Still Rising: The Career Politician in the British House of Commons, the Cabinet and the Shadow Cabinet

There is a public perception that politicians in the United Kingdom are increasingly detached from the electorate due to the apparent increase in the number of ‘career politicians’ with a professional background in politics. This article examines the occupational backgrounds of successful candidates to the House of Commons of the United Kingdom between the 1997 and 2010 general elections, comparing the parliamentary compositions of the three main political parties (Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats) during this period, and the Cabinet and Shadow Cabinet as of 2014. By evaluating original and secondary quantitative data, it is argued that professionalised politicians have increased in the House of Commons relative to other occupational backgrounds, and are even further disproportionately represented in the senior teams of each major party.

Impact of primary networks on the performance of energy harvesting cognitive radio networks

In this paper, we investigate the effect of of the primary network on the secondary network when harvesting energy in cognitive radio in the presence of multiple power beacons and multiple secondary transmitters. In particular, the influence of the primary transmitter's transmit power on the energy harvesting secondary network is examined by studying two scenarios of primary transmitter's location, i.e., the primary transmitter's location is near to the secondary network and the primary transmitter's location is far from the secondary network. In the scenario where the primary transmitter locates near to the secondary network, although secondary transmitter can be benefit from the harvested energy from the primary transmitter, the interference caused by the primary transmitter suppresses the secondary network performance. Meanwhile, in both scenarios, despite the fact that the transmit power of the secondary transmitter can be improved by the support of powerful power beacons, the peak interference constraint at the primary receiver limits this advantage. In addition, the deployment of multiple power beacons and multiple secondary transmitters can improve the performance of the secondary network. The analytical expressions of the outage probability of the secondary network in the two scenarios are also provided and verified by numerical simulations.

Leave it to the Amateurs: A Career Development Explanation of Political Inexperience among Members of the Canadian Parliament:MA Thesis

In many advanced democracies, political scientists have lamented the rise of professional politicians as a challenge to the effective representation of diverse electorates. In contrast, their relative absence from Canadian federal politics gives rise to concerns over high levels of political amateurism among Canadian MPs. This study, thus, seeks to account for the numerical weakness of individuals with an occupational background in politics in the Canadian Parliament. It utilizes both individual-level quantitative data on MPs serving between the 35th and 41st Parliaments, inclusive, as well as material from qualitative interviews with over seventy former MPs. Conceptualizing the field of politics as a career in itself, and drawing on career development theory, the study finds that at the key stages of establishing, maintaining, and disengaging from a federal political career, there are specific challenges that are not significantly ameliorated by the possession of professional experience in politics itself. Professional politicians, therefore, have no major advantage over those with non-political occupational backgrounds in their career development. Furthermore, by acknowledging the existence of different types of professional politician, it finds that those whose primary occupational background was in politics itself to be in a distinct minority, but the extent of political amateurism is challenged by a much larger minority of MPs whose primary occupation was non-political but who still possess some secondary or electoral experience prior to entering Parliament.