Who stands in the way of women? Open vs. closed lists and candidate gender in Estonia

The literature on women's descriptive representation has looked at the debate on open and closed lists as a choice between electoral systems. This article instead focuses on whether voters or the parties are biased against female candidates. Using data from six Estonian elections, the article finds that voters are not consistently biased against female candidates and open lists do not necessarily decrease women's representation. However, unknown and non-incumbent female candidates fare significantly worse than similar men. The analysis also shows that parties do not place women in electable positions on closed lists, and closed lists do not improve women's representation

Structural Material Considerations for the First Graving Dock in St. John ’s, Newfoundland Harbour

The graving dock in St. John’s, Newfoundland is located at the south western end of the harbour at “River Head”. Its placement is ideal because it is more or less dry during low tide and occupies an area with little traffic. The first graving dock was of wood construction and the original contract dates back to 1882. In 1882 the advantages of having an upgraded dry dock were known for almost forty years. The earliest reference found was in 1856, when an American entrepreneur, Cyrus Field, published a pamphlet. It showed the advantages of the location of St. John’s along Atlantic shipping routes and he predicted a great future for St. John’s if the dock facilities could be improved. Up to 1882 a floating dry dock was employed, but this was not sustainable as the floating dock began to deteriorate and become unsafe for lifting purposes. Also, enlarging the floating dock would be superfluous. This put pressure on government, along with economic demands, to build a permanent graving dock in St. John’s. The government entered into a contract with J.E. Simpson and Sons of New York at a cost of $550,000, in 1882, for the construction of a wooden graving dock. Before work could commence, thorough research was conducted to ensure the most suitable structural material was selected for the graving dock in St. John’s. The Honourable J. J. Little and St. John’s Harbour Master, Commander G. Robinson, were sent to Boston, Charleston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington City to survey American dry docks for the government of Newfoundland. Little submitted his report on January 2nd, 1883, a bill to construct the graving dock was passed on April 21, 1883, work commenced in May of 1883 and the graving dock opened on December 10th, 1884. The following paper will give a brief history of the graving dock and discuss Little’s survey of the American dry docks through his correspondence with Engineers and those with vested interested in the ship industry. It will highlight the engineering challenges and advantages of both wooden and stone dry docks and it should become apparent why the wooden design was chosen

Leading from the Margins: Black Women\u27s Experiences Navigating Historically Black Colleges and Universities

A capstone submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Education in the Ernst and Sara Lane Volgenau College of Education at Morehead State University by Christina R. Caul on March 30, 2023

Disrupting Traditional Content Delivery Through Technology-Mediated Learning: A Student-Centered Approach

Traditional, lecture-based content delivery is not effective in cultivating problem-solving and deep content knowledge that future physicians need to be successful. To disrupt the norm, this project includes: driving student engagement through technology-mediated learning, providing adaptive modes of learning to cater to our diverse learners, and creating a feedback loop for student voice. The Stanford EdTech support team encourages faculty to adopt student-centered approaches by providing consultation and instructional technology tools. During synchronous classes, we support faculty with live polling, gamification, and interactive Q&A. For asynchronous content on our LMS, we support flipped-learning through media, interactive CFUs, and captioning with searchable transcripts. We’ve seen significant increases in student engagement as shown by student attendance, turn-in rates on ungraded activities, and evaluation data. Faculty also have more confidence to innovate with instructional technology. Conversely, some challenges included funding, piloting, faculty buy-in, and consistency across guest lecturers

Feminizing political parties: women’s party member organizations within European parliamentary parties

Party member women’s organizations were early features of party development. While some contemporary studies maintain these are important sites for the substantive representation of women, there is also a claim that they are in decline. Our primary purpose here is to establish the existence of party member women’s organizations – as one test of the first dimension of party feminization: the inclusion of women. We draw on new survey data of 17 European countries provided by Scarrow, Poguntke and Webb. We establish that almost half have a party member women’s organization. The new data also permits analysis of relationships between party member women’s organization and gender quotas for the top party leadership body (National Executive Committee (NEC)), women’s presence among the party leadership and candidate quota rules. Together we see these (i) as a means to establish whether women are marginalized within the party, thereby limiting descriptive representation and (ii) as surrogate measures for women’s substantive representation. We importantly find that the presence of a party member women’s organization does not come at the cost of women’s presence on the NEC. In the final section, we turn our attention to building a new comparative research agenda that more fully addresses substantive representation

Modelling the dynamics of support for a right-wing populist party: the case of UKIP

ABSTRACT: Similar to a number of other right-wing populist parties in Europe, Great Britain's United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) has experienced increased public support in recent years. Using aggregate data from monthly national surveys conducted between April 2004 and April 2014, time series analyses demonstrate that the dynamics of UKIP support were influenced by a combination of spatial and valence issues. A spatial issue, Euroscepticism, was fundamental, with UKIP support moving in dynamic equilibrium with changing public attitudes towards EU membership. In addition, widespread anti-immigration sentiment and dissatisfaction with the performance of the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government combined with the “oxygen of publicity” to propel UKIP's surge. The political context after the 2010 general election helped as well by enabling UKIP to benefit from valence considerations. Many voters continued to doubt the competence of the major opposition party, Labour, while the Liberal Democrats were part of the government and, hence, unavailable as a protest vehicle. Since many of the forces driving UKIP support are beyond its control, the party's prospects are highly uncertain