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The professionalisation of politics in Western industrialised nations has been well documented (Borchert 2003). The extension of the franchise and the gradual introduction of salaries for elected representatives has led, in most nations, to the formation of a political class who share a common interest in preserving and promoting the means to pursue a political career. However, there is variation across nations and across time, in some cases professional politicians are divided by sociological and ideological differences and fail to form a coherent political class. This paper exams variation in one country, Britain, across time. It assesses whether the increasing homogeneity amongst politicians educational and class background has produced a more unified group. Alternatively it considers whether the entry of a more diverse group of politicians, particularly women, has fractured the political class. This paper establishes that there are differences in the early career backgrounds of men and women MPs. It provides evidence of a political class, where attitudes to professionalisation are consistent across party and other divides, and a gendered political class where attitudes to reforming working hours and providing childcare facilities are fractured by sex, cohort and party. Finally it provides an agenda for future research into gender differences in Parliamentary careers. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Foreign policy analysts have developed several conceptual frameworks for understanding decision making, focusing upon the unit of decision, intra-governmental conflict, characteristics of leaders, and decisional pathologies such as groupthink and poor quality decision making more generally. The substantive focus of these studies has generally fallen upon American foreign policy, and the methodological approach has commonly involved comparative case studies. Relatively few studies have applied these frameworks; 1) Simultaneously to a sample of decision making episodes; 2) Done so using non-US foreign policy cases; 3) Employed multivariate analysis to estimate relationships between the variables involved. This study analyzes decision making in the British government during the Korea, Suez, and Falklands crises. Variables derived from the foreign policy analysis frameworks are operationalized so as to be dichotomous. This allows for both the charting of frequencies of behaviors associated with these frameworks and, through logistic regression, the exploration of some intriguing causal linkages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the selection of the speakers during the 2010 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association that was held on September 2 to 5, 2010. It states the similarity of the speakerships of the British House of Commons and the Indian Lok Sabha (lower house, House of the People) on the derivation from the Westminster model. It also mentions the presiding of legislatures' proceedings and debates from the speakers enforcing the legislature's rules.