Women in politics: women political staffers in Australia and Canada #nlpoli

Feodor Nagovsky and Matthew Kerby, “Political Staff and the Gendered Division of Political Labour in Canada,”  Parliamentary Affairs, 24 August 2018.

Summary:  While there is considerable research on elected legislators in a variety of contexts, the academic knowledge about their advisors is very limited. This is surprising, given a considerable portion of work attributed to legislators is performed by political staff. Further, political advising increasingly serves as a training ground for future politicians in many professionalised legislatures. 

We use a mixed-methods approach to understand how the influence of men and women differs in political advising positions in the case of Canada’s House of Commons, and how this may affect women’s political ambition. 

We demonstrate while close to an equal number of men and women work for MPs in a political capacity on Parliament Hill, men continue to dominate legislative roles while women continue to dominate administrative roles. Further, legislative work increases political ambition, which means more men benefit from the socialising effects of legislative work than women.

Marija Taflaga and Matthew Kerby, “Who Does What Work in a Ministerial Office: Politically Appointed Staff and the Descriptive Representation of Women in Australian Political Offices, 1979–2010”, Political Studies, 19 June 2019.

Summary: Women are underrepresented within political institutions, which can (negatively) impact policy outcomes. We examine women’s descriptive representation as politically appointed staff within ministerial offices. Politically appointed staff are now institutionalised into the policy process, so who they are is important. 

To date, collecting systematic data on political staff has proved impossible. However, for the first time we demonstrate how to build a systematic data set of this previously unobservable population. We use Australian Ministerial Directories (telephone records) from 1979 to 2010 (a method that can notionally be replicated in advanced democratic jurisdictions), to examine political advising careers in a similar manner as elected political elites. 

We find that work in political offices is divided on gender lines: men undertake more policy work, begin and end their careers in higher status roles and experience greater career progression than women. We find evidence that this negatively impacts women’s representation and their later career paths into parliament.

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Sick parade #nlpoli

When you are home with a cold, there’s not much to do besides doze and read.

And when you are a political nerd at home with a cold, what better prezzie could there be than the papers presented at the Midwest Political Science Association?   Not much, is the answer, except the Monkey Cage, which offered up the links to the MPSA and a bunch of other gems.

Here’s one from the Monkey Cage to hold you until the old e-scribbler brain is de-fuzied.

The Oil Curse:  New book. Along with oil goes less democracy and economic instability.  Who knew?

There are four qualities of oil revenue, according to Michael Ross that make them so attractive to governments.  Your humble e-scribbler broke them out from Erik’s =post to make them easier to read quickly:

1. “The first is just the sheer scale of oil revenues. Government budgets tend to rise exponentially with oil discoveries. Increased revenues by themselves are not necessarily problematic but the source of the revenue also matters.”
2. Taxes versus oil royalties:  “If governments are funded by taxes, they become more constrained by their own populace than when they are funded by non-tax revenues (see here a more generalizable version of that argument from Kevin Morrison).”
3. “Third, oil revenues are very volatile compared to tax revenues. Most countries have little control over the world oil price, which falls and rises quite dramatically. They have some control over new oil discoveries but luck also plays a major role. Volatile revenues make for volatile politics, although some mature oil rich states (like Norway or the UAE) have managed to find ways to cope with this.”
4. “Fourth, oil revenues are secretive and relatively easy to hide. This facilitates corruption and hinders accountability.”

On that last one it was interesting to watch the evening news the past couple of days.  People are talking about home care and crumbling infrastructure.  No one mentioned the $4.0 billion in cash the provincial government is sitting on. 

Now they haven’t hid it completely.  The number is in the budget and other documents. It’s just hidden in plain site, so to speak.

Oh and it is going to pay for Muskrat Falls, in case you missed that little point.  Muskrat Falls becomes – in effect – a giant tax on the public, incidentally, but that’s another issue.  If no one “authoritative” speaks about it and no one in the media reports it, then it doesn’t really exist.  Come to think of it, that point is in among the conference papers somewhere.

Anyway, ask Kathy, Dwight and Lorraine about The Cash sometime. 

See what the Muskrat backers say.

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Cost per vote: by-elections #nlpoli

One measure of campaign efficiency and effectiveness is comparing the amount a campaign spends for the number of votes it receives.

It’s called cost-per-vote.

Here’s a comparison of the cost per vote for each of the three political parties in a string of by-elections over the past three years.  From left to right, they are:

• Straits-White Bay North
• Terra Nova
• Topsail
• Conception Bay East-Bell Island
• Humber West

Basically you judge CPV this way: the lower the number, the better. No matter whether your party is the incumbent or one of the outs, you want to spend as little money as possible to get your votes in the box.  That just reflects a basic notion about spending money efficiently.  Money, like people and time, is precious.

Just so that you don’t get turned around here, we are not talking about winning or losing.  Spending the most per vote doesn’t necessarily guarantee success at the polls. In fact, you can spend the most per vote and get clobbered.

In the four by-elections they won, the Tories spent the least amount per vote compared to the other parties. In three of the by-elections, the variation was marginal. In Humber West, for example, the Conservatives spent $21.50 per vote compared to the Liberals $23.48. The New Democrats spent $28.29.

In the one by-election in this series they lost (Straits-White Bay North in 2009), the Conservatives spent $30.96 per vote compared to $19.61 per vote for the Liberals.  The NDP spent $37.50.

Take a look at the three by-elections in between those two extremes and you’ll see other extremes.  The Tory CPV  in Topsail was a mere $6.15.  In Terra Nova it was $11.53.

One of the reasons for this is that the Tories didn’t have to ship in large numbers of campaign workers a long distance from St. John’s in order to effect the win.  In both Humber West and the Straits, the Tories’ centrally controlled campaign system meant they had to pay cash to cover the travel and accommodations of their workers.

They didn’t have to do that in the two by-elections closest to Sin Jawns.  And not surprisingly, that’s the two where the Tory CPV was less than 10 bucks.

As noted here after the Humber West by-election, the Tories poured a heavy effort into hanging onto the seat.  Now that we have actual financial details, we can see that the Tories were relatively more efficient in CPV terms. 

But notice how close together the three parties were.

That’s interesting.

It will get more interesting when you look at the trends in cost-per-vote over the past decade and a bit.  That’s for another post.

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Related:

• Buzzfeed:  How much did each Republican candidate spend per vote in Iowa?
• The Atlantic:  the price Rick Perry paid for each vote in Iowa.
• The cost per vote in 2010 Texas state primaries.

On Rights, the Charter notwithstanding #nlpoli #cdnpoli

The Department of Political Science Distinguished Lecture series presents Dr. Janet Hiebert on the topic:

Constitutional Experimentation and Canada’s Notwithstanding Clause: Crude Political Compromise or Constitutional Innovation?
February 2, 2012, 7: 00 PM in SN 2109 (Science Building, Memorial University, St. John’s campus)

Comparative political and legal scholars have observed what they consider to be an important constitutional innovation: the emergence of an alternative model of a bill of rights, which has been adopted in several Westminster-based parliamentary systems.

The form these bills of rights take differs significantly from more conventional models, because they do not compel legislatures to comply with judicial interpretations of rights.

These constitutional innovations raise the following two questions:

• How does this new model conceive of the function of a bill of rights?
• Given the conceptual contribution of Canada’s notwithstanding clause to this new model, should Canadians revisit the deep scepticism in which they regard this political power to set aside the effects of a Charter ruling?

Dr. Janet Hiebert is head of the political studies department and Professor of Political Studies at Queen’s University.

She is author of two books about the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms: Charter Conflicts: What is Parliament's Role? (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2002), and Limiting Rights: The Dilemma of Judicial Review (McGill-Queen's University Press, 1996), and has written numerous papers and chapters on the politics of rights and on campaign finance laws in Canada.

Hiebert has served as a member of the Ontario Electoral Boundaries Commission, an independent, non-partisan body with responsibility to readjust the electoral boundaries in the province of Ontario
.
Her current research project examines how the recent adoption of bill of rights in several parliamentary jurisdictions affects political practices, policy development and legislative behaviour (Canada, NZ, UK, Australia).

For more information contact Dr. Matthew Kerby, 864-3093 or kerbym@mun.ca

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Monkey Cage Round-up

From The Monkey Cage, some recent posts that also tie to local politics and events:

• Media “consumption”. A recent post by John Sides at the Washington Post discussed a study into how much radio news people reported they listened to with the amount they actually did.  Two things to take away from Sides in the WP:  First, there can be a huge discrepancy between what people report and what they actually do.  As a result, pundits and analysts may have a hard time connecting advertising, news coverage and other sources of political opinion to voter attitudes and behaviour.  Second, think about the technology used to collect the data.  They used a small cellphone that recorded ambient noise.  The researchers then compared the information to “radio and television programming in the participant’s media market to identify what, if any, programs they had listened to or watched.”
• The Partisan use of Public Money:  A new study published in the American Political Science Review established an undeniable connection between a recorded incident of political direction from the White House with changes in government contracting:  “Vendors in Republican districts labeled vulnerable [by the White House] experienced contracts an estimated 272% larger than those in their unmentioned counterparts.”  Yes, folks, in some parts of the world this sort of thing is actually considered to be wrong. In other places, political direction of capital works spending is considered “normal”.
• Tax rates and Corporate Investment:  “Utilizing dynamic tests for up to 19 OECD countries from 1980 to 2000 and isolating the impact of time-varying factors on FDI [foreign direct investment] inflows, I find no empirical relationship between corporate taxation and FDI inflows. Using a number of different tax rate variables, control variables, and estimation techniques, I find no relationship between corporate tax rate changes and FDI flows.” 
• Nonvoters:  The phrase “absentee ballots and early voting” caught your humble e-scribbler’s attention given the law suit the local Dippers have launched against the provincial special ballot laws.  Those “special ballots” are not really special but rather a way to allow people who will be absent from the province during an election to vote. Do a bit of digging, though, and you’ll find the original New York Times commentary on the differences between people who vote and those who don’t vote in elections.  That discussion gets to be especially interesting around these parts given that elections since 2003 are characterised by relatively low voter turn-outs (when compared to previous elections in this province.)
• Politics and polls:  “No one set of polls drives how Americans think nor how “the media” reports on politics. Neither does a single politician reap a unique advantage from polling. The signal is too diffuse.

The overall effects of polling are often neutralized in the cacophony of private and public surveys and the swirl of other media and campaign tactics. There are tremendous problems with American politics today; polls are not the cause.

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When will she get the flick?

A political science professor at Memorial University developed a computer program to help predict when a cabinet minister will get fired.*

CBC Radio’s Central Morning Show interviewed Matthew Kerby for an broadcast on July 9.

Kerby’s indicators include:

• age
• sex
• educational level
• profession
• potential leadership challenger
• strength of government majority

-srbp-

* added “minister”.

Massive cost overruns, delays now normal for provincial government?

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, you really didn’t hear very often about a provincial government construction project in Newfoundland and Labrador going for almost double the original cost estimate.

You’d hear stuff about other places, like say one involving a nuclear power plant in New Brunswick. Or there might be one involving transportation – always a rat’s nest of problems – like say the streetcar line in Toronto or another light rail one in Ottawa.

That was then, as they say.

This is now, where the provincial government in Newfoundland and Labrador seems to have a huge problem with construction projects of all kinds.

The latest is the health centre in western Labrador.

Promised originally as a juicy bit of pork for the January 2007 by-election, the project seems stuck like an excavator in winter snow. Other than that, not much has happened.

Not much except watching the cost estimates balloon like an embolism.  According to The Aurora, what was once estimated to cost about $56 million is now estimated to be in the range of $90 million.

That number will get bigger almost certainly.  And at some point, as in Lewisporte and Flower’s Cove, there will have to be an intervention to reduce the sorts of health stuff that happens in the health care centre so that the construction costs don’t go completely off the charts.  

The Aurora report says provincial government officials put the cost spiral down to a construction boom in briefing notes prepared for health minister Jerome Kennedy last fall.

Okay.

Theoretically, that could be the case. There’s just so much construction going on in the province right now that everything is at a premium.  Boom times and all that.  At least, so the idea goes.

There are a couple of problems with that notion. 

First of all, this is a recession and Newfoundland and Labrador hasn’t escaped the recession at all.  Far from it.  Even the provincial government is forecast a huge drop in the value of goods and service sin the province.  Everything is down from oil to newsprint to minerals. 

And if you look around, like say in Alberta, you can see what happens in a recession.  Like most places in the developed world, and even in an Alberta which is still chugging along well ahead of other provinces in economic activity,  a recession in Alberta means costs are dropping. Businesses – like Total SA and Conoco  - are actually increasing their spending on oil sands development because of costs that are as much as 40% less than they were in 2008.

That Labrador health centre is already estimated to cost 40% more than first forecast, incidentally. That’s pretty much on par with what happened to the one in Lewisporte.

So it doesn’t really make a lot of sense – at first blush – that Newfoundland and Labrador in a recession would see costs go up while everywhere else – like Alberta – costs are dropping.

Second, the sort of delays and cost over-runs for the Labrador west hospital is typical of the pattern of delays on provincial government construction projects – upwards of three and four years in some cases – and massive cost over-runs (40% is the half of it) people in this province have seen for the past five or six years. It didn’t just start.  And it isn’t confined to hospitals.

On delays, we have things like a 2004 court security law that still isn’t in effect. There’s a 2006 law creating a health research ethics board that still isn’t in place.  From 2007, there’s a major piece of legal work and a centrepiece – supposedly – of the Tory big blue plan called the sustainable development act.  Three years and not so much as a peep.

Let us not forget three years on Grenfell to deliver nothing that couldn’t have been done without all the fuss and the promises when the idea was first announced.

Nor can we ignore the land claims deal with the Innu on the Lower Churchill that happened and then unhappened.  Now it roams the Earth periodically cropping up in some news story in which it claims to be alive.  The reality is that it is undead, trapped by internal political wrangles within the Innu community in a world between life and death.

In the background, there is the program review, a response to a supposed budget crisis in 2004 the premier gave to Ross Reid.  No one knows what happened to it.   similar initiative – a 2006 economic program review – likewise disappeared.  The guy looking after it went back to Memorial in 2008.  What is Doug House doing these days?

On the construction front, there are cases like the sports centre slash conference hall in St. Anthony that doubled in price before the provincial government cut the whole thing down to a size that would fit inside the ballooned budget.  Two years after it was first announced, there was much less for way more.

We also can’t forget the aquaculture centre in St. Alban’s.  Two years later the thing is just starting to get underway  - we were originally told it would actually be finished by now - for 71% more than the original estimate.

Ferries. Schools. Hospitals.  Roads. You name it and the thing has been announced - in some cases many, many times - the costs have skyrocketed and there’s not a sign of anything tangible.  As noted here last winter, about half the economic stimulus projects the provincial government announced consisted of projects that had been announced, some of them as long ago as 2005.

Massive cost overruns and inordinate delays seem to be the norm in the provincial government these days.

The interesting question is why that is so.

We can be pretty sure it doesn’t have anything to do with just the normal cost of doing business. The pattern started before costs really skyrocketed and it affects things besides construction work.

And it really doesn’t have anything to do with outdated ceremonies and rules.  One of the things Tory supporters in this province should point out is that all the time the current administration doesn’t spend in the legislature gives it more time to get things done.  These guys are much more efficient than other administrations, so the talking point would go. 

Notice that they don’t say that sort of thing, though.  Despite having a legislature that sits about half the number of days it sat two decades ago, the usual complaint lately is about all the distractions. 

Nor can there be any complaint about requirements to have the legislature approve things.  The Fishery Products Act amendments a couple of years ago gave cabinet the right to make decisions on its own without reference to the legislature ever again. That follows a pattern in other bills where the decision on when laws come into force is left entirely to cabinet. 

Call it a sort of low-rent rule by decree, the idea behind this approach is that things can be done more quickly if all it takes for is a cabinet conference call and then a quick printing of The Gazette. No messy debates in public.  No question period.  Just a nice clean agreement behind closed doors.  Job done.

Except it hasn’t seemed to work that way.

Now this is the sort of thing we old political science types call “interesting” or “curious”.  It goes to the heart of what we love:  how government works in practice. 

The theory is fine.  All the bumpf from the departmental bumpf factories keeps the news media full.  And some people think they can change the budget by going to a consultation session.  People who are genuinely interested in this sort of thing, though, love trying to figure out how things actually get done.

In the case of the current provincial administration, those types have got their work cut out for them.  The current crowd should be performing much more efficiently and effectively than they actually are.  Put another way, they should be accomplishing things on par with what - as their polls show -  people think they are doing.

So how come they aren’t?

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