelligence. A second theme that has received less attention has been the view that the Blair government lied in claiming that its actions at the United Nations (UN) were aimed at securing peaceful Iraqi compliance with its disarmament obligations. Instead, most think that the UK was actually committed to a policy of regime change by force and did not want the ‘UN route’ to produce a peaceful outcome. The article argues that the conceptual focus of the discussion needs to be broadened from lying to also considering deception by omission and deception by distortion as part of a campaign of organized political persuasion. It argues that, on the WMD intelligence, it is now apparent that a campaign of deceptive organized political persuasion was conducted by UK officials. With respect to the UN route, there is mounting evidence that the Blair government ran a campaign of deception on this issue as well to pave Britain’s road to war in Iraq
Adapting authoritarianism: institutions and co-optation in Egypt and Syria
No full textThis PhD thesis compares Egypt and Syria’s authoritarian political systems. While the tendency in social science political research treats Egypt and Syria as similarly authoritarian, this research emphasizes differences between the two systems with special reference to institutions and co-optation. Rather than reducibly understanding Egypt and Syria as sharing similar histories, institutional arrangements, or ascribing to the oft-repeated convention that “Syria is Egypt but 10 years behind,” this thesis focuses on how events and individual histories shaped each states current institutional strengthens and weaknesses. Specifically, it explains the how varying institutional politicization or de-politicization affects each state’s capabilities for co-opting elite and non-elite individuals.
Beginning with a theoretical framework that considers the limited utility of democratization and transition theoretical approaches, the work underscores the persistence and durability of authoritarianism. Chapter two details the politicized institutional divergence between Egypt and Syria that began in the 1970s. Chapter three and four examines how institutional politicization or de-politicization affects elite and non-elite individual co-optation in Egypt and Syria. Chapter five discusses the study’s general conclusions and theoretical implications.
This thesis’s argument is that Egypt and Syria co-opt elites and non-elites differently because of the varying degrees of institutional politicization in each governance system. Rather than view one country as more politically developed than the other, this work argues that Syria’s political institutions are more politicized than their Egyptian counterparts. Syria’s political arena is, thus, described as politicized-patrimonialism. Syria’s politicized-patrimonial arena produces uneven co-optation of elites and non-elites as they are diffused through competing institutions. Conversely, the Egyptian political arena remains highly personalized as weak institutions and individuals are manipulated and molded according to the president’s ruling clique. This is referred to as personalized-patrimonialism. As a consequence, Egypt’s political establishment demonstrates more flexibility in ad hoc altering and adapting its arena depending on the emergence of crises.
This study’s theoretical implications suggest that, contrary to modernization and democratization theory’s adage that institutions lead to a political development, politicized institutions within a patrimonial order actually hinder regime adaptation because consensus is harder to achieve and maintain. It is within this context that Egypt’s de-politicized institutional framework advantages its top political elite. In this reading of Egyptian and Syrian politics, Egypt’s personalized political arena is more adaptable than Syria’s. These conclusions do not indicate that political reform is a process underway in either state
David A. Croll ’24 (1900–1991)
No full textDavid Croll was born in Moscow and immigrated with his family to Canada when he was a young boy. An early advocate of welfare and other types of social assistance, Croll first worked as a lawyer then moved into politics. He served as the mayor of Windsor from 1931 to 1934 during the height of the Great Depression. Croll insisted the city go into deficit in order to provide relief programs for the unemployed and destitute. He became Canada’s first Jewish cabinet minister when he was appointed the Minister of Public Welfare under Mitchell Hepburn’s Liberal government. While serving as Minister of Labour, Croll resigned from Hepburn’s Cabinet, after the Premier sided with General Motors during the 1937 United Auto Workers Strike in Oshawa. He wrote: “I would rather walk with the workers than ride with General Motors.” After another term as mayor of Windsor, and service with the Canadian Army during WWII, he was elected as an MP for Toronto-Spadina riding. Croll became Canada’s first Jewish senator in 1955. He was the author of an influential report on poverty, which moved the Trudeau government to triple family allowances and institute the Child Tax Credit in 1978. Croll was also responsible for several Senate reports on aging. In 1990, he was sworn into the Queen\u27s Privy Council, an honour usually given only to federal cabinet ministers.https://digitalcommons.osgoode.yorku.ca/catalysts/1015/thumbnail.jp
Political life writing in the Pacific
No full textThis book aims to reflect on the experiential side of writing political lives in the Pacific region. The collection touches on aspects of the life writing art that are particularly pertinent to political figures: public perception and ideology; identifying important political successes and policy initiatives; grappling with issues like corruption and age-old political science questions about leadership and ‘dirty hands’. These are general themes but they take on a particular significance in the Pacific context and so the contributions explore these themes in relation to patterns of colonisation and the memory of independence; issues elliptically captured by terms like ‘culture’ and ‘tradition’; the nature of ‘self’ presented in Pacific life writing; and the tendency for many of these texts to be written by ‘outsiders’, or at least the increasingly contested nature of what that term means
David A. Croll ’24 (1900–1991)
No full textDavid Croll was born in Moscow and immigrated with his family to Canada when he was a young boy. An early advocate of welfare and other types of social assistance, Croll first worked as a lawyer then moved into politics. He served as the mayor of Windsor from 1931 to 1934 during the height of the Great Depression. Croll insisted the city go into deficit in order to provide relief programs for the unemployed and destitute. He became Canada’s first Jewish cabinet minister when he was appointed the Minister of Public Welfare under Mitchell Hepburn’s Liberal government. While serving as Minister of Labour, Croll resigned from Hepburn’s Cabinet, after the Premier sided with General Motors during the 1937 United Auto Workers Strike in Oshawa. He wrote: “I would rather walk with the workers than ride with General Motors.” After another term as mayor of Windsor, and service with the Canadian Army during WWII, he was elected as an MP for Toronto-Spadina riding. Croll became Canada’s first Jewish senator in 1955. He was the author of an influential report on poverty, which moved the Trudeau government to triple family allowances and institute the Child Tax Credit in 1978. Croll was also responsible for several Senate reports on aging. In 1990, he was sworn into the Queen\u27s Privy Council, an honour usually given only to federal cabinet ministers.https://digitalcommons.osgoode.yorku.ca/catalysts/1015/thumbnail.jp
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Mersenne Numbers: consolidated results
No full textThis document provides and comments on the results of the Lucas-Lehmer testing and/or partial factorisation of all Mersenne Numbers Mp = 2^p-1 where p is prime and less than 100,000. Previous computations have either been confirmed or corrected.
The LLT computations on the ICL DAP is the first implementation of Fast-Fermat-Number-Transform multiplication in connection with Mersenne Number testing.
This paper championed the disciplines of systematically testing the Mp, and of double-sourcing results which were not manifestly correct. Both disciplines were adopted by the later GIMPS initiative, the 'Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, which was itself one of the first web-based distributed-community projects
Search for triboson production in collisions at TeV with the ATLAS detector
No full textSee paper for full list of authors - Comments: 39 pages in total, author list starting page 23, 5 figures, 7 tables, submitted to European Physics Journal C, All figures including auxiliary figures are available at https://atlas.web.cern.ch/Atlas/GROUPS/PHYSICS/PAPERS/STDM-2015-07/International audienceThis paper reports a search for triboson production in two decay channels ( and with ) in proton-proton collision data corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 20.3 fb at a centre-of-mass energy of 8 TeV with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider. Events with exactly three charged leptons, or two leptons with the same electric charge in association with two jets, are selected. The total number of events observed in data is consistent with the Standard Model (SM) predictions. The observed 95 % confidence level upper limit on the SM production cross section is found to be 730 fb with an expected limit of 560 fb in the absence of SM production. Limits are also set on anomalous quartic gauge couplings
First Analysis of Multiple Paternity in an Oviparous Shark, the Small-Spotted Catshark (Scyliorhinus canicula L.)
No full textMultiple paternity (MP) has been demonstrated in a variety of sharks, although its prevalence and the number of sires per litter vary considerably among species. To date, such analyses have focused on viviparous species that possess only part of the wide spectrum of reproductive strategies developed in elasmobranchs. We analyzed MP in an oviparous species, the small-spotted catshark (Scyliorhinus canicula). In total, 150 neonates originating from 13 different mothers were genotyped using 12 microsatellite loci. MP was commonplace, with progeny from 92% of females sired by multiple males. This result is consistent with the reproductive biology of the species, particularly its protracted breeding season and potential for long-term sperm storage. The significance of these findings is discussed in light of small-spotted catshark behavior, which suggests that the cost of avoiding mating attempts initiated by males may be high and is therefore supportive of convenience polyandry as an explanation for MP. Eggs were followed from the time they were laid to when they hatched, offering a rare opportunity to investigate juvenile development in more detail
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