Today’s cbc.ca/nl/ website contains a story about fixing potholes in St. John’s. Coun. Wally Collins is quoted:

“I urge people to report all the potholes they see, so the roads don’t get so bad,”

“If you’ve got a pothole on your street just report it, [call] 311, and within a week it’s fixed.”

Of course many call VOCM instead. Potholes were a recurring theme that came up in the research Alex Marland and I conducted on public policy and open line.

“There was general agreement among our respondents that prompt action in response to minor policy issues or administrative errors raised in the media is common. Calls to talk radio can draw attention to a matter that government officials can react to within existing policy and budget parameters. In some instances this involves routine maintenance (e.g. municipal pothole repair) or processing errors (e.g. cheque amounts) that bureaucrats can immediately address. In such cases calling elected officials directly might be just as effective, leading MHAs to tell constituents: ‘You don’t have to get on the open line and talk about your problem to get me to work on it. Call me.’ (Marland and Kerby 2010, p. 1011)

Somebody should run an experiment to see which of the two, a call to VOCM or a call to 311, get’s the pothole filled fastest!

Matthew Kerby, “Combining the Hazards of Ministerial Appointment AND Ministerial Exit in the Canadian Federal Cabinet”, Canadian Journal of Political Science, 44:3 (September 2011) 595–612.

Abstract

The Canadian federal cabinet stands out among Westminster parliamentary democracies because of the large number of first-time ministers who are appointed to cabinet without any previous parliamentary or political experience. Several explanations have been put forward to account for this peculiarity but no attempt has been made to examine how Canadian prime ministers overcome the information deficit associated with appointing ministers with no experience. How can prime ministers be confident that they are making the right choice? This paper explores the subject by estimating the survival functions of ministerial turnover for potential, but not yet appointed, cabinet ministers were they to survive to a defined political benchmark; these survival rates are included in a logit model of Canadian ministerial appointment following four general elections (1957, 1979, 1984 and 2006) in which the prime minister was tasked with appointing a cabinet with ministerial neophytes.

Matthew Kerby and Kelly Blidook, 2011, “It’s Not You, It’s Me: Determinants of Voluntary Legislative Turnover in Canada”, Legislative Studies Quarterly, 36(4), pp. 621-643.

Abstract

The Canadian federal parliament is unique among Westminster parliamentary democracies due to the unusually high level of voluntary and involuntary MP turnover that occurs at each general election. This article builds on existing research to test the hypothesis that the MP career duration is related to MPs’ expectations about parliamentary roles, insofar as voluntary turnover is concerned. Data on MPs drawn from historical records collected by the Library of Parliament and from surveys conducted in 1993 and 20011 are used to develop an event history model which estimates the hazard of voluntary career termination when different parliamentary roles are taken into consideration. Findings suggest that a number of individual factors play a role in voluntary turnover, most notably that MPs who enter Parliament hoping to affect policy are the most likely to move on.

Hot off the press…

Kelly Blidook and Matthew Kerby, 2011, “Constituency Influence on ‘Constituency Members’: The Adaptability of Roles to Electoral Realities in the Canadian Case”, Journal of Legislative Studies, 17(3). pp. 327-339. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13572334.2011.595125

Abstract:

This paper takes a first comparative look at ministerial duration and exit in two Westminster parliamentary democracies: Canada and Australia. Despite sharing the same core rules which govern ministerial tenure (individual and collective ministerial responsibility), Canada and Australia differ with respect to parochial conventions which have evolved since federation in Australia (1901) and Confederation in Canada (1867); these conventions both enhance and diminish prime ministers’ ability to appoint, retain and dismiss their ministers. Furthermore, we expect the variation in institutional and party organization in both countries to affect the rate and nature of ministerial duration and exit. This paper makes use of an original combined dataset of complete ministerial career paths in both countries for the period 1945-2010 in order to provide a first round of descriptive statistics which highlight the similarities and differences in ministerial duration in both countries across space and over time.