The National Teaching Fellowship Scheme in England and Northern Ireland

In the 1990s, the Higher Education Funding Councils of England and the equivalent body in Northern Ireland (DEL NI) took a positive step by supporting the development of initiatives that promoted and supported innovation and the recognition of excellence in learning and teaching in Higher Education. One of the earliest manifestations of this support was the National Teaching Fellowship Scheme which celebrates its tenth anniversary this year, making this a timely opportunity to consider the personal and professional impact this scheme has had on the quality of teaching throughout the Higher Education sector.

Parties in democratic national assemblies: comparative assessment of parliaments note

This paper argues that the analysis of democratic national assemblies is not only impossible without discussing political parties, but also incomprehensible without recognizing parties as the most significant organizations within them. Parties have structured political groupings and demands on government even before assemblies were democratically elected. And although parties may be in decline as institutions mediating between society and government in the current era, they remain significant as organizing forces within government. The paper first explains the origins of party organizations within parliaments by exploring why individual members and the assemblies taken as a whole need parties: what are their costs and benefits? It then describes the manner in which party organizations operate in different national assembly chambers. The third section analyses types and sources of party influence, including the role played by party leaders in manipulating legislative agendas, structuring Members’ policy choices and shaping policy outcomes. The final section reviews how politi- cal scientists have sought to explain intra-party cohesion and discipline across different national assemblies.

Democracy, cosmopolitanism and national identity in a ‘globalising’ world

Broadly globalising processes have been in train for centuries, but contemporary discourse about globalisation is here located within a specific historical context, particularly characterised by new forms of communications and the pressures on states produced by the decline of Keynesianism and the end of the Cold War. Coincident changes also led to a growing interest in national identities, marked not least by the founding of this journal in 1999. Globalisation, a series of processes rather than a single force, has a range of effects on states, nations and national identities, including accommodation and adaptation as well as resistance. Indeed, globalising forces, such as democratisation, are shown to require nation-building. Attempts to impose order on international society through cosmopolitan devices are arguably more inimical to national identities. As with nations, cosmopolitanism involves an imagined community. Because this necessarily exists outside time, the building of a sense of trust and commonality across people and territory is however more challenging. Without popular ownership, it is argued, cosmopolitanism is often more likely to appear a threat than a boon. Building a global civil society, or indeed local democracies, is also unlikely when so many societies still lack local versions anchored in some form of national identity.