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This article compares the constituency roles of the members of the Scottish Parliament & the National Assembly for Wales to their counterparts in two German federal states using postal survey data & interviews. Representatives elected in single-member constituencies spend more time than their list-elected counterparts on constituency service, believing it to be important to their re-election effort, while list-elected representatives focus more strongly on interest groups. Competition between constituency & list representatives in Britain has caused more problems than in Germany. The results suggest that rational-choice considerations motivate the behavior of politicians, & that the mixed-member electoral system contributes to role differentiation. Tables. Adapted from the source document.

Examines the nature of democratic representation in federal systems, drawing on examples of functioning of the political systems of Austria, Germany, Spain, and the European Union; 7 articles. Available in book form as "Compounded representation in West European federations", ISBN 0 7146 4816 7 (cloth), 0 7146 4366 (paper).

Parties vary substantially in the proportion of women they send to Parliament. We examine how party characteristics affect women's representation in the parliamentary parties of twelve advanced industrial nations at three time points-- 1975, 1985, and 1989. Four party-level factors have some explanatory power: 1) organizational structure, 2) ideology, 3) women party activists, and 4) gender related candidate rules. Leftist and New Left ideologies, high levels of women activists within the party and gender related candidate rules all enable parties to increase the descriptive representation of women. We propose a temporal sequence in which the four factors and electoral rules work both directly and indirectly to affect women's representation. Women party activists and gender related rules are the more direct mechanisms which affect women's legislative representation. Further, New Left values and high levels of women activists within the party both enhance the likelihood that gender-related candidate rules will be implemented.

We argue that introspection reveals a ubiquitous aspect of conscious experience that hitherto has been largely unappreciated in philosophy of mind and in cognitive science: conscious appreciation of a large body of background information, and of the holistic relevance of this information to a cognitive task that is being consciously undertaken, without that information being represented by any conscious, occurrent, intentional mental state. We call this phenomenon chromatic illumination. We begin with a phenomenological case study, involving an experience of joke-understanding in which the conscious aspect of chromatic illumination is especially vivid. Then we offer an account of the prototypical causal role of conscious intentional states (mental states that consciously represent their intentional contents), and we offer a contrasting account of the somewhat different prototypical causal role of conscious chromatic-illumination features of conscious intentional states. Finally, we describe the specific kind of physical-to-mental supervenience situation that needs to obtain in order for a chromatically illuminated conscious intentional state to figure as a supervenient mental cause that exerts both kinds of prototypical, content-appropriate, reasons-guidance vis-a-vis one's cognition and behavior.

Representation is inherent to democracy and truly representative institutions are vital for a good quality democracy. However, the argument that parliaments are not sufficiently representative because of female under-representation is widespread. A number of countries around the world have introduced gender quotas in order to enhance the descriptive representation of women. This article analyses women's representation and the adoption of gender quotas in Poland. After several unsuccessful attempts, the law was finally approved in 2011. Veto players analysis is used to explain this policy change.

Politicians worldwide are positively selected in terms of income. But does the distribution of income affect the degree of overrepresentation? Mounting evidence suggests a link between economic inequality and an upper-income bias in various forms of political representation, such as policy responsiveness and turnout. This paper provides the first study of the association between income inequality and descriptive political representation by income. I explore how politicians' income levels relate to income inequality using Swedish register data covering the universe of municipal politicians from 1982–2014. A common hypothesis posits that income inequality concentrates political power to top-income earners and therefore demobilizes citizens with low incomes from political engagement. I find no support for this hypothesis. Rather, higher income inequality is associated with better descriptive representation by income. Left parties mainly drive this, as they appear to mobilize low-income segments of the populationwith higher income inequality.

While recent political transformation has brought several inclusion policies and changes in Nepal, Dalit are still politically excluded. In order to trace out the political inequality of Dalit and to generalize the findings, both primary and secondary qualitative data have been interpreted and analyzed. The key informant interview method was employed to explore the experiences of Dalit on the current political inequality, identity debates, and representation. It was found that deeply rooted caste hierarchy and discrimination practices are underlying detrimental factors for the depleted socio-economic, educational, and political status of Dalit in Nepal. The conception of Dalit as a common identity, although contested among Dalit, is only a short-term strategy to unite them against all forms of injustice including caste based discrimination, and to achieve equality. It can be concluded that special political representation measures, such as proportional representation (PR), are one of the major institutional reforms for achieving social justice for Dalit in Nepal.

Research in social psychology shows that looking into the nuances in stereotyping is of vital importance due to unique emotional and behavioural reactions the different clusters of stereotypical representations may evoke. Media analysts, however, rarely apply a framework that would allow a systematic deconstruction of stereotypes conveyed in the media productions. In the current study, the Dutch news media representation of native and non-native youth is analyzed and compared. The results show considerable differences in news media portrayal of the two groups not only in the amount of (negative) attention they attract but, especially, in the content of their descriptions. While native youth is more frequently evaluated with reference to competence, non-native youth is more readily evaluated with respect to benevolence. The results of the study and the social consequences of Dutch news media representations of younger citizens are interpreted in the light of literature on social distance and (social) practices of 'othering'.