Focus Group Follies?

Abstract

Media coverage of the contemporary British Labour party routinely suggests party leaders, notably Tony Blair, have been overly reliant on using focus group as a means of obtaining voter feedback. The paper explores this popular understanding by considering how and when qualitative forms of opinion research began to play a significant role in developing campaign strategy. Following their incorporation into party planning during the mid-1980s, focus groups provided an increasingly influential (and at the time more discreet) source of data and support for the leadership's Policy Review later that decade. Following the 1992 election defeat selective findings from the party's qualitative research programme became integral to the public relations' initiatives of Labour's self-styled “modernisers,” particularly in their largely successful attempt to delegitimise and then marginalise the role of the party's once formidable affiliated union supporters in internal affairs. Crucially this contributed to a climate that enabled the key moderniser Tony Blair to emerge and win the leadership.     

Finland's NATO membership: Continuous shelter-seeking strategy

This article offers a challenge, in the form of an illustrative case study, to the notion that Finland's NATO membership is a radical reversal in security policy. With the use of shelter theory, it examines how Finland (as a small state), beginning in the Cold War, has actively sought to achieve political, economic and societal shelter from Western organizations. However, due to geopolitical restraints, the country has at various times been unable to fully adopt preferred shelter arrangements, especially within the military security sphere. The analysis indicates that the institutionalisation of Finland's shelter strategy has often been a tedious, diplomatic quest to integrate with the West, contingent upon opportunistically taking advantage of external ‘critical junctures’ to solidify its own interests. The article posits that Finland's pursuit of Western economic and societal shelter during the Cold War transformed into further Western political shelter-seeking in its aftermath and, finally, membership of NATO in 2023. The case of Finland indicates that shelter theory captures the foreign policy strategy of a small neutral/nonaligned state. Nevertheless, our specific case also indicates that the theory ought to take a closer look at four features regarding relations between small and large states, that is how an agressive neighbour can restrict a small state's foreign policy choices, how economic and societal shelter relations may precede political shelter relations (or vice versa), the role of critical junctures within shelter theory, and, finally, how a history of cooperation may be transitioned into full-fledged shelter.     

Raising Seoul's global competitiveness: developing key performance indicators

This paper develops a set of key performance indicators (KPIs) for Seoul city administration, inaugurated in 2006. Proper establishment and application of the KPIs into its administration would not only help in accomplishing municipal leadership's strategic initiations but also enhance Seoul's global competitiveness. At the same time, the KPIs can be a good communication tool through which the leadership and city customers can communicate with each other.     

Pockets of resistance to globalization: the case of the Lega Nord

ABSTRACT

From its inception, the Lega Nord has been a populist social and political movement obsessed with the Other. In the world-view of the Lega Nord, the Other is anything that threatens the cultural and regional identity of Italians in the northern part of the country, particularly the Northeast. In the early 1990s the Other was constituted by corrupt politicians in Rome, Italian economic monopolies and southern Italians. By the late 1990s the Other had increasingly become the forces of globalization that, according to the Lega leadership's shrill arguments, threatened the economic and social fabric of what the party now refers to as ‘Padania’. Woods explores the manner in which anti-globalization became the dominant ideological Other in the rhetoric of the Lega Nord.     

Hungary: Unpicking the Permissive Consensus1

Hungary's was the only referendum on EU membership held in Western or East-Central Europe by the time of the Union's 2004 enlargement in which less than half the electorate participated. The ‘yes’ result was high, reflecting broad pro-accession sentiment but also low participation, a relationship linked to the status of EU membership in the post-communist context. This analysis focuses on explaining the low referendum turnout. It finds that most non-participation was due to longstanding features of Hungarian electoral behaviour and public attitudes to the EU which feature in Szczerbiak and Taggart's model, namely low levels of participation in elections in general and referendums in particular, low contestation of EU membership at elite and mass levels, and a low intensity of EU-related preferences. It also suggests that the kind of anti-government partisanship which in non-post-communist settings might be translated into ‘no’ positions, in the Hungarian case primarily contributed further to abstention.     

Campzenship: reimagining the camp as a social and political space

This article engages with current debates on the sociology of camps and camp-like institutions in contemporary society. Drawing on ethnographic material collected in Italy in ‘nomad camps’ where forcibly displaced Roma from former Yugoslavia were sheltered in the 1990s and 2000s, it argues that Agamben's conceptualisation of the camp as a space of exception, by constructing the camp as other to an idealised notion of citizenship and the rule of law, offers limited purchase for a sociological investigation of the complexity and ambivalence of social relations in and around camps as well as residents' everyday practices and experiences of political membership. Focusing on the resources, entitlements and ‘rights’ of camp residents and their interactions with state, regional and local authorities and non-governmental actors, this article invites to de-exceptionalise the camp and the experiences of its residents, and proposes the concept of ‘campzenship’ to capture the specific and situated form of political membership produced in and by the camp. Getting closer to the camp and its inhabitants through the adoption of an ethnographic gaze reveals the camp space as paradigmatic of the stratification and diversification of political membership in contemporary society, a social and political terrain where rights, entitlements and obligations are reshaped, bended, adjusted, neglected and activated by and through everyday interactions.     

New Labour in Britain: New Democratic Centralism?

This article uses a case study - the introduction in 1997 of new policy machinery - to analyse competing claims about the nature of the Labour Party's organisational transformation. It aims to demonstrate that whilst the new policy process was presented as a move towards greater democracy, both its general design and its modes of operation rendered inevitable the production of a general election manifesto in 2001 (the culmination of the process) whose contents coincided very closely to the leadership's tastes. The article then seeks to account for the form Labour's transformation took, drawing on the work of Michels and Lipset and his colleagues.     

Trouble with Ken: new labour's negative campaign in the selection and election process for London mayor

This paper examines the London mayoral selection and election process and discusses New Labour's negative campaign against the candidacy of Ken Livingstone. It discusses the objectives which lay behind the adoption of this new constitutional system of a directly elected mayor and traces New Labour's problems in getting their chosen candidate elected. It traces the Blair leadership's difficulties in choosing a viable candidate, the methods employed to manipulate the selection process and the stunts and dirty tricks used to undermine Living‐ stone's mayoral challenge. It places these problems in the context of media coverage of such a negative and divisive campaign. The paper concludes by outlining some wider implications for New Labour's future campaigning and suggests that voters now have a more tarnished image of New Labour as a result of this campaign. Copyright © 2001 Henry Stewart Publications     

The effects of membership decline on party organisations in Europe

On election day, voters’ commitment is crucial for political parties, but between elections members are an important resource for party organisations. However, membership figures have been dropping across parties and countries in the last decades. How does this trend affect parties’ organisation? Following classics in party politics research as well as contemporary organisational theory literature, this study tests some of the most longstanding hypotheses in political science regarding the effects of membership size change. According to organisational learning theory, membership decline should induce an expansion of the party organisation. However, threat‐rigidity theory and the work of Robert Michels suggest that parties are downsizing their organisation to match the decline in membership size. To test the hypotheses, 47 parties in six European countries (Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom) are followed annually between 1960 and 2010 on key organisational characteristics such as finances, professionalism and complexity. A total of 1,922 party‐year observations are analysed. The results of multilevel modelling show that party membership decline triggers mixed effects. Declining membership size induces the employment of more staff, higher spending and a higher reliance on state subsidies. At the same time, it also triggers lower staff salaries and a reduction in the party's local presence. The findings indicate that today's parties are targeting an organisational structure that is custom‐made for the electoral moment every four years. Faced with lasting membership decline, the party organisation retracts its organisational resources and focuses more on election day. Members matter to parties, but votes matter more.     

A Wider Range of Friends: Multi‐speed Organising during the 2015 Labour Leadership Contest

The British Labour party's recent adoption of a partially open primary for the selection of its leader conforms to a trend seen across many European political parties of increasing rights and privileges in internal party decision‐making and expanding opportunities for more loosely affiliated supporters to participate in party activity. This dual trend can be seen as a response to changes in the membership environment, greater individualisation of political participation and growth in social movement politics and online activism. Yet as much as parties are responding to a changed membership environment, they are also driving that change, increasingly blurring the distinction between members and supporters. This article examines the recent impact of this change within the British Labour party and argues that, in line with Susan Scarrow's theory of ‘multi‐speed’ membership, the Labour party's experiment in expanding affiliation options has led directly to a tension in locating the source of authority within the party, creating a challenge for its new leader in accommodating his new supporters within his party's representative traditions.     

Global equality of opportunity and self-determination in the context of immigration

David Miller’s political philosophy of immigration employs two complementary argumentative strategies to challenge open border theories. The first strategy is to defeat the principled case for open borders, such as the global equality of opportunity argument for more lax immigration control. The second strategy is to establish the democratic community’s prima facie right to determine the shape of its future, including membership and the right to exclude. First, I argue that Miller’s conception of global equality of opportunity is overly narrow and that his objections to the principle, to the metric and to what counts as feasible political action misfire against other, more plausible, accounts. Second, I argue that his democratic interpretation of collective self-determination does not solve the pressing question concerning the morally justified scope and content of self-determination and the moral limits of the right to exclude. I conclude by questioning Miller’s general strategy: whether theories of immigration should be engaged in an exercise of shifting the burden of proof between open and closed borders. By contrast, I argue that a more desirable task for the political philosophy of immigration is to find ways in which the joint requirement of global equality of opportunity and collective self-determination can be coherently upheld.     

Under Construction: ESDP and the ‘Fight Against Organized Crime’

Abstract

This essay discusses the phenomenon of ‘organized crime’ as a matter for EU foreign and security policy. Primarily aimed at searching for conceptual guidance, it draws on literature on criminology and policing, presenting two different theoretical perspectives for analyzing the phenomenon of ‘organized-crime fighting’, a utilitarian and a critical one. Against this backdrop, the essay discusses how ESDP (European Security and Defence Policy) has developed and engaged the issue of organized crime. Specifically, it outlines the character of ESDP as a mechanism for ‘civilian crisis management’ and illustrates its ‘working’ through the case of the EU's police mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina (EUPM) by placing it in the two different theoretical frames. Deciding in favour of a social constructivist approach, the essay concludes by suggesting that a successful strategy must focus on the dissemination of the EU's understanding of ‘organized crime’ abroad.     

Expanding Japan's role in the United Nations

In 1994, Japan made a bid for a permanent UNSC seat. This reflects Japan's growing influence in the United Nations as the second largest financial contributor to the regular UN budget and to the UNPKO budget. Moreover, Japan's contribution is no longer limited to the financial realm. Japan has actively participated in UNPKO since it enacted the International Peace Cooperation Law in 1992. It has sent military contingents to three UNPKO missions and a number of civilian missions. The changing international system necessitates fundamental reforms of the UNSC. The UN's fiftieth anniversary seems to be an opportune time for establishing realistic guidelines for the SC reforms to facilitate permanent membership for Japan and Germany comparable to their growing economic and political standings at the global level. In the meantime, Japan should overcome its reluctance to commit itself to UN peacemaking operations, as Germany did, and consolidate public opinion at home and abroad in support of its bid.     

The national dimension of citizenship in T.H. Marshall

In the revival of the political theory of citizenship, T.H. Marshall is a seminal influence. A major attraction is clearly his apparent reversal of the usual relation between membership and rights. Whereas rights are commonly regarded as deriving from membership, Marshall raises the possibility that appropriate combinations of rights may be constitutive of membership in the form of citizenship, a form not determined by any prior identity. This is of immediate relevance for analysis of possible postnational reformulations of citizenship. Yet theoretical discussion must take seriously the derivation of membership from rights, which requires attention to the concrete sociological process by which rights become endowed with meaning. Although it has received comparatively little comment, this theme is central to Marshall's discussion, which provides some suggestive pointers to the main theoretical issues. In particular, Marshall reproduces the standard British ambivalence about the ‘national’, which is variously and sometimes confusingly distinguished from the ‘local’, the ‘private’ and the ‘foreign’. The ‘civilisation’ of which Marshall suggests that it should be a ‘common heritage’ is historically situated—in fact it is precisely because it is in one sense already common that social pressure gradually causes it to be recognized as such. In other words, it is possible to show that Marshall's analysis specifically addresses the issues of citizenship within the nation‐state. Its potential relevance beyond the nation‐state requires, therefore, explicit discussion of the social basis of belonging that Marshall, for his own purposes, was able to take for granted.     

The decontamination of German history: Jürgen Habermas and the ‘Historikerstreit’ in West Germany

The ‘Historikerstreit’ in West Germany was opened by the non-historian Habermas who sought to expose what he saw as a ‘scandalous’ revision of aspects of the history of German fascism on the part of leading conservative historians like Nolte, Hillgruber and Stürmer. Habermas sees this revisionism in the wider context of the perceived need to foster a new German nationalism as a means of legitimation. The attempt to decontaminate German history would seem to derive from the need to resist the demands for political realignment in West Germany and to establish a strong pedigree of German anti-communism which takes in National Socialism and its membership of the Anti-Comintern Pact as well as West Germany's membership of NATO. Habermas's critique of conservative historians and the non-rational assumptions of their philosophy of history is essentially linked to his critique of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida and Foucault and his identification of a common paralyzing influence on discourse.     

Culture,Institutions and Campaign Effects: Explaining the Outcome of Malta's EU Accession Referendum

This survey examines the background to and the campaign preceding Malta's EU accession referendum. The result of the referendum, which was held on 8 March 2003, and which was the first of the EU accession referendums of 2003, was a 53.65% vote in support of membership, on a turnout of close to 91%. Explaining both the relatively low support for EU accession and the high turnout on referendum day involves weighing up the relative impact of distinctive features of Malta's political culture and institutional framework against more immediate campaign effects. While the conclusion is that the high turnout in the Maltese EU accession referendum can be traced to Malta's political culture, the relatively low but positive vote in favour of membership can only be fully understood by focusing on a range of factors, including campaign-related factors, such as the credibility of the arguments presented by the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ camps and the balance of resources available. The most important factor explaining the result of the Maltese referendum are, however, the cues provided by the political parties prior to and over the course of the referendum campaign.     

Balanced-budget redistribution as the outcome of political competition

This paper models balanced-budget redistribution between socio-economic groups as the outcome of electoral competition between two political parties. Equilibrium is unique in the present model, and a sufficient condition for existence is given, requiring that there be enough ‘stochastic heterogeneity’ with respect to party preferences in the electorate. The validity of Hotelling's ‘principle of minimum differentiation’, and of ‘Director's Law’, are examined under alternative hypotheses concerning administrative costs of redistributions, and voter's possibilities both of abstaining from voting and of becoming campaign activists for one of the parties. The policy strategy of expected-plurality maximization is contrasted with the strategy of maximizing the probability of gaining a plurality. Incomes are fixed and known, so lump-sum taxation is feasible. However, constraints on tax/transfer differentiation between individuals are permitted in the analysis.     

England,Englishness and Brexit

In the 1975 referendum England provided the strongest support for European integration, with a much smaller margin for membership in Scotland and Northern Ireland. By 2015 the rank order of ‘national’ attitudes to European integration had reversed. Now, England is the UK's most eurosceptic nation and may vote ‘Leave’, while Scotland seems set to generate a clear margin for ‘Remain’. The UK as a whole is a Brexit marginal. To understand the campaign, we need to make sense of the dynamics of public attitudes in each nation. We take an ‘archaeological’ approach to a limited evidence‐base, to trace the development of attitudes to Europe in England since 1975. We find evidence of a link between English nationalism and euroscepticism. Whatever the result in 2016, contrasting outcomes in England and Scotland will exacerbate tensions in the UK's territorial constitution and could lead to the break‐up of Britain.     

Iceland's Economic Crash and Integration Takeoff: An End to European Union Scepticism?

Iceland's application for European Union (EU) membership in summer 2009 suggests that the country's political parties had reconsidered their longstanding scepticism towards European integration and opted for closer engagement with the EU after the financial crisis. Applying Moravcsik's liberal theory of preference formation, this article investigates the European policies of Iceland's political parties from 2007 to 2010, focusing on four related European issues which have been prominent in the Icelandic EU debate: an application to join the EU with no reservations; the unilateral adoption of the euro; the inclusion of a clause in the constitution allowing a transfer of sovereignty; and the holding of a referendum on an EU application. It analyses whether the economic crash actually led to a change in the political parties' economic preferences and to a subsequent reformulation and adaptation of their long‐term European policy goals and, if not, then how Iceland's decision to apply for EU membership is to be understood. The article concludes that the parties' European policies have remained remarkably stable despite the EU application. This indicates that Iceland's EU membership application can only be understood through a thorough examination of domestic politics, to which liberal intergovernmentalism pays insufficient attention.     

Between Opinion Leadership and 'Contract of Disagreement': The Norwegian Labour Party and the European Issue (1988-1994)

The Norwegian Labour Party elite advocated European Union membership in the 1994 referendum, but the party's members and voters were divided. This article examines the party leadership's conflict management strategies. The possible tradeoff between, on the one hand, seeking a given policy outcome (in this case, Norwegian membership of the EU), and, on the other, maximising votes and maintaining party cohesion, is focused upon. In the 1972 referendum on Norwegian membership of the European Community, Labour had failed to achieve any of these objectives. Electoral losses and party splits were avoided in 1994, but the main policy objective – EU membership — was still not reached. It is difficult to argue, however, that the Labour elite chose one goal at the expense of the others. This case study suggests that parties may try to reconcile seemingly incompatible objectives and to avoid choosing between goals. In addition, the results underline the importance of organisational learning and indicate that the strategies of both leadership and internal opposition should be included in research on party behaviour.