Quality of Scottish democracy

The founders of Scottish devolution intended to create a ‘new politics’ that would be less adversarial than British politics. Some of their aspirations resonate with the basic themes of freedom, equality and democratic control in the quality of democracy literature dating back to the 1970s. Authors of this literature disagree on some aspects of what constitutes democratic quality, so a distinction can be made between minimalist and maximalist democratic conceptualisations. This chapter provides examples of both types of conceptualisation present before and after devolution, noting that more recent developments are pushing Scotland in the highly contested maximalist direction

Join the Club - On the Attractiveness of Golf Club Membership

This paper concerns the attractiveness for member ship in Swedish golf clubs. A representative voter model is derived and the attractiveness for member ship in golf clubs estimated using a unique data set on qualities of the golf course, the quality of neighboring courses and characteristics regarding the region where the golf club is located. Characteristics and composition of population within the municipality where the club is located have a significant impact on the attractiveness of the club. The attractiveness increases as the share of number of junior members decrease. Golf is found to be a substitute to publicly financed goods. Keywords: spatial econometrics, sports, utility maximization JEL classification: D71, L83, R12

Calibration Systems of the ATLAS Tile Calorimeter

TileCal is the hadronic calorimeter covering the most central region of the ATLAS experiment at the LHC. This sampling calorimeter uses iron plates as absorber and plastic scintillating tiles as the active material. A multi-faceted calibration system allows to monitor and equalize the calorimeter response at each stage of the signal production, from scintillation light to digitization. This calibration system is based on signal generation from different sources: a Cs radioactive source, laser light, charge injection and minimum bias events produced in proton-proton collisions. A brief description of the different TileCal calibration systems is given and the latest results on their performance in terms of calibration factors, linearity and stability are presented.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures. For the 32nd Symposium on Physics in Collision, Strbske Pleso 12th - 15th September 201

Mobile satellite services: International co-ordination, co-operation and competition

In the context of a discussion of international cooperation, coordination and competition regarding mobile satellite services, it is asserted that: there will be more than one civil mobile satellite service in the 1990's; competition between these separate mobile satellite systems is inevitable; no system should enjoy monopoly protection or subsidies; and coordination and cooperation are desirable and necessary, since the available L-band spectrum is in short supply

Using Spatial Econometrics to Analyze Local Growth in Sweden

This paper investigates factors that determine the average income growth and net migration rates in Swedish municipalities during the period 1981 to 1999. The main issue is to test the hypothesis that, conditional on a set of other possible determinants of regional growth, the growth rate in one municipality is affected by the growth rates in its neighboring municipalities. We also test the hypothesis of conditional convergence, that is, the hypothesis that initially 'poorer' regions tend to grow faster than initially 'richer' regions conditional on the other explanatory variables in the model. We find a positive correlation between net migration rates in neighboring municipalities, which suggests that net migration tend to 'spill over' to neighboring municipalities. When it comes to average income growth, our results indicate spatial dependence in the error terms during the 1980's. Such dependence is important in the sense that it indicates that shocks into the system not only affect the municipality where the shock has its origin but spread across the country. In addition, and in contrast to previous empirical findings based on Swedish data, we do not find any clear evidence in favour of the hypothesis of conditional convergence. Instead, our results predict conditional divergence between municipalities located in the Stockholm region throughout the period and also for municipalities outside the Stockholm region during the 1990's.

A Leap in the Dark. From a Large Actor to a Large Approach: The Joint Committee of the Nordic Social Democratic Labour Movement and the Crisis of the Nordic Model.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the Nordic Social Democratic parties’ own efforts to manage the inner and outer challenges of the so-called Nordic welfare model. The relationship between what Social Democracy does and the shaping of the welfare state seems, quite simply, no longer as direct and unproblematic. How should their political endeavours be understood if they can no longer unquestioningly be described as an expression of a movement that builds, refines, or defends tooth and nail a welfare model of a particular Nordic type? How have the Nordic Social Democrats legitimised their actions in recent decades? What role has the notion of a Nordic model played in the change or transformation process that has taken place? In practice, the answers to these questions depend on developments in the national parties. Social Democracy in the Nordic countries is not a uniform subject. Although there are many common features, Nordic Social Democrats have always worked under varied conditions, sought different paths toward reform, entered into different coalitions, and faced different problems. There is, however, a common denominator for a more general line of reasoning to be found in discussions of the future of the Nordic model that began in the late 1970s within the Joint Committee of the Nordic Social Democratic Labour Movement (Arbetarrörelsens nordiska samarbetskommitté, SAMAK). This paper will focus on the activities of this Nordic co-operative body.Nordic Social Democratic Labour Movement; Nordic Model

Doomed to failure? UKIP and the organisational challenges facing right-wing populist anti-political establishment parties

Using the UK Independence Party, we examine the effects of sudden electoral success on an Anti-Political Establishment (APE) party. The pressures of aspiring to government necessitate organisational structures resembling those of mainstream parties, while this aspiration challenges APE parties because they differ not just in terms of their policy profiles, but also in their more ‘unorthodox’ organisational make-up, inextricably linked to their electoral appeal. Robert Kilroy-Silk wanted to emphasise office-seeking goals while most members wanted the party to remain true to its APE status and not sacrifice its populist nature. This inevitably resulted in internal party conflict

Electoral system reviews in New Zealand, Britain and Canada: a critical comparison

This article compares the use of people outside government to consider electoral reform in three countries using the single-member plurality electoral system. The composition of electoral reform bodies, ranging from commissions of experts (New Zealand) and ex- politicians (Britain) to assemblies of randomly selected citizens (British Columbia), appears to have influenced how well their recommendations were received by the public. Governments should be careful not to assume that they can retain control of the electoral reform process once they let it out of their hands, as the cases of New Zealand and British Columbia show, where majorities of the voters chose reform