Convenors: Oscar Mazzoleni (Lausanne) and Duncan McDonnell (Birmingham/Torino)

Deadline for paper proposals: 17 September 2010

Party change and crisis has been a key theme for political science in recent decades, in particular as regards the capacity of Western European parties to adapt to a series of new structural challenges. One of the less explored of these challenges is that posed by the introduction of direct election for mayors, the strengthening of local executives and the weakening of council chambers. With the focus on single personalities rather than parties during campaigns and greater (at least formal) independence for mayors and their executives, party elites and representatives at local level have had to contend with a new set of structures and opportunities influencing not only their relationship with local government, but also with local party members and voters. The aim of this panel therefore is to consider these issues by looking, in particular, at the following inter-related questions:

• · In those contexts where directly-elected mayors have been introduced in recent decades, what effects has this had on the relationships between parties and candidates/mayors?

• · What effects has the strengthening of local executives had on relationships between parties and mayors/executives?

• · What effects have all the above had on the role of local councillors?

• · What effects have the changes in local politics had on party organizations and memberships at grassroots level?

• · What effects have the changes in local politics had on party campaigning, candidate selection and funding?

• · How do relationships between parties, councillors and mayors function in those countries which have had directly-elected mayors and more independent executives for many decades? How are the roles and actions of parties at local level different?

We welcome papers on single city/party case-studies and those which adopt comparative national/cross-national/cross-party perspectives. Preference however will be given to those papers which are based on original empirical research.

Those wishing to participate should send their paper title, affiliation and contact details along with an abstract of no more than 200 words by 17 September 2010 to oscar.mazzoleni@unil.ch and duncan.mcdonnell@unito.it.

For more information, please visit the conference website at http://www.psa.ac.uk/2011/.

Most journalists don’t care much about the law. The finer points of multiple concurring opinions are hardly catnip for the press corps — if indeed one can talk of a corps covering the UK Supreme Court rather than a few isolated snipers. If the Supreme Court is ever to gain widespread media attention — and commentators have noted just how difficult this is — it will be through high-profile split decisions.

Bare majorities on the court, such as the 5-4 split seen in JFS, are rather exciting to the outsider who knows nothing about the law (and I include myself amongst that number). Put crudely, they provide a score-line, and aid a narrative of the court as engaged in a battle between sides, rather than a collaborative effort to divine the meaning of the law, whatever that might be.

There are good reasons for thinking that the new UKSC ought to be more dissentient than the Judicial Committee of the House of Lords. More judgements are heard by more judges, and research has shown that larger bench sizes tend to produce more dissenting opinions. The composition of the court is more consistent, and the circulation of draft opinions seems to be more extensive, both factors which could either promote consensus or, should a draft opinion strike a bum note, end up polarizing justices and creating clear lines of demarcation.

At the same time, we can overstate the reasons for change. The court’s preference for a single majority opinion in preference to the seriatim judgements of old seems, to me, to demonstrate a preference for unanimity in order to strengthen the authority of the new court. Most of the justices on the Court came from the Lords. And the kind of claims possible within the various British legal systems do not seem, on the face of it, to be as likely to provoke dissent as the claims possible in other jurisdictions with constitutionally protected rights.

The graph below helps us tackle the issue. It shows the percentage of unanimous decisions for five different courts — the House of Lords, the US and Canadian Supreme Courts, the Australian High Court, and the South African Supreme Court of Appeal and, from 1995, the Constitutional Court. The graph is based on data collected by a number of political scientists in each of these jurisdictions, and are broadly comparable. Note that unanimous decisions are decisions where no judge dissented with respect to the outcome of the appeal; they may include separate judgements which concur in the outcome but disagree over the ratio decidendi. Occasionally this ignores significant differences in opinion between judges (Smith v. Sec. State for Defence being one good example)

As the graph shows, the House of Lords, as was, displays much greater comity than its Canadian, Australian or American counterparts, and is only bested in the percentage of unanimous decisions by the South African courts. On average, about one case in five results in a dissenting opinion, but this ratio has changed over time, with fewer dissenting opinions in the eighties against relatively more in the seventies.

How then does the new UKSC compare to the House of Lords? Well, out of the fifty-seven judgements reported on BAILII, ten involved a dissenting opinion, meaning 82% of decisions were unanimous — almost exactly the same percentage found in the House of Lords. (Marked by the dot on the graph).

Admittedly, some of the dissents registered by the new court are more significant than others, with bare majorities of 5 to 4 (JFS), 4 to 3 (R (Electoral Commission) v City of Westminster Magistrates Court & UKIP [2010] UKSC 40; R (Sainsbury’s Supermarkets Ltd) v Wolverhampton City Council), and 3 to 2 (Star Energy Weald Basin v Bocardo; Martin v. HM Advocate). But unless these cases are portents of greater dissentience down the road, it seems that the UKSC has continued in the same path ploughed by the House of Lords.

Anyone know how much, as a percent, each party asks its deputies and senators to contribute to the party from their indennità? or how this is enforced? or if there’s a paper trial?

This is why it pays to establish your own micro-party in Italian politics.

And this is when Berlusconi is at his best. It’s not quite the LBJ treatment, but I imagine it’s almost as effective.

So Berlusconi and Fini have fallen out, and the Popolo della Libertà has split.

Berlusconi wants Fini to leave the post of President of the Chamber of Deputies, but, as I mentioned before, there are no provisions for no-confidencing the President of the Chamber.

Berlusconi’s allies are giving the example of Sandro Pertini, who offered his resignation as President of the Chamber following a split within the PSU (the unified Socialist Party). Read the transcript here.

Of course, perhaps part of the reason Pertini offered his resignation was that he knew it would be rejected. In that case, the comparison might be thought to be a little disingenuous.

Here.

Here is the paper I’ll be presenting at LSE today, a slightly revised version of my PSA paper with Christel Koop.

Fresh from… well, fresh from doing something, one presumes, the Italian parliament is ready to vote on a law hamstringing the press even further (the so-called <a href=”http://www.repubblica.it/politica/2010/05/19/news/senato_accelera-4186524/?ref=HRER1-1″>legge bavaglio</a>).

The main provisions of the law relate to the publication of leaks from public prosecutors’ office: in particular, a ban on any information before the initial hearing, a ban on publication of wiretap evidence, and a ban on concealed recording. It is, of course, entirely coincidental that this law should have risen to prominence after a network of corrupt exchanges was uncovered through… leaks from prosecutors’ offices.

Before I sat down to write this, I checked the UK legal situation to see if there were any laws similar in effect (if not in intent) to those proposed by the majority in the parliament. Okay, wiretap evidence is much less common in the UK than in Italy, so some of these concerns aren’t raised, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that the one time the Crown Prosecution service tried to go after the journalist rather than the leak, they were <a href=”http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article5251192.ece”>laughed out of court</a>.

This was largely (as far as I can tell without having the text of the judgement) on the grounds that journalists had a right under Article 10 of the EHCR to publish information given to them.

So this legislation too would probably go against the ECHR. Hell, it probably also goes against the Italian constitution. But then I think that both of those could also be said of Italian defamation legislation — and that remains an extremely handy tool for politicians.

[See this video if you want to know the reason behind the title]

So people have noted that if Elena Kagan becomes a Supreme Court Justice, every member of that Court will have been to either Harvard or Yale.

It could be worse: every member of the Bulgarian Constitutional Cour has been to the same university.

I was inspired by this post at The Monkey Cage to repeat an exercise I’ve previously carried out for Italy: namely, to calculate the expected duration of the new cabinet using some off-the-shelf models. I think it’ll last a full five year term — here’s why.

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