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This book discusses voting procedures in collective decision-making. Drawing on well-established election processes from all over the world, the author presents a voting procedure that allows for the speedy but fair election of a proportional, all-party coalition. The methodology - a matrix vote - is accurate, robust and ethno-color blind. In the vote, the counting procedure encourages all concerned to cross the gender as well as any party and/or sectarian divides. While in the resulting executive each party will be represented fairly and, at best, with the consensus of parliament, every minister will be the one most suited to his/her new portfolio. By using preferential voting and thus achieving consensus, the matrix vote will be fundamental to the resolution of conflicts. The matrix vote can also be used when: • two or more parliamentary parties elect a coalition government • one parliamentary party elects a government or shadow cabinet, or organizations in civil society elect their governing boards or executive committees • any group chooses a fixed number of individuals to form a team in which each member carries out a different function

"This book examines the leading role of the Quaker American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) in the United Nations relief program for Palestine Arab refugees in 1948-1950 in the Gaza Strip. It situates the operation within the context of the AFSC's attempts to exercise new influence on the separate issues of pacifism and disarmament at a time marked by US efforts to construct a Cold War security regime in the Middle East and British efforts to retain influence and bases in Arab countries. Using archival data, oral histories, diplomatic documents, and biographical and autobiographical accounts, the authors provide a detailed look at internal decision-making in an early non-governmental organization where beliefs regarding the requirement to provide refugees with skills for self-reliance clashed with intractable political and cultural realities and the realization that only full repatriation or resettlement elsewhere would solve the problem (a lesson that UNRWA and the international community learned only decades later). Faced with impossible solutions, the Quakers withdrew. The story of AFSC involvement in Gaza shows that refugee relief is always political and that humanitarianism can prolong the problems it seeks to solve"--

IntroductionThe Chinese state has been found to penetrate community participation to strengthen state infrastructure power, but understanding of these strategies remains equivocal.MethodsThis paper collect complete network data from a sample of 112 residents who were active in community activities in Kang community in Shanghai, China. Kang is an award-winning community for its active participation and excellent governance. We examine the strategies of state penetration on the relation between residents' committee (RC) and the thick network through routine community activities.ResultsThe network is indeed horizontal (rather than hierarchical) around the RC. Instead of manifesting state power, popularity within the network translates to decision-making power in deciding routine community activities. However, residents with high network popularity are affiliated with the state, and this association may be generated by the state itself through a deliberate process of cultivation and co-optation.DiscussionThese findings shed light on the nuanced strategies of state penetration. Rather than overt suppression or infiltration, the state exerts authority over a horizontal network, which ensures that self-organized community participation occurs under state domination.

While there is increasing evidence in the literature of politicisation in the area of European foreign policy, we know less about how this has affected the dynamics of cooperation among EU member states and, specifically, the procedural norms that govern this policy. This article is concerned with how politicisation and contestation manifest at the micro-level and how they might shape everyday EU foreign policy negotiations. It seeks to establish to what extent politicisation – resulting from the emergence of a new political cleavage centred around issues of identity and supranational integration – has driven normative contestation within EU foreign policy negotiations and whether this has led to the erosion of long-standing procedural norms in European foreign policy. Our findings suggest that despite CFSP Council committees being an institutional arena, characterised by intergovernmental, relatively insulated, and technical decision-making, current processes of politicisation linked to the rise of populism and the increasing transfer of authority to the EEAS have increased contestation of norms within this setting. However, procedural norms have remained relatively resilient to these challenges.

This research aims to reveal how women are involved in politics in South Aceh, factors influencing Ulama's opinions about the women involvement in politics, and also their perceptions about the involvement. Method used in this research was qualitative (field research), through interviews and observations, then literature research (library research). Dataobtained in the field were interpreted through descriptive analysis. The results show several things. Firstly, the women involvement in South Aceh politic had developed, such as serving as a member of Parliament, candidates, secretary, and chief of the committee. Secondly, ulama's perceptions about the involvement of women in politics are that some Ulama allow women participated in politics. Nevertheless, women must maintain their identity as a Muslim. On the other hand, some ulama reject women involvement in politics because many obstacles would be faced by women who are less firm in the leadership and decision making. Thirdly, a fewfactors that cause the differences in ulama's perception of women's involvement in South Aceh politics are due to differentinterpretations of al-Qur'an verses and hadith. Other reasons are that some Ulamado not know about politics, and some are related to their educational level and their knowledge.

A constant reminder of unresolved national problems, the issue of the Serbo-Croatian language and of the creation of a standard language presented itself in various forms in both the first Yugoslavia, a centralized and monarchic country, and the second one, a socialist and federal country. In the effort to produce a viable standard language, the Central Committee of the Communist League had to officially address this issue on several occasions, making decisions that more than once turned out to be contradictory and harbingers of further complications. This essay investigates the linguistic policies adopted in Tito's Yugoslavia from its constitutive act (Jajce 1943) to 1991, year of Yugoslavia' s breakup. While the socialist state in many ways followed a leading- edge policy with regard to the linguistic minorities, the issue of a federal language itself and of its variants, by contrast, remained an open question, revelatory of the difficulties to strike a precarious and ultimately impossible balance between unitarism and separatism. The failure to agree upon a name identifying a shared federal language bespeaks of the disintegrating tendencies that in the following years would eventually make Yugoslavia collapse.

Policies designed to hasten the closure of high-emissions coal-fired power stations routinely include reference to the need for a 'just' transition in affected communities. But the detail of what a just transition might entail is rarely specified. This article examines how policy interventions in Australia in 2012–2013, as part of the Gillard government's Clean Energy Future package, approached the problem of a just transition in the case of Victoria's coal dependent Latrobe Valley. It describes how policymakers framed the issue as transition, adopted a regional scaling, and expanded the territorial arena of policy action. A stakeholder-based multilevel governance committee shrouded this top-down decision-making from public scrutiny. These moves made it possible to conjure a narrative of benign transition governed by market processes. The paper explains how these strategic framings sidelined local interests, misrepresented the issues, exacerbated local disempowerment, and enabled the redirection of re-distributional funding to communities that were not directly affected by the impending closure of coal-fired power stations. The perceived injustice of this process exposes the limitations of climate policy-related strategic issue, scale and place framing.

If you have ever thought about serving on a board or being actively involved in meetings aimed at making policy decisions, but are not sure you have the knowledge, skills or abilities to serve competently, this article is for you! In this article, the authors describe six competencies needed by nurses who are serving on boards and/or policy committees so as to contribute in a productive manner. These competencies include a professional commitment to serving on a governing board; knowledge about board types, bylaws, and job descriptions; an understanding of standard business protocols, board member roles, and voting processes; a willingness to use principles for managing and leading effective and efficient board meetings; an appreciation for the ethical and legal processes for conducting meetings; and the ability to employ strategies for maintaining control during intense/uncivil situations. They also discuss strategies for demonstrating these competencies and describe personal responsibilities of board members. The authors conclude that a knowledge of these rules and standards is essential in order for nurses to assume leadership roles that will enhance the health of today's and tomorrow's societies.

Despite the media attention lavished on short-termism, the UK perspective has not enjoyed any sustained examination of the sort Professor Mark Roe has undertaken in the US. The short-termist view provides that substantial weight is placed on current profits, leading to companies being managed according to these same short-term horizons, through transmission mechanisms from market to boardroom. This paper analyses whether short-termism in listed companies should affect corporate lawmaking in the UK. It examines market behaviour and the legal landscape, and the extent to which they dissuade or stimulate the corporate search for instant gratification. This paper assesses hostile takeovers, executive remuneration and shareholder activism as potential transmission mechanisms for short-termism. It finds that the first two are particularly effective mechanisms, while the third is circumscribed by the costs of collective action and rational apathy. The conclusion is that short-termism in listed companies should affect regulatory and legislative proposals in the UK. Breaking transmission mechanisms is crucial to prevent short-termism in corporate decision-making. Regulatory proposals are therefore suggested, endorsing Main's Career Shares and reform of the composition of remuneration committees.

The relationship between development aid and recipients' 'good behaviour' (human rights, democracy, and good governance) has been examined frequently, in a belief that giving more aid to countries with better performance in these areas can motivate their improvement. Most researchers agree that traditional, Development Assistance Committee (DAC) donors reward recipients' 'good behaviour' at least to some extent; however, 'new', non-DAC donors have been thus far portrayed as largely unconcerned with these issues. In this article, I examine the evidence underlying such claims by investigating whether or not human rights, democracy, and good governance play any role in the 'new' donors' aid allocation. I find that, similar to DAC donors, many non-DAC donors pay heed to recipients' democracy, human rights or good governance records at some point in their aid decision-making process. These results suggest that the fears raised regarding the nature of 'new' aid might be unfounded and point to the emergence of stronger global norms vis-à-vis the importance of human rights, democracy, and good governance to development.

While philosophers are often concerned with the conditions for moral knowledge or justification, in practice something arguably less demanding is just as, if not more, important – reliably making correct moral judgments. Judges and juries should hand down fair sentences, government officials should decide on just laws, members of ethics committees should make sound recommendations, and so on. We want such agents, more often than not and as often as possible, to make the right decisions. The purpose of this paper is to propose a method of enhancing the moral reliability of such agents. In particular, we advocate for a procedural approach; certain internal processes generally contribute to people's moral reliability. Building on the early work of Rawls, we identify several particular factors related to moral reasoning that are specific enough to be the target of practical intervention: logical competence, conceptual understanding, empirical competence, openness, empathy and bias. Improving on these processes can in turn make people more morally reliable in a variety of contexts and has implications for recent debates over moral enhancement.

The relationship between development aid and recipients' 'good behaviour' (human rights, democracy, and good governance) has been examined frequently, in a belief that giving more aid to countries with better performance in these areas can motivate their improvement. Most researchers agree that traditional, Development Assistance Committee (DAC) donors reward recipients' 'good behaviour' at least to some extent; however, 'new', non-DAC donors have been thus far portrayed as largely unconcerned with these issues. In this paper, I examine the evidence underlying such claims by investigating whether or not human rights, democracy, and good governance play any role in the 'new' donors' aid allocation. I find that, similar to DAC donors, many non-DAC donors pay heed to recipients' democracy, human rights or good governance records at some point in their aid decision-making process. These results suggest that the fears raised regarding the nature of 'new' aid might be unfounded and point to the emergence of stronger global norms vis-à-vis the importance of human rights, democracy, and good governance to development.

This article examines the factors that shape parties' motivation to invest time and other resources in scrutinizing European Union policy proposals. We distinguish between two different motivations to engage in scrutiny activities. First, parties use such mechanisms to influence the national position directly. Second, parties play a two-level game and use scrutiny to manipulate their negotiator's domestic constraints. Both arguments depend on a set of conditions, namely the government's relative strength in Brussels, the transparency of the European Union decision-making process as well as the government's relative strength and cohesion in the domestic arena. On the empirical side, we study scrutiny at the level of committees in the national parliaments of Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Poland, Slovakia, and the United Kingdom over a 13-year period, during which 32 governments are covered. Our findings suggest that parties deploy scrutiny to shift the domestic constraint strategically, but only if such a shift can be communicated convincingly to the international bargaining partners. Moreover, our findings suggest that opposition parties employ such measures to influence the position of a weak government.

ABSTRACT
Accounting and auditing professors continually stress the importance of effective judgment and decision making (JDM), yet few accounting programs or textbooks discuss the biases that may impact an individual's ability to exercise high-quality professional judgment. In recent years, KPMG (Ranzilla, Chevalier, Herrmann, Glover, and Prawitt 2011) and the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission (KPMG, Glover, and Prawitt 2012) addressed this gap at the corporate level by publishing guidance for accounting professionals and board members on how to identify and mitigate common judgment biases, yet there remain few resources designed for accounting students. This collection of exercises enables instructors to introduce the topic of effective JDM in the classroom. It provides students with the opportunity to identify bias in their own judgments by highlighting five frequently occurring biases that adversely impact business judgments (i.e., availability, anchoring, overconfidence, confirmation, and rush to solve). This compendium gathers exercises from psychology literature that may be used to pique student interest and encourage discussion of how each bias impacts judgments made by accounting professionals and how individuals may reduce their impact.

This article advances the argument that security integration is occurring in the European Union (EU) as a result of the influence of certain knowledge-based networks or epistemic communities. Given that EU member-states consistently resist integration in areas that are central to traditional state sovereignty, security integration presents a puzzle. The case of the EU Military Committee (EUMC) will serve as an example of how and why epistemic communities matter in security decision-making. Although the EUMC and the Common Security and Defence Policy are relatively new, the power of shared expertise among high-level military officers has already begun to dismantle sovereign barriers to security integration. In considering the puzzle of security integration, this article suggests that the epistemic community framework provides a better explanation for the emergence of a European security space than alternative arguments, such as principal-agent theory, intergovernmental bargaining, and regime theory. The case of a military epistemic community also serves to broaden the epistemic community literature, which tends to focus somewhat narrowly on cases of environmental and economics experts.