‘A naked scrap for party advantage, dressed up as a principled defence of democracy’: the House of Lords on the number of MPs and defining their constituencies

The Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government formed in May 2010 in the United Kingdom has instituted a programme of considerable electoral and constitutional reform. The first major element of this was the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill, which was debated at great length in Parliament over a five‐month period. During its passage through the House of Lords debate over this Bill raised a number of issues relating to both the country’s constitution and the role and operations of that House. This paper uses those debates, in particular the sections dealing with the number of MPs and the rules for defining constituencies, to illustrate those substantial concerns and their implications for the future role of the House of Lords.electoral reform, constitution, House of Lords

On Estimates of Split-Ticket Voting: EI and EMax

Cho and Gaines have recently criticized work by Burden and Kimball on split-ticket voting in the USA, suggesting that their estimates of the volume of such voting (derived using King�s EI method) across Congressional Districts and States are unreliable. Using part of the Burden-Kimball data set, we report on a parallel set of estimates generated by a different procedure (EMax), which employs three rather than two sets of bounds. The results are extremely similar to Burden and Kimball�s, providing strong circumstantial evidence for their conclusions regarding the impact of campaign spending and other influences on the volume of split-ticket voting

Charles Johnston to Frederick Johnston

In this letter to his father, Charles Johnston describes his artillery training at Craney Island as well as the possibility of an impending battle

Charles Johnston to Patty

In this letter, Charles Johnston writes to Patty regarding the state of the war, the evacuation of Richmond, the possibility of Yankee rule, and the possibility of an impending battle