53 research outputs found

    Combating Terrorism by Constraining Charities? Charity and Counterterrorism Legislation Before and After 9/11

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    This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Wiley via the DOI in this record.How does counter-terrorism legislation – enacted in democratic states – impact upon charities, intentionally or unintentionally? To address this question, we present a new analytical framework that allows us to compare, across established democracies, how charity and counterterrorism legislation are connected, enabling us to assess how charities’ legal environments have changed since 9/11. Comparing legislation across six long-lived democracies (UK, US, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Ireland), we distinguish between three types of legislative connection: overlap, direct intersection and indirect intersection. These categories differ in terms of the visibility of the connection established between the two areas of law. As high profile reform exercises, both overlap and direct intersections have been predominantly introduced post-9/11. But it is through indirect intersections that intensified post 9/11 which are most vague and difficult to manoeuvre, that the day-to-day activities of charities are most likely to be affected, with important empirical and normative repercussions.This research has received funding from a BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grant (SG-132160) and from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–13)/ERC grant agreement 335890 STATORG). This support is gratefully acknowledged

    Bias spectroscopy and simultaneous SET charge state detection of Si:P double dots

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    We report a detailed study of low-temperature (mK) transport properties of a silicon double-dot system fabricated by phosphorous ion implantation. The device under study consists of two phosphorous nanoscale islands doped to above the metal-insulator transition, separated from each other and the source and drain reservoirs by nominally undoped (intrinsic) silicon tunnel barriers. Metallic control gates, together with an Al-AlOx single-electron transistor, were positioned on the substrate surface, capacitively coupled to the buried dots. The individual double-dot charge states were probed using source-drain bias spectroscopy combined with non-invasive SET charge sensing. The system was measured in linear (VSD = 0) and non-linear (VSD 0) regimes allowing calculations of the relevant capacitances. Simultaneous detection using both SET sensing and source-drain current measurements was demonstrated, providing a valuable combination for the analysis of the system. Evolution of the triple points with applied bias was observed using both charge and current sensing. Coulomb diamonds, showing the interplay between the Coulomb charging effects of the two dots, were measured using simultaneous detection and compared with numerical simulations.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figure

    Charge-based silicon quantum computer architectures using controlled single-ion implantation

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    We report a nanofabrication, control and measurement scheme for charge-based silicon quantum computing which utilises a new technique of controlled single ion implantation. Each qubit consists of two phosphorus dopant atoms ~50 nm apart, one of which is singly ionized. The lowest two energy states of the remaining electron form the logical states. Surface electrodes control the qubit using voltage pulses and dual single electron transistors operating near the quantum limit provide fast readout with spurious signal rejection. A low energy (keV) ion beam is used to implant the phosphorus atoms in high-purity Si. Single atom control during the implantation is achieved by monitoring on-chip detector electrodes, integrated within the device structure, while positional accuracy is provided by a nanomachined resist mask. We describe a construction process for implanted single atom and atom cluster devices with all components registered to better than 20 nm, together with electrical characterisation of the readout circuitry. We also discuss universal one- and two-qubit gate operations for this architecture, providing a possible path towards quantum computing in silicon.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figure

    District-level explanations for supporter involvement in political parties: The importance of electoral factors

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    © The Author(s) 2017. Traditional analyses of grass roots involvement in political parties have focussed almost exclusively on formal members. However, recent analyses across a range of democracies have shown that non-members (supporters) are playing important roles within political parties, including election campaigning, candidate and leader selection, online policy deliberations and even policy formation. The growing literature on this topic suggests that the involvement of supporters may be a function of party structure and availability of online recruitment. Using new data collected at the 2015 British general election, this article extends the examination of supporter involvement but challenges these assumptions. It shows that supporter activity is better explained by responses to electoral factors and that the focus on online recruitment seriously underplays the enduring importance of human contact.UK Research & Innovation (UKRI) Economic and Social Research Council (grant no ES/M007251/1

    Party rules, party resources, and the politics of parliamentary democracies: how parties organize in the 21st Century

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    This article introduces the first findings of the Political Party Database (PPDB) project, a major survey of party organizations in parliamentary and semi-presidential democracies. The project’s first round of data covers 122 parties in 19 countries. In this paper we describe the scope of the database, then investigate what it tells us about contemporary party organization in these countries, focussing on parties’ resources, structures and internal decision-making. We examine organizational patterns by country and party family, and where possible we make temporal comparisons with older datasets. Our analyses suggest a remarkable coexistence of uniformity and diversity. In terms of the major organizational resources on which parties can draw, such as members, staff and finance, the new evidence largely confirms the continuation of trends identified in previous research: i.e., declining membership, but enhanced financial resources and more paid staff. We also find remarkable uniformity regarding the core architecture of party organizations. At the same time, however, we find substantial variation between countries and party families in terms of their internal processes, with particular regard to how internally democratic they are, and in the forms that this democratization takes

    Policy Fiascos, Blame Management and AWB Limited: The Howard Government's Escape from the Iraq Wheat Scandal

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    In 1999, the Australian government privatised the statutory Australian Wheat Board and created AWB Limited, transferring the Board's assets and its export monopoly to a grower-controlled company. In 2000, allegations surfaced that AWB Limited had made payments to Saddam Hussein's Iraqi regime in order to secure lucrative wheat exports worth $500 million per annum. Such actions violated the terms of the United Nations' Oil-for-Food Programme and became one of the biggest corporate scandals in Australian history. It also placed considerable pressure on senior ministers in John Howard's coalition government who were vulnerable on a number of issues, including the existence of numerous warning signs and the extent of ministerial awareness. The purpose of this article is to outline and examine the federal government's role in managing the ensuing blame game. It utilises literature on policy fiascos and blame management to create a conceptual framework that is then applied to the unfolding dynamics of the AWB Limited case. It examines issues such as the roles played by the Cole Inquiry and the political language of ministers in steering blame away from ministers and towards AWB Limited and the UN

    Selecting party leaders, reform processes and methods: Examining the Australian and New Zealand Labour parties

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    It is well documented that there has been significant change in the methods of political party leadership selection in recent years. It is now estimated that close to half of the parties in Western democracies use some form of ‘primaries’ for this purpose. However, research suggests there is marked variance in the methods used among parties that have adopted more inclusive processes. Using two qualitative comparative case studies, New Zealand Labour and the Australian Labor Party, this article identifies the main organizational decisions that stem from the choice to expand the leadership franchise. In doing so, we explore the range of options open to parties and examine the rationales supporting each of these. The relationship between the type of reform process undertaken and the decisions made is also explored

    Designing candidate selection methods: Exploring diversity in Australian political parties

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    The processes political parties use to select their candidates for public office constitute a crucial element of political recruitment in representative democracies and provide important insights into how power is distributed within party organisations. In this article, we develop a typology for understanding the diversity of preselection mechanisms in Australia's major parties that is based on degrees of influence between the central and local components of the party organisation. The typology in turn reflects preselection rules as public expressions of intra-party power sh

    Research Note: The Influence of Party Candidate Selection Methods on Candidate Diversity

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    In this research note we test the argument that centralised and exclusive nomination methods result in more diverse lists of candidates than do those organised with a more inclusive, decentralised selectorate. We do so using a database of candidate information compiled for the 2010 and 2013 Australian federal elections and an analysis of the House of Representatives sele
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