Recent Prime Ministers Research Articles

Representation and Ministerial Influence on Cabinet Committees in Canada

AbstractCabinet committees are important sites of executive politics in Canada. This article examines the extent to which two representational attributes—gender and region—determine influence, as a function of cabinet committee structure. Employing a dataset of ministers under the three most recent prime ministers, I find that female ministers are less likely than male ministers to be influential in terms of connections to other ministers, to belong to the core of most influential ministers and to be represented on the most powerful committees or chairing committees. However, there is evidence of improvement over time. While regional representation is an imperative in cabinet making for Canadian prime ministers, its role in determining ministerial influence within committees is not evident: ministers from less-represented regions are no more likely to be influential than other ministers. This analysis highlights a neglected but central arena for social representation in Canadian government.

The Leader Filtration Process and the Low Impact Jamaican Prime Ministers

How can the two most recent Prime Ministers who have not rocked the policy boat with transformative public polices be explained? Simpson-Miller and Holness are different in terms of personality, gender, age, level of education and the circumstances that propelled them to office; but they have all been socialized the same way by their political party and the political system. These two Prime Ministers like Jamaican Prime Ministers in general, all came through the party structures and institutions and the wider political system from the bottom up. Holness and Simpson Miller like majority of Prime Ministers were filtered by the elites so they did not deviate from their predecessors, because the system blocks extreme leaders that are likely to be transformative. The JLP and PNP party structures and institutions and the political system filters out doers and keep survivors that it feels can win elections. Doers are extreme leaders that engage in spectacular policy solutions and equally spectacular policy failures. Extreme leaders when they get it right will transform the country unlike the modal (average) leader.

Getting `a grip': New Labour and the reform of the law on child adoption

Child adoption featured prominently in a range of discourses throughout the 1990s. Conservative administrations failed to introduce changes to the law in England and Wales, yet used adoption to attack `political correctness'. The character of adoption has radically altered since the 1950s and 1960s and any `reforms' introduced in the early 21st century need to take account of such changes. New Labour's initial preoccupation centred on `race' and adoption, but the more recent Prime Minister's Review and the hyperbole surrounding its initiation has had a wider focus. The outcome of the Review and a subsequent White Paper hints at a hankering for a return to an anachronistic conceptualization of adoption and needs to be understood in terms of New Labour's more encompassing orientation to welfare services and the family. In this context, the impact of US influences may also be significant.

I Never Had a Chance: Using Hindsight Tactics to Mitigate Disappointments

People seem to have a rather rich repertoire of tactics for regulating moods and dealing with unpleasant events. The current work examines one such tactic. It suggests that to render a disappointing reality more palatable, people sometimes change the perceived probabilities of relevant events post facto so that the disappointing reality appears almost inevitable and the more positive alternatives now seem highly unlikely. This “retroactive pessimism” effect was demonstrated in two studies. In the first, participants were asked to imagine themselves in a situation in which they experienced a disappointing outcome and then assess the likelihood that a more favorable alternative could have occurred. In the second, participants were asked to evaluate each candidate’s chances of winning in the recent prime minister race in Israel before and after the elections.

A New Left-Wing Radicalism in Contemporary German Music?

‘Communism is dead’, crowed a recent Prime Minister, little realizing that the shaky condition of capitalism would precipitate her downfall in short order. ‘Socialist art is a phenomenon of the past’, pronounced many post-modernist critics, who equated creative expressions of radical politics with a modernist aesthetic they had already consigned to their re-interpretation of history. Yet as the developed economies totter from one crisis to the next, interspersed with stock market upheavals or corruption scandals, and the ‘new world order’ fails to materialize, a new left-wing idealism is beginning to assert itself in the work of several German composers, and the growing number of discs of their music testifies to the existence of a substantial international audience for their output. It is a movement of considerable diversity, but also genuine sophistication, for it takes account of the limitation of modernism, and is not averse to encompassing expressions of radicalism from the ‘romantic’ era, where appropriate. Thus, it does not shun post-modernism, but incorporates those features which have not been sucked into the new world chaos, or into the prevalent nostalgia, usually associated with the banner of ‘pluralism’. Above all, the new radicalism reaffirms certain fundamental truths, respected by socialism, which have been overlooked both by postmodernists and proponents of the ‘new world order’. It also asserts the importance of artistic integrity at a time when consumerism is undermining creative values.