One can create an e-petition about anything that the government is responsible for and if it gets at least 100,000 signatures, it will be considered for debate in the House of Commons. Referenda and other forms of direct democracy could be argued to be more democratic than the opportunity to vote in elections because of the fact that general turnout for referenda exceeds the turnout for a general election. Direct democracy also allows citizens to contribute actively to decisions on how they are governed and important issues such as tax. An example of this could be the Croydon council poll in 2001. Direct democracy also overcomes flaws in the mandate theory.
The names of Members applying for a Bill are drawn in a ballot held at the beginning of the parliamentary year. The first seven ballot Bills get a day's debate. There are also Ten Minute Rule Bills which is a speech of ten minutes outlining a position. The majority of PMBs fail because the government doesn’t provide the support necessary for their successful passage through the House and it is also held on Fridays which reduces the attendance. This shows that backbencher serve little purpose, other than acting as lobby fodder.
Proportional Representation (PR) is the principle behind a number of electoral systems, all of which attempt to ensure that the outcome of the election reflects the proportion of support gained by each competing group. PR contrasts to the Majoritarian principle, where whichever party or candidate obtains a plurality of votes within any given constituency wins that contest outright. Majoritarianism is the principle that underpins the First-Past-The-Post system that is used for elections to the House of Commons, along with other systems including alternative vote, bloc vote and various single member constituency systems. Similarly, there are a number of different systems based on PR. A simple party-list PR system is used in the UK for the European Parliament.
It is in fact possible to identify three different behaviours of the voters. Sincere voters cast their ballot for their most preferred party or candidate, not considering its chances to actually win the election (or a seat at least). Sophisticated ones base their votes on the expected utility according to a party or a candidate and its probability of success. Sophisticated voters usually pay attention to previous elections and surveys. The third type of voters is the one voting for the frontrunner, according to previous elections or polls.
A voter could switch from voting for the Conservatives to vote for the Labour Party at the next election because they decide according to single issues. In general the public today is not really aligned to parties anymore. I would say that party allegiance is something which is nearly vanished in Britain’s voting behavior. There are still groups which are strongly related to one or the other party but that is not as common as was in the 50s and 60s. The important things today are which party has at the moment the right promises for the single voter and which party is better in delivering policy goals.
If a party gains a majority it will be offered the chance to form government by the Queen. The MP is then responsible for representing all constituents, even those who didn’t elect the member. For example in 2005 George Galloway received only 18.4% of his constituents but was still elected MP for Bethnal Green and Bow. [1] This high proportion of constituents who didn’t vote for Galloway is not a unique anomaly, during the 2005 election only three MPs secured more than 40% of their constituents votes. It may be argued that voter apathy has a large influence on this
For example according to the paper in the 1950s 53 percent of Americans in their 20s read newspaper coverage of national politics, while today only about 30 percent watch any kind of news coverage and 24 percent don’t even care to watch at all. This shows that the argument of a decaying news audience is well supported by studies and statistics. Another big source of information for this essay is Nielsen/ NetRatings. Nielsen is a company that mainly focuses on providing companies such as NBC, CBS, and ABC numbers on many things including the number of viewers at a determined hour, peak times, primetime information and results on new shows. Although there are problems with Nielsen methods, for example they only survey people by phone calls and do not
Greg Alter, assistant special agent in charge of the air marshal program says that the 280 number grossly understates coverage by an order of magnitude and the number is 4 digits but wouldn’t elaborate. In a post on its web site the TSA (transportation safety Administration) said it would not disclose the number of air marshals flying each day so as not to tip of the terrorists. He did go on to say that the actual number of flights that air marshals cover is thousands per day. The air marshal program started in the 1970s after a rash of hijackings and was expanded significantly after the terrorist attacks on 9-11. (Griffin, drew, Kathleen Johnston and Todd
For the most part the majority of error comes from the initial sample and its detail of design, with things such as time, place, and size. One thing I find particularly troubling is the time in which the interviews took place. All interviews took place within a timeframe of less than 40 minutes. The bias associated with telephone selection, such as people without phones has been accounted for in the first wave of samples. However of those people errors may lie with the small time frame and time of day interviews occurred.
Administration and Politics Dichotomy Rolin Dantino Grantham University 12 November 2013 Administration and Politics Dichotomy President Woodrow Wilson is known for his idea that government administration and politics are two separate entities. Wilson describes the contrast between administration and politics like this, “politics is dealt with questions of policy formulation; administration is dealt with carrying them out.” (Pandian, 2010) The distinctions between the two entities have been debated for decades. There are advantages and disadvantages of using dichotomy in the manner that Woodrow Wilson argued. This paper will cover the advantages, disadvantages and why the distinction makes our government work better. The chart below displays the differences between politics and administration: Politics | Administration | Deals with the “expression of the will of the people “.