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This chapter examines the reasons behind low female representation in the Czech parliament. It is argued that the nominating process is the biggest obstacle faced by female politicians. The absence of a strong women’s movement causes parties that decide on how to balance the tickets to prioritise regional balance instead. Another reason is the lack of transparency in the nomination process of political parties, which tends to undermine female, minority, and other groups outside of the power structure.

This chapter examines women’s representation in Bulgaria’s national assembly. It is argued that women’s representation can be improved when parties become unified organizations and when women achieve leadership in these parties. However, the volatile party system and the uncertainty of voter support has made parties hesitant to nominate women in competitive list positions.

Assesses the degree to which parties still structure the legislative process. Party cohesion and party dominance within legislatures has usually been grounded in one of two explanations. One explanation sees legislative party discipline as a feature of the importance of party organization in fighting elections, which carries through to the legislative chamber itself, while a second explanation sees party discipline as a product of incentives facing individual legislators inside the legislative arena. The first argument would predict that party discipline inside the legislature should begin to falter because of the changes described in the previous chapters of this book. The second argument would predict that very little change should be seen and, further, that formal rules inside legislatures should underpin the importance of parties. In examining a range of behavioural data, such as roll‐call voting and internal Rules of Procedure, there is little evidence to support the view that party discipline has weakened or that parties are less important today in determining legislative outcomes. Changes in electoral behaviour, then, are not reflected in changes in the importance of parties inside legislatures where parties remain dominant actors.

The story behind the nomination and confirmation of John Hanford as IRF ambassador brings credit on no one, least of all the IRF supporters who opposed Hanford; the Bush administration which let the wrangling proceed too long; or Hanford himself, who delayed in taking his position even after Senate confirmation. When he finally arrived in May 2002, the Bush-Powell team had been operating well over a year and Hanford had to fight even to maintain authority over his own staff. He quickly discovered what his predecessor had learned: IRF was not a mainstream concern at Foggy Bottom. But John Hanford had a certain comfort level with this arrangement. He preferred to oppose persecution rather than advancing religious freedom. The results over the next few years were decidedly mixed, especially in China, but his work in Vietnam and Saudi Arabia was potentially ground-breaking.

Treatment of the meaning of names by linguists is very much influenced by work in philosophy, with some of them adopting sometimes rather crude forms of descriptivism (Jespersen, Sørensen), and others adopting Mill's view. Important distinctions among the functions of names have been established with work (by Lyons and others) on vocatives and nomination. Most grammarians have maintained the position that names are a sub-type of noun, while some (e.g., Gary-Prieur) have asserted that their distributions cannot be distinguished. However, this is based on regarding every occurrence of a name form as being categorially a name rather than a derived noun. Opposed to this is the view (J. M. Anderson) that names belong to a functional category shared with (other) determinatives (pronouns and determiners), which also introduces difficulties (e.g., in Greek). There has also been much work on classes of name and the derivational relationships between names and other categories.

This chapter brings together and extends various observations on the functions of names and their relation to other categories. Names as arguments are definite and serve independently to establish the identity of a referent; this capacity they share with deictics. Names also occur in nominations or naming expressions, where they are not definite, and in vocatives, where they are again not obviously definite but confer a label on the addressee. The distinctions between names and pronouns are discussed, as well as the similarities and differences between names and generic expressions. Names emerge as functionally and distributionally distinct from all of these. The relationship between these various categories is conceptualized as what is termed a ‘cycle of individualization’, in which names are basic.

This chapter elaborates the categorial structures associated with the functions of names. It is only as an argument that they have the syntax of a determinative, expressed either inherently (English) or analytically (Greek). The act of nomination bestows a fixed reference on a name; it makes it active, identificatory, and thus definite; the syntactic role in nominations of the up-'till-then inactive name is appositional. By deixis, rather than fixed reference, other definites can also be identificatory of particular entities. Vocatives are active names converted into performative predicators. The name itself is unspecified as to word-class; it is the basic entity-word, opposed to relational words. Other word classes introduce notional categories elaborating on this basic distinction: nouns denote classes of entities, not entities, and the presence of a determiner enables reference to particulars, possibly identifiable; verbs denote types of possibly polyvalent predicational relations, not a simple relation, which is associated with functors.

This chapter describes the Shah Court of 1970–71. J.C. Shah, the sixth and last of the CJI S.R. Das appointees to serve as CJI had a stewardship of only thirty-five days, the shortest to date, from 17 December 1970 to 21 January 1971. Prior to the official announcement that he would succeed Hidayatullah, there were rumours that he would be bypassed and that an outsider would be brought in. His brief stewardship was important because of the failure of his nomination. The timing of the nomination was not opportune, for three days after Shah became CJI, Parliament was dissolved and preparations for the new elections were underway. Shah received no response from the government to his nomination. Unsuccessful in filling his own vacancy, Sikri’s tenure began with nine associate judges and Bombay was left without any representation on the Court.

This chapter examines how viva voce voting raised the stakes in speakership elections and all House officer elections more generally. The move to a viva voce vote for House Speaker helped inaugurate an era of contentious fights over the speakership, even as the precipitating events that prompted the change had to do more with the position of the Printer and, to some degree, the Clerk. Thus, opening the choice of House officers to public scrutiny was significant not only to the organization of the chamber itself but also to the broader project of building national political parties. The chapter first considers how the issue of electing House officers was contested on the floor during the 23rd, 25th, 26th, and 27th Congresses before discussing the effects of viva voce voting on House officer nominations and speakership elections. It also highlights the ways in which viva voce voting interacted with region and party.

Set on nomination eve in Fallbrook, California, the chapter captures the reaction of John Shalikashvili’s high school classmate and former girlfriend Donna Bechtold (“Blondie”) to the media reports of his nomination as chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff. It hints at her vibrant personality and outlines some of the qualities she admired in Shalikashvili. It ends with the teaser about luck as a determinant of success: that because she’d betrayed him over 40 years earlier, she’d actually helped keep him on the path to the chairmanship.

The nomination process is critical in determining the quality of judges selected to the ICJ and ICC. Both the ICJ and ICC Statutes cover the nomination processes but the rules are open-ended and lack specificity as to the exact procedures to be followed. This chapter seeks to shed light on the nomination process, in the words of insiders who have been directly involved as candidates or potential candidates, decision-makers, or observers. The information gathered was drawn from a sample of the state parties of the two courts, with the aim of representing the range of approaches taken by states. It is shown that some insiders lack detailed understanding of the nomination processes even in their own states; as a result, accounts are fragmented and contradictory, and only a few well-informed insiders appear to be familiar with the details.

This chapter presents the stories behind the judges' appointment to the federal bench. The stories touch on many of the variants in the nomination process and present in revealing details how the process works, not from the point of the view of the White House—where the attention is usually placed—but from the point of view of the nominee and just how he or she aligned the stars to get that nomination to a lifetime position.

Although much maneuvering and speculation about the Whig party's presidential candidate had occurred since 1844, systematic efforts to secure the party's presidential nomination began only with the opening of the Thirtieth Congress. Ultimately, decisions at the periphery of the American political system, in states and localities that chose delegates to the Whigs' national convention, determined the outcome of the presidential election. During the first three months of 1848, however, decisions made in Washington had the greatest impact. One of those decisions decisively changed Whig opinion and thus Whig behavior at the periphery; more than anything else, it brought about the nomination of Zachary Taylor. However, as much as that outcome itself, the abrasive process by which it was reached opened wounds that debilitated the Whig party during its remaining lifetime.

If 1852 inevitably resembled other presidential years, Truman Smith concluded that the Whig party confronted “exactly the same situation” as they had in 1848. Once again, Whigs required a military hero to win. Every consideration requires that they should go for Winfield Scott now. In 1848, Zachary Taylor's appeal to the vital votes by Native Americans in Pennsylvania helped him secure nomination and election; in 1852, nativists there and elsewhere vehemently opposed Scott. In 1848, most southern Whigs zealously sought, and most northern Whigs vigorously opposed, Taylor's nomination; in 1852, northern Whigs led the drive for Scott, whereas almost all Southerners tried to derail him. Suspicious of Taylor's No Party tactics, northern Whigs in 1848 demanded concrete evidence of his fidelity to Whig principles. In 1852, in contrast, Southerners insisted upon irrefutable proof from Scott that he deemed the Compromise measures a final settlement of the slavery controversy.

The Whig party's choice of General William Henry Harrison instead of Henry Clay at Harrisburg has made them seem particularly opportunistic. Whigs, indeed, nominated military heroes rather than civilian leaders in four of the five presidential campaigns they contested, including the only two times they won. That record has led to the illusion that the Whig party was a natural loser, triumphing only when it evaded issues and clung to the coattails of figurehead leaders who had popularity beyond the boundaries of the Whigs' normal voting constituency. The Whig victory in 1840 is, accordingly, usually attributed to the legendary “Log Cabin-Hard Cider” campaign the party ran on Harrison's behalf. In December 1839, most Whigs could not foresee what would happen to the economy and to Whig fortunes in 1840. The inverse relation between economic conditions and the Whigs' political fortunes played a major role in both Harrison's nomination and his subsequent election.

Many historians have echoed Thomas Dorr's charge that the Whig party's nomination of Zachary Taylor in 1848 was an act of desperation, a confession that they could not win on issues. By January 1848, Whig leaders, having squabbled about their nominee for three years, remained far from a consensus. By then most southern Whigs, like northern Whigs from strongly Democratic states, enthusiastically backed Taylor. Despising the war in which he gained fame, many Whigs, however, vehemently opposed him. Others adamantly rejected Taylor because they demanded a committed advocate of Whig programs. They objected to a candidate who, in Dorr's words, “has not made up his mind on any of the great questions of principle and policy that have so long divided the country”. Only days after Dorr wrote this, Rhode Island's Whigs officially endorsed Henry Clay for the nomination explicitly because he embodied Whig principles.

The liberal republicans saw the Cincinnati Convention as the ultimate means to gain control of the Republican Party. However, the proceedings of the Liberal Republican Convention in Cincinnati upset the original liberal republicans. The reason for the liberal republicans' pain was the unexpected nomination of Horace Greeley as the new party's presidential candidate. They tried to determine how Greeley had been nominated in place of their preferred candidates, Charles Francis Adams and Lyman Trumbull. The liberal republicans lost control of their movement at the Cincinnati Convention. Though many were experienced politicians, the liberal republicans repeatedly made political miscalculations: counting on candidates hesitant to work for the nomination, continually compromising with Greeley, and mismanaging the balloting. The discussion argues that they lost control at the convention because the liberal republicans, despite their experience, were poor politicians.

This chapter makes three claims and pursues them though the historical record. One is that factional conflict at the nomination stage is a sign of party strength rather than weakness. Another is that factions have endowed the presidential selection process with much more continuity than most analysts have argued. Despite major changes in the mode of presidential nominations over the last one hundred and forty years, factions have consistently been important pieces in the presidential nomination puzzle. Finally, the historical account presented here suggests that the decline-of-parties thesis—as seen through the lens of presidential nominations—is wedded to a questionable historical periodization.

In July 1972, Fannie Lou Hamer traveled to the Democratic National Convention in Miami Beach, Florida despite her deteriorating health. Hamer’s health took a turn for the worse in January of that year, when she collapsed from “nervous exhaustion” as she walked a picket line near her home. She convalesced over the next seven months. This chapter reproduced Hamer’s “speech” delivered at the 1972 Democratic National Convention in Miami Beach. It was actually a seconding speech for the nomination of Texas’s Frances Farenthold as vice presidential candidate.