The face of the party? Leader personalization in British campaigns

The personal characteristics of political elites play an important role in British elections. While the personalization of the media’s election coverage has been the subject of much debate, we know less about the conditions under which voters receive personalized messages directly from elites during the campaign. In this paper, we use a new dataset that includes more than 3300 local communications from the 2015 general election to explore variation in the personalization of campaign messaging. We find that there is systemic variation in terms of where photographs of party leaders are included in election communications, which provides further evidence that campaign messages are deployed strategically to portray the candidate – and their party – in the best possible light.     

Setting a Good Example? The Effect of Leader and Peer Behavior on Corruption among Indonesian Senior Civil Servants

Standard anticorruption interventions consist of intensified monitoring and sanctioning. Rooted in principal‐agent theory, these interventions are based on the assumption that corrupt acts follow a rational cost‐benefit calculation by gain‐seeking individuals. Given their mixed results, however, these interventions require closer scrutiny. Building on goal‐framing theory, the authors argue that rule compliance requires a salient normative goal frame, since monitoring can never be perfect. Being inherently brittle, it needs constant reinforcement through external cues operating alongside formal monitoring and sanctioning. Leaders and peers setting a good example can provide such cues. In line with this hypothesis, analysis of multilevel repeated measures data from a vignette study of 580 Indonesian senior civil servants shows that the perceived likelihood of a hypothetical civil servant accepting a bribe is lowest when monitoring and sanctioning are strong and when leaders and peers are known to have refused bribes in the past.     

The Transparency President? The Obama Administration and Open Government

President Obama has trumpeted transparency as a major part of his agenda, promising "unprecedented" openness throughout the federal government. Although Obama benefits politically from the contrast with his predecessor's reputation for secrecy, in the long run an excessive emphasis on fishbowl governance can raise unrealistic expectations and ultimately backfire. After all, at some point transparency has its costs, such as when disclosure dampens internal deliberation or undermines privacy. The real issue, then, is how much transparency and what type. Despite its rhetoric, the Obama Administration has placed limits on transparency and will likely continue to do so. Yet members of the public and open government activists are unlikely to appreciate the need for such limits, leading to disappointment and charges of hypocrisy. It remains unclear whether Barack Obama will earn the mantle of the "transparency president"—or whether the hopes he has raised will, when unfulfilled, only reinforce public cynicism.     

The Quiet Revolution? The Labour Party and Welfare Conditionality

Labour's 2017 general election manifesto contained a pledge to ‘end the punitive sanctions regime’ in the British welfare state. Whilst the specific implications of this pledge were not elaborated, such a policy would nevertheless constitute a profound break with a welfare consensus spanning over twenty years. The depth of the suggested changes on welfare are also evident in the scale of reform proposed to disability benefits, as well as plans—confirmed in August 2018 by the Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell—to pilot universal basic income. Collectively, these policies would seemingly be deeply at odds with public opinion on the benefits system, which over the course of the last two decades has significantly hardened. Yet despite the seemingly radical and controversial nature of the policy, it received very little media or public attention during the election campaign. This article explores Labour's ‘quiet revolution’ on welfare, examining whether Labour's new welfare approach is indeed a bold attempt to reshape public opinion on welfare or, alternatively, a mostly pragmatic reaction to changing social attitudes. The argument presented is that whilst there are persuasive explanations that Labour is responding to a change in the public mood, there is also evidence of a more ambitious goal at stake: the aim of reshaping, not simply responding to, public opinion on the welfare state.     

The Cohesion and Teaching of English Writing

This paper introduces the purpose of our English teaching briefly and a few points for attention in the standards of English writing evaluation. On the basis of this, it discusses the relationship between English writing and cohesion in order to try to find an appropriate method for our English writing.     

The Arab Uprisings and the EU's Migration Policies—The Cases of Egypt,Libya, and Syria

The article analyzes the European Union's (EU) migration strategies toward the Arab states in the light of the Arab uprisings in a comparative context. Going through migratory processes related to Egypt, Libya, and Syria, the article discusses Middle Eastern migration and its diverse manifestations, critically assessing the relevance of the EU's migration policy ambitions vis-à-vis the different challenges in the Mediterranean region. In its theoretical approach, the article draws on the concept of non-traditional security, demonstrating that migration constitutes an anarchistic element in the relations between states, which goes beyond traditional foreign policy means. The article characterizes recent EU initiatives concerning migration and demonstrates that despite the fact that the EU has declared migration “one of the strategic priorities in the external relations of the Union,” it seems apparent that the EU has not been able to develop adequate new approaches regarding migration. Many of the suggested initiatives within the framework of the new EU foreign policy setup have not been established yet—they remain preliminary works in progress, projects in different stages or legislative procedures under negotiation between EU institutions. Summing up the cases of Egypt, Libya, and Syria, the article concludes that the migration phenomenon since the start of the Arab unrest in early 2011 constitutes a highly important issue in European–Middle Eastern relations, regarding which, the EU foreign and security measures seem to be relevant only to some degree.     

The Rise and Fall and Rise Again of Public Broadcasting? The Case of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation

The purported capacity of the digital age to solve the problem of market failure in the broadcasting sector was widely expected to further compromise the already fragile status of public service broadcasting in advanced democracies. The proliferation of niche media content made possible by convergence led to speculation that publicly funded broadcasters would be rendered redundant. However while public service broadcasting in Australia and in comparable states remains under financial pressure, many signs point to a renewed government commitment to the sector. Using the Australian Broadcasting Corporation as our case study we argue that the digital era has contributed to the renaissance of the sector in unexpected ways.     

“If You've Got Friends and Neighbours”: Constituency Voting Patterns for the UK Labour Party Leader in 2010

Most attention in British electoral studies has been paid to the pattern of voting for parties, with relatively little to that for individual candidates. In intra-party elections, however, candidates may perform better in some areas than others, illustrating V. O. Key's well-known “friends and neighbours” effect. This paper explores whether that was so at the election for the leader of the UK Labour party in 2010, expecting each of the five candidates to perform better in their own constituency and its environs and also with those constituency parties whose MPs supported their candidature. The results are in line with the expectations, especially for one of the candidates who ran an explicitly geographical campaign.     

The OECD and “The Rest”: Analyzing the Limits of Policy Transfer

Abstract

Prompted by the rise of the emerging economies and the growing importance of the G20, the OECD has formally announced its intention of establishing itself as a key actor in global policy coordination. As part of this ambition, it has embarked on cultivating closer relations with five G20 countries it designated as key partners through the so-called “Enhanced Engagement” programme: Brazil, China, India, Indonesia and South Africa. This article mobilizes concepts from the policy transfer literature to explain why the OECD’s attempts to increasingly involve all five countries in its policy have fallen short of its original ambitions, and also why the transfer of its policy work has been uneven across policy and country issue.     

The city and its ‘other’ in Islamic political ideas and movements

Historically, the city has been the natural habitat for innovations in political and religious ideas and the locus of politico-religious organization and associations. But the proximity to the centers of military power and of religious orthodoxy have rendered the social movements based on these ideas ineffective. The movements which led to political transformations come from marginal settlements and tribal organizations. Ideas and actions relating to location and habitat are examined briefly. Moving on to the modern period it isnoted that almost without exception Islamic political ideas related implicitly to an urban setting. In particular, we examine some of the political ideas of Sayyid Qutb which have been influential among more recent radical Islamic groups in Egypt. These relate to theformation of an Islamic vanguard, separating itself from the prevalent jahiliyya (state of error and ignorance) and, following the example of the early Muslims, fortified with faith, wage a jihad (holy war) to conquer this jahiliyya. Some implications of these ideas for urban social relations and for location and space are examined.     

The post‐Stalinist present and the Australian past

Abstract

Since 1979, housing reforms in China have been seen as successive state efforts to improve urban governance. The idea is that the state has all along failed to deliver housing efficiently and equitably through the work units and that it is believed that only through the recommodification of housing could the housing problem be ultimately resolved. The housing monetarization policy (HMP) was thus launched in 1998 to replace the long-standing in-kind housing subsidy under the old welfare housing system. The policy aims at providing workers with cash subsidies as part of their wage package to enable them to buy or rent their homes from the market. The purpose of this paper is to explain the implications of the HMP through a neoliberal urbanization perspective. Through the case study of Guiyang, it is argued that while the HMP is successful in improving certain historical housing inequalities, it does not primarily aim at eradicating housing inequalities. HMP has in fact led to more rather than less horizontal inequities. In addition, it is argued here that a market housing system is leading towards increasing urban poverty, greater social polarization and spatial segregation. To improve governance, China needs to keep neoliberal urbanization in check and pay serious attention to its adverse consequences during economic transformation.