Third Party Rights of Appeal in Planning: Reflecting on the Experience of the Republic of Ireland

The potential introduction of third party planning appeals in the UK as a result of the Human Rights Act 1998 has increased interest in those countries that have established third party appeal procedures. The closest of these is the Republic of Ireland, which has had a third party right of appeal since 1963. This paper describes the impact these appeals have had on planning in the Irish Republic by explaining the appeal process, describing past trends and providing background information on the parties that engage in third party appeals. An overall assessment of the Republic’s experience is given and the paper concludes with a few comparative remarks relating this to planning and rights discourse in the UK

What’s information got to do with it? Third-party voting in plurality systems

Although strategic voting theory predicts that the number of parties will not exceed two in single-member district plurality systems, the observed number of parties often does. Previous research suggests that the reason why people vote for third parties is that they possess inaccurate information about the parties’ relative chances of winning. However, research has yet to determine whether third-party voting persists under conditions of accurate information. In this article, we examine whether possessing accurate information prevents individuals from voting for third-placed parties in the 2005 and 2010 British elections. We find that possessing accurate information does not prevent most individuals from voting for third-placed parties and that many voters possess reasonably accurate information regarding the viability of the parties in their constituencies. These findings suggest that arguments emphasizing levels of voter information as a major explanation for why multiparty systems often emerge in plurality systems are exaggerated.

An agent-based control mechanism for WFQ in IP networks

This paper presents a new packet scheduling scheme called agent-based WFQ to control and maintain QoS parameters in virtual private networks (VPNs) within the confines of adaptive networks. Future networks are expected to be open heterogeneous environments consisting of more than one network operator. In this adaptive environment, agents act on behalf of users or third-party operators to obtain the best service for their clients and maintain those services through the modification of the scheduling scheme in routers and switches spanning the VPN. In agent-based WFQ, an agent on the router monitors the accumulated queuing delay for each service. In order to control and to keep the end-to-end delay within the bounds, the weights for services are adjusted dynamically by agents on the routers spanning the VPN. If there is an increase or decrease in queuing delay of a service, an agent on a downstream router informs the upstream routers to adjust the weights of their queues. This keeps the end-to-end delay of services within the specified bounds and offers better QoS compared to VPNs using static WFQ. This paper also describes the algorithm for agent-based WFQ, and presents simulation results. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.