An electoral calculus? Dual incentives and committee assignment in the UK's mixed-member legislatures

Although mixed-member electoral systems offer an apparent opportunity to observe how different rules shape politicians’ behaviour, ‘contamination’ between the SMD and PR-list tiers has frequently confounded academic work. Investigating Scotland and Wales’ mixed-member legislatures by exploiting their different chamber sizes and an unusual dual candidacy prohibition in Wales, modelling of committee assignments uncovers a split finding. Controlling for membership of the lead governing party, list members have a higher committee workload than their constituency colleagues, and members with previous employment experience in justice and health are more likely to be assigned to the corresponding subject committee once elected. Elsewhere, expectations that members might seek assignments that best suit theorized re-election interests are not found. The hypothesized influence of electoral rules is strongly conditioned by the small size of the legislature in Wales

Compact Superconducting Crabbing and Deflecting Cavities

Recently, new geometries for superconducting crabbing and deflecting cavities have been developed that have significantly improved properties over those the standard TM110 cavities. They are smaller, have low surface fields, high shunt impedance and, more importantly for some of them, no lower-order-mode with a well-separated fundamental mode. This talk will present the status of the development of these cavities

How institutional culture trumps tier effects: evidence from government responsiveness to FOI requests

Claims that decentralization could improve government accountability and responsiveness led to its adoption as a policy objective across the globe. But recent empirical work finds little evidence of ‘tier effects’ in practice; instead, significant variation exists even between most-similar bodies. Recognizing the value of FOI in facilitating large-scale data collection, and that the UK’s institutional diversity offers an important source of between- and within-tier variation, I compile a large new dataset by emailing two separate FOI requests to 812 UK public bodies with an executive function. Identifying significant variation in timeliness and quality between UK territories, I argue that differing foundational motives can help explain patterns of responsiveness between institutions established by transparency-facing reforms and those designed to resolve conflict. A lack of evidence that by lower-tier governments are generally more responsive reaffirms the recent challenges to the more fundamental claims about decentralization that informed academic debate and real-world practice

Essays on the political economy of decentralization

This thesis consists of three papers that make a distinctive contribution to the study of decentralization in the areas of fiscal policy, legislative behavior and government responsiveness. The first paper revisits theories of substate tax policy that usually draw on evidence from stable federations. Investigating fiscal decentralization reforms in four European countries subject to intense center-periphery territorial competition, I find that incentives operating in such systems generate a paradox whereby prominent autonomist regions are among the least likely to make proactive changes after decentralization. I theorize this as the best response to central government attempts at blame-shifting by locking regions into making controversial policy changes. The frequent alignment of autonomist parties as ‘catch-all’ parties buttresses incentives to avoid tax innovation. The second paper picks up these themes of institutional constraints and electoral incentives faced by political actors. Addressing a frequently confounding question in the field, I exploit the unusual treatment of dual candidacy in the UK’s devolved legislatures to examine whether mixed-member electoral systems influence the legislative behavior of reelection-seeking politicians and uncover a split finding. Although there is some evidence that status as a list or constituency member influences members’ assignments, other connections to members’ presumed re-election interests are not found. I contend that the influence of electoral rules is conditioned by contextual factors including re-selection procedures, chamber size and strong parties. Building on insights from the first paper, the third paper empirically scrutinizes expectations from fiscal federalism theory that lower tiers of government should be more responsive to citizens. Using the responses from two waves of FOI requests emailed to 812 public bodies, I develop objective measures of timeliness and quality which identify significant variations in responsiveness across the tiers and territories of the UK. I argue that the theoretical foundations of traditional fiscal federalism theory are inadequate because they ignore institutions’ cultural underpinnings, capacity constraints and principal-agent relationships shaping public officials’ behavior

Internal coordination of social security in the United Kingdom

Although social security is traditionally viewed as a highly centralized function in the UK, health care and long-term care have long been devolved to sub-state governments, an arrangement requiring extensive internal coordination agreements. This coordination has various objectives, including ensuring parity of benefits provision in Northern Ireland (where social assistance is devolved) and Great Britain (where it is centralized), securing financial reimbursements for cross-border health care provision, and determining responsibility and eligibility criteria for individuals in need of social care. Further devolution and decentralization of social security benefits over the past decade have made such coordination arrangements even more essential

Superconducting Accelerating Cavity Pressure Sensitivity Analysis and Stiffening

The Soreq Applied Research Accelerator Facility (SARAF) design is based on a 40 MeV 5 mA light ions superconducting RF linac. Phase-I of SARAF delivers up to 2 mA CW proton beams in an energy range of 1.5 - 4.0 MeV. The maximum beam power that we have reached is 5.7 kW. Today, the main limiting factor to reach higher ion energy and beam power is related to the HWR sensitivity to the liquid helium coolant pressure fluctuations. The HWR sensitivity to helium pressure is about 60 Hz/mbar. The cavities had been designed, a decade ago, to be soft in order to enable tuning of their novel shape. However, the cavities turned out to be too soft. In this work we found that increasing the rigidity of the cavities in the vicinity of the external drift tubes may reduce the cavity sensitivity by a factor of three. A preliminary design to increase the cavity rigidity is presented

Analysing vote choice in a multinational state:National identity and territorial differentiation in the 2016 Brexit vote

Striking territorial variations in the 2016 Brexit referendum are neglected in the explanatory literature, a gap our analysis of British Election Study helps to fill. Rather than modelling Britain as one political system, we present parallel models for England, Scotland and Wales. Typical in other multi-national states, this approach is innovative for ‘British politics’. To analyse complex multi-level national identities, we develop a Relative Territorial Identity (RTI) measure. Substantively, RTI predicts Brexit vote-choice. Since voters who prioritise English identity tended to vote Leave, while the obverse was true in Wales and Scotland, RTI helps to explain territorial differentiation

Wales' fiscal future: A path to sustainability?

As we enter the third decade of devolution, Wales’ fiscal landscape is subject to considerable political and economic uncertainty, from the UK’s recent departure from the European Union and second round of negotiations over future trading relations, to increased interest in questions relating to Wales’ constitutional future. This report is an attempt to provide a sober assessment of Wales’ current fiscal position as part of the UK, considers what would need to change for the fiscal deficit to reduce, and finally explores some of the fiscal and economic implications of Welsh independence. While not a comprehensive assessment, it is hoped this report will stimulate an informed and wide-ranging debate

Government Expenditure and Revenue Wales 2019

Government Expenditure and Revenue Wales 2019 presents a comprehensive multi-year analysis of Wales’ public sector spending, public sector revenues and the nation’s overall net fiscal balance. The findings reflect Wales’ current fiscal position according to the accounting conventions of the UK government. Using data sourced from the Country and Regional Public Sector Finances datasets published by the ONS, it is designed to enhance public understanding of Wales’ fiscal position and contribute to the continuing debate over Wales’ fiscal and economic future

Tactical interventions in online hate speech: The case of #stopIslam

This article sets out findings from a project focused on #stopIslam, a hashtag that gained prominence following the Brussels terror attack of 2016. We initially outline a big data analysis which shows how counter-narratives – criticizing #stopIslam – momentarily subverted negative news reporting of Muslims. The rest of the article details qualitative findings that complicate this initial positive picture. We set out key tactics engaged in by right-wing actors, self-identified Muslim users, would-be allies and celebrities and elucidate how these tactics were instrumental in the direction, dynamics and legacies of the hashtag. We argue that the tactical interventions of tightly bound networks of right-wing actors, as well as the structural constraints of the platform, not only undermined the longevity and coherence of the counter-narratives but subtly modulated the affordances of Twitter in ways that enabled these users to extend their voice outwards, reinforcing long-standing representational inequalities in the process