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Restoration and renewal of the Palace of Westminster is essential to remedy many thousands of issues and defects. Multidisciplinary collaboration and BIM are making that work possible

Macedonia – New Challenges and Difficult Compromises (2016−2019) After the SDSM (Socijaldemokratski sojuz na Makedonija – Social Democratic Union of Macedonia) took over the government in 2017, the party proposed reforms which, although fundamental for the future of the country, were difficult to accept by the majority of Macedonian society. Nevertheless, SDSM’s policy, approved and monitored by the European Union and the US, was to lead to Macedonia joining NATO and EU structures in the near future. It should also be noted that both the US and the EU are strategic partners of the Republic, which actively support the processes taking place there. Having signed the agreement with Greece, on 17 June 2018 the Republic of Macedonia changed its official name. After the entry into force of the amendments to the Constitution and ratification of the Greek-Macedonian bilateral agreement by both parties, the country adopted the name of the Republic of North Macedonia (mac. Република Серверна Македонија). In February 2019, just after the parliaments of North Macedonia and Greece ratified the Prespa Agreement, the accession process of North Macedonia to NATO began. The condition for accession was the consent of the parliaments of all members of the Alliance for enlargement. Immediately after such approval, on 27 March 2020, the decision on membership was announced in Brussels by its chairman, Jens Stoltenberg. Macedonia’s relations with Bulgaria and Serbia have also changed, and the Albanians have been granted further privileges and rights in this country – in the opinion of the Macedonians it is very difficult to accept and implement. The escalation of nationalist sentiment in the country’s internal relations is important, caused not only by foreign policy but also by concessions to the Albanians. The Law on the Use of Languages, also known as the ‘language law’, criticized not only by the Macedonian scientific elite, but also by the Venice Commission, which sees certain threats to Macedonia in granting such extensive rights to the Albanian population, strengthens the opposition. On 26 March 2020, the EU gave its consent to start accession negotiations with Albania and the Republic of North Macedonia. Negotiations with Bulgaria are ongoing and it will be difficult to find a compromise. The biggest challenge for the government will be to convince the public that it is in the interest of its citizens to make compromises with both Greeks and Albanians and in the future with Bulgarians. In this case, the EU position will be very important, both in relation to the Albanian and Bulgarian demands.

Do electoral systems matter for the outcomes of democratic politics beyond their well-known relationship to party systems? This thesis presents three studies on the consequences of electoral institutions, highlighting how they shape incentives and opportunities for political actors operating at the intra-party level. The first article considers how the spatial representativeness of legislatures - i.e. the extent to which MPs from different parts of the country are equally represented - varies with constituency and ballot structure. The paper proposes a novel measurement to gauge the descriptive representation of places in parliaments and develops a theoretical framework linking spatial representation to parties' incentives and voters' ability to elect local MPs. Consistently with the theory, the analysis finds that mixed-member systems and preferential voting mechanisms are associated with more geographically representative parliaments. The second paper asks whether sub-national legislators' likelihood to run for the national parliament is influenced by the electoral system through which they were elected. Leveraging within-legislature variation in electoral rules across German State parliaments, I find that list-PR MPs are more likely to attempt 'level hopping' than single-member district legislators. It is argued that this depends on the lower levels of electoral security of the former, and to the more direct accountability of the latter to local (s)electorates. The third paper develops a theoretical model of preference vote distribution in preferential-list PR system, extending the approach behind Taagepera and Shugart's Seat Product Model to intra-party competition. I show that the share of preference votes for the first-ranked and last-eligible candidates, as well as the effective number of candidates in a list, can be accurately predicted in expectation as functions of institutional variables. Overall, the thesis makes contributions in terms of measurement, data and theory towards a broader and richer understanding of the intra-party effects of electoral institutions.

Making a special trip north NZNO members have helped along the way - with the likes of southern delegates setting up a stall at the region's biggest craft market to gather signatures in July. Health still a hot political issue The latest Ipsos Issues Monitor survey released this week showed health care was still the number two issue - topped only by the cost of living. What does the declaration say? * Aotearoa New Zealand's health system is in a state of crisis. * The Government must act urgently to address that crisis. * Rural, Maori, and low-income populations are disproportionately impacted by the crisis. * The Government must act urgently to meet its obligations under Te Tiriti o Waitangi and protect Maori health, in consultation with iwi and hapa. * The Government must allocate the resources needed to train, recruit and retain more nurses, midwives, doctors, specialists, allied health professionals, health assistants and other health workers. to train, recruit and retain more nurses, doctors and specialists.

This thesis investigates the development of regional integration parliaments around the world. It analyses and compares the expansion and current stage of institutional development of three regional assemblies, which are in Europe (European Parliament), Africa (Pan-African Parliament), and Latin America (MERCOSUR Parliament). The key research question this PhD project seeks to answer is: why, and to what extent, have these three regional parliaments developed differently in terms of their functions and legislative competences? In order to answer these questions, particular attention is paid to the notion of parliamentary agency. To this end, this research proposes four types of parliamentary agency, considering both its external (restricted/stimulated agents) and internal (timid/proactive agents) dimensions. A historical institutionalist lens guides the analysis, focusing on the 'critical junctures' in the history of the three assemblies. This thesis draws on new and original empirical data (élite interviews with officials and delegates from the three regional parliaments), official documents, and the academic literature. Thus, this thesis aims to make both an empirical and a conceptual contribution to the emerging literatures on comparative legislative studies and comparative regionalism. The main argument of this thesis is that parliamentary agency has impacted the institutional development of the European Union, MERCOSUR and the African Union, leading the three cases to diverse paths of regional parliamentarisation.

The Second Reform Act, passed in 1867, created a million new voters, doubling the electorate and propelling the British state into the age of mass politics. It marked the end of a twenty year struggle for the working class vote, in which seven different governments had promised change. Yet the standard works on 1867 are more than forty years old and no study has ever been published of reform in prior decades. This study provides the first analysis of the subject from 1848 to 1867, ranging from the demise of Chartism to the passage of the Second Reform Act. Recapturing the vibrancy of the issue and its place at the heart of Victorian political culture, it focuses not only on the reform debate itself, but on a whole series of related controversies, including the growth of trade unionism, the impact of the 1848 revolutions and the discussion of French and American democracy.

The NHS modernisation bill contradicts evidence showing that trust, public involvement, and coproduction are central to successful health systems, writes Simon Denegri

The current research is essentially a qualitative comparison of impoliteness in the Iraqi and British parliamentary discourse. It is intended to enhance our understanding of impoliteness, in particular parliamentary interactions. Hence, the study aims at developing an analytical framework to account for and compare the nature of parliamentary impoliteness in these two settings. The comparison includes three dimensions of impoliteness: (1) the factors that underlie the communication/ interpretation of impoliteness in these settings; (2) the linguistic set of strategies utilised by the Iraqi and British parliamentarians to convey impoliteness in initiation turns; (3) the counter-impoliteness patterns available to politicians in the Iraqi and British parliaments. Following a theory- and data-driven approach, this study integrates different approaches to device an analytical framework that covers cross-cultural differences in impoliteness patterns. The framework draws on Bull et al.'s (1996); Spencer-Oatey's (2000, 2005, 2008); Culpeper's (2011); Harris' (2001); Bull & Wells' (2012); Culpeper's (1996); Culpeper et al.'s (2003); and Bousfield's (2007) theory contributions to address the aspects of impoliteness under discussion. The study employs a binary set of naturally occurring data, which comprises pre-existing video recordings of parliamentary discourse from both cultural settings. The Iraqi parliamentary corpus comprises three interrogation sessions in which governmental figures, i.e. Ministers of Defence, Trade, and the Mayor of Baghdad, are being questioned on allegations of corruption. The British corpus comprises 19 Prime Minister's Question Time sessions, henceforth PMQs, featuring David Cameron as Prime Minster and both Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn as the Leader of the Opposition. The length of the analysed corpus in each setting comprises nine and a half hours. The analysis reveals a significant influence of the institutional context on shaping the three dimensions of impoliteness under examination in these two parliamentary practices. The analysis also shows that face is fundamental in the interpretation/communication of impoliteness in these parliamentary interactions. However, particular sociality rights also contribute to sculpting impoliteness in these parliamentary corpora, such as autonomy and imposition expectancies. Additionally, the results reflect points of similarity with respect to the use of particular impoliteness strategies in initiation turns and counter-impoliteness strategies in response turns in both parliaments. The absence of some strategies in questioning and answering turns is also noticeable in both parliaments. Moreover, the results indicate differences between the two parliaments in the frequency and delivery of strategies both in questioning and answering turns.

This thesis assesses the failure of the UK House of Commons to pass an item of legislation: the Parliament (No. 2) Bill 1968. The Bill was an attempt by the Labour Government 1964-70 at wholesale reform of the House of Lords. Government bills would normally pass without difficulty, but this Bill had to be withdrawn by the Government at the Committee Stage in the Commons. While the Bill's failure is often attributed to a backbench filibuster, this was a necessary but not sufficient cause for the failure. The filibustering would have been overcome if the Bill was supported enthusiastically by a larger number of the Labour backbenchers. The Labour Party had an attachment to the Westminster Model of British Government. Within this constitutional conservatism, there was a conservative standpoint on the House of Lords which consisted of three tenets: firstly, the Lords' existing anachronistic/irrational composition was considered as preferable to a rationalised composition, since this protected the supremacy of the House of Commons; secondly, it was thought that a Labour Government should be focussing on economic and social reform, rather than on Lords reform; thirdly, there was a distinct lack of theory, or theorising, on the Second Chamber qua Second Chamber, which was based on the Labour Party's empirical, atheoretical, and pragmatic approach in general. The Parliament (No. 2) Bill was intended to appeal to the Labour Party on the basis of a range of selling-points: 1) abolishing the Lords' hereditary basis, 2) abolishing the Lords' capacity to impede the Commons, 3) strengthening the Commons' scrutinising functions, 4) technocratic reform of the governance institutions, and 5) modernising Parliament as part of a wider institutional modernisation. The thesis concludes that these selling-points were insufficient to overcome the Labour Party's conservatism on Lords reform, grounded as it was in a broader constitutional conservatism, and that this overall conservatism was the principal cause for the Bill's failure.