The time investment in council duties and the roles adopted by local councillors in Britain have been studied extensively but rarely has research incorporated information about the type of area represented. This article combines individual-level survey responses from councillors with aggregate-level data that describe characteristics of the wards that elect each councillor. The survey data report each councillor’s social and political characteristics, the average hours per week performing council duties and the range and frequency of activities undertaken. The ward-level data include a measure of relative social deprivation, electoral competitiveness and other features. The analysis shows that councillors representing relatively deprived areas spend more time on council activities than do councillors representing more affluent areas. The activities that councillors pursue, especially whether they are proactive or reactive towards constituents, relate to the ward context. Women and people that are retired from work also invest relatively more time in their work as councillors. These findings establish that assessments of what councillors do and the roles that they might adopt should take account of the types of ward being represented.
The liberalisation of the rules covering postal voting attracted a good deal of attention during the 2005 general election campaign, including several allegations of fraud and malpractice. This article uses both survey and aggregate-level data to examine the increase in the numbers of postal voters and its impact on both turnout and party choice at that election. It demonstrates the legacy of the all-postal voting pilots held between 2000 and 2004 in prompting a rise in the postal electorate, and a consequent reduction in the correlation between constituency marginality and turnout. In general, however, postal voting on demand did not prove to be a panacea for the turnout ‘problem’ and had only a very weak effect on the distribution of party support.
It is frequently canvassed by some politicians and political commentators that the current British electoral system is biased against the Conservative party because of variations in constituency size: seats won by the Conservatives at recent elections have been larger than those won by Labour in terms of their registered electorates, thereby disadvantaging the former. As a consequence, it is argued that equalisation of constituency electorates by the Boundary Commissions would remove that disadvantage. The validity of this argument is addressed in two ways. First, we demonstrate that the rules and procedures applied by the Boundary Commissions when redistributing seats in the UK preclude the achievement of substantial equality in constituency electorates. Secondly, we use a recent adaptation of a widely-used procedure for establishing electoral bias in three-party systems to show that variations in constituency electorates had only a minor impact on the outcome of elections after the last two redistributions. The geography of each party's support base is much more important, so changes in the redistribution procedure are unlikely to have a substantial impact and remove the significant disadvantage currently suffered by the Conservative party.
This chapter presents some mathematical models in support of the hypothesis that there is a general principle of information processing at the levels of both preattention and attention. It is claimed that, at both levels, information processing is based on the coherent (synchronous) activity of neurons, neural populations, and brain structures. The level difference is presumed to relate to how synchronization is realized. At the level of preattention, synchronization results from the self-organization of cortical activity, whereas at the level of attention, synchronous activity is controlled by special brain structures that act as a central executive. Two types of oscillatory neural networks are developed to model preattention and attention phenomena. In preattention modeling we concentrate on the binding problem. To solve this problem, a two-layer network of neural oscillators is developed which is able to generate two-frequency envelope oscillations, where the amplitude of high-frequency oscillations is modulated by a lower frequency. This network synchronizes regions of oscillatory activity at high and low frequencies according to the type of stimulation. Such synchronization gives feature binding for both simple and complex stimuli. Networks of phase oscillators with a central element are used to describe a different dynamical behavior that is associated with attention focus formation and switching. For input to the attention system represented by two stimuli, we give a complete description of conditions whena specific attention focus can be formed. The results are interpreted and discussed in terms of attention modeling. This includes the interpretation of psychological experiments on visual selective attention, the problem of attention focus formation, and the possibility of spontaneous attention switching.
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