Upper house

Abstract: Section 1: Conceptualizing and Designing the Project 1. Introducing the Internet and Elections Project 2. The Internet and Elections Project Research Design Section 2: Political Actors as Web Producers 3. Finland: The European Parliament Election in a Candidate-Centered Electoral System 4. The Netherlands: Party and Candidate Web Sites during the 2004 European Parliament Election Campaign 5. Slovenian Online Campaigning during the 2004 European Parliament Election: Struggling Between Self-promotion and Mobilization 6. The Consequence of e-Excellence: Party Web Sites in the Czech Campaign for the 2004 European Parliament 7. Online Structure for Political Action in the 2004 U.S. Congressional Electoral Web Sphere Section 3: Reaching Diverse Constituencies Via the Web 8. Philippines: Poli-Clicking as Politicking. Online Campaigning and Civic Action in the 2004 National Election 9. The Internet in the 2004 Sri Lankan Elections 10. Addressing Young People Online: The 2004 European Parliament Election Campaign and Political Youth Web Sites 11. Two Indias: The Role of the Internet in the 2004 National Elections Section 4: Political Culture and the Diffusion of Technologies 12. Web-based Citizen Engagement in the 2004 Australian Federal Election 13. Hungary: Political Strategies and Citizen Tactics in the 2004 European Parliament Elections 14. Internet Deployment in the 2004 Indonesian Presidential Elections 15. Roles and Regulations: Boundaries on the Japanese Web Sphere in the 2004 Upper House Election 16. Web Sphere Analysis for Political Web Sites: The 2004 National Assembly Election in South Korea Section 5: Comparisons and Conclusions 17. Comparing Web Production Practices across Electoral Web Spheres 18. Project Conclusions and Proposals for Continued Research

Abstract: Female presence in India’s state and national legislatures hovers at ten percent. Concerns that this limits the political voice available to women has led to the introduction and subsequent passage of a Reservation Bill in the Upper house of the Indian Parliament (Times of India, March 9 2010). The bill seeks to reserve 33% of India’s state and national legislature positions for women. If implemented 181 out of the 543 National legislators and 1,370 out of the 4,109 State legislators will be women. Several studies demonstrate that men and women differ in their political and policy preferences (Edlund and Pande, 2002; Miller, 2008). Furthermore, as voters are typically unable to enforce full policy commitment by their legislator, implemented policies often reflect policy-makers’ preferences (Besley and Coate, 1997; Pande, 2003). Political under-representation of women, thus, potentially biases policy-making away from female policy interests. These arguments provide important motivations for gender-based affirmative action policies. Consistent with this view, a number of ∗The authors are from Northwestern University, MIT, Harvard and IMF respectively. We thank Catherine Lee for painstaking work on coding the transcripts and research assistance and Logan Clark for editorial assistance. We thank IPF participants and especially Devesh Kapur, Hari Nagarajan and Suman Bery for comments. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not implicate the International Monetary Fund, its management, or Executive Board.

Abstract: cross-temporally. Taking advantage of this "natural experiment," we derive and test six specific hypotheses. Our most robust findings are that the rate of factional affiliation varies directly with the level of intraparty competition induced by these different regimes and that Upper House members with cabinet experience are more likely to be factionally affiliated than those without. We also find that smaller factions died out sooner in the Upper House and that the distribution of factional strengths was more skewed there. he literature on party systems contains two central themes. The first is that the number and characteristics of parties can be traced to the incentives produced by electoral rules (Duverger 1954; Taagepera and Shugart 1989; Cox 1997). The second is that party systems emerge as by-products of social cleavages (Lipset and Rokkan 1967). Debate over the source of intraparty factions follows a similar pattern, with some stressing electoral incentives while others point to cultural predispositions. Although recent analyses (Ordeshook and Shvetsova 1994; Amorim Neto and Cox 1998) attempt to control for cleavage structures in assessing the impact of electoral rules, they can do so only with relatively crude indicators, such as the effective number of ethnic groups. Fortunately, countries with bicameral legislatures produce "natural experiments" that provide superior means of controlling for differing cleavage structures. Elections for two separate legislative chambers in the same country at the same (or nearly the same) time better allow us to see the impact of electoral rules, since social cleavages-and other country-specific factors, such as political culture-are held constant. Candidates and parties should adapt to the particular electoral niches created by the rules for each house and-insofar as those niches differ across chambers-the number, size, and internal organization of parties should differ as well. In this paper, we examine variation in the number and characteristics of party factions. We focus on Japanese politics, specifically on the longdominant Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), whose factions have been much studied but with little attention to the explanatory leverage provided by bicameralism. If different electoral rules can create different incentives for the formation and sustenance of intraparty factions-a key contention of many recent studies of Japanese elections-then intercameral differences in electoral rules ought to produce different factional structures in

Abstract: The Constitution of the United Kingdom is no single written document but consists mainly of customary law, statutes with a “constitutional” character and common law, that is case law. There is no technical difference between ordinary statutes and law considered “Constitutional Law”. The United Kingdom is a unitary state which is divided into the four constituent countries of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. The Government of Wales Act of 31 July 1998, the Scotland Act of 19 November 1998 and the Northern Ireland Act of 19 November 1998 conferred a certain regional autonomy upon the three countries. Each now has its own Parliament and executive. Gibraltar has the status of a Crown Colony of the United Kingdom. Each is further subdivided for the purposes of local government. The United Kingdom is a Constitutional Monarchy with a parliamentary form of government. Parliament consists of an upper house, the House of Lords, and a lower house, the House of Commons. The House of Commons has 646 deputies who are elected by the people on the basis of a majority vote. The House of Lords consists of 731 members with the majority being Life Peers. The Head of State is the Monarch who is to give royal assent to every bill passed by the two houses. The Monarch appoints the Prime Minister who is the leader of the largest party in the House of Commons. The Prime Minister then chooses a cabinet.