Thirty Years of Territorial Politics

For many years, territorial politics was neglected in political science under the influence of a modernist paradigm according to which territory gives way to function as a principle of social and political organisation. In the last 30 years it has received more attention as territorial political movements have made an impact. This has provoked a reconsideration not just of the present but also of the past, as scholars have identified the persistence of territorial politics even within unitary states. There is a continuing separation of the study of local and urban from regional politics, although the respective literatures address similar issues and use similar concepts. The ‘new regionalism’ literature examines the emergence of territorial systems of action under the impact of state transformation and transnational integration. There are marked differences in territorial politics in western and east-central Europe, not because of primordial ethnic characteristics, but because of the evolution of the state in the post-war era.     

Patrimonial Economic Voting: Legislative Elections in France

Patrimonial economic voting has been neglected in favour of classical economic voting studies. This assertion holds less, however, with French election investigations, where the neglect is relative rather than absolute. Whereas classical economic voting holds the economy to be a valence issue, patrimonial economic voting regards the economy as a positional issue. Voters who own more property, in particular high-risk assets, are held to be more right-wing in their political preferences. This patrimonial effect shows itself to be statistically and substantively strong in one of the few election data-sets with sufficient measures available – surveys on the National Assembly contests of 1978, 1988, 2002. The electoral effect exceeds that from the traditional ‘heavy variables’ of class and income. Moreover, further work might show its impact comparable to that of classic sociotropic retrospective evaluations of the national economy. Certainly a case can be made for further study of patrimonial economic voting, as compared to classical economic voting.     

Bletchley Park and the Holocaust

A common substantive topic in intelligence studies is the analysis process. The addition of active-learning techniques to reinforce key concepts like competitive analysis, ‘wheat’ versus ‘chaff’, and the different ‘ints’ of intelligence can be an important supplement to existing teaching methods. Moreover, a deeper appreciation of the intelligence analysis process is likely to be best achieved through simulation learning. Drawing on the growing literature that recognizes active learning and simulations as important pedagogical tools, this teaching note presents an original active-learning simulation for the college-level intelligence studies classroom in which students face an analysis challenge that highlights different components of the analysis process. This simulation increases appreciation for intelligence analysis and serves as a student-friendly method for enhancing intelligence studies pedagogy.     

Multi-dimensional economic voting in Spain: The 2008 election

Economic voting studies remain contentious in Spain. The notion is widely-held that there is no economic vote in that country, due to the pervasive and effacing influences of left-right ideology. Still, a growing number of investigations show a significant impact of economic evaluation on the vote choice in Spanish national elections. At least one possible exception here is the 2008 election, where the question has received no systematic treatment. In this study, we explore the impact of economic voting in that contest. We find, first, the presence of strong economic voting of the valence kind. Second, we find that two hitherto unstudied dimensions of economic voting – position and patrimony – have their own independent effect.     

Reading the Riot Act: The Schlesinger Report, 1971

The difficulty of satisfying competing needs of both national and sub-national officials and commanders for intelligence support capabilities that are too sensitive and expensive to duplicate for both sets of requirements emerged with the growth of industrial-scale imagery and signals intelligence assets and production during the Cold War. The literature of intelligence history and intelligence studies covers the symptoms of this problem, but says less a rigorous and well-documented nature on its causes. Thanks to recent declassifications in the United States, however, we can now read key documents in an American attempt to understand and deal with the dilemma. A study prepared for President Richard Nixon in 1971 and now dubbed the ‘Schlesinger Report’ has been published virtually intact by the US Department of State. In addition, the Central Intelligence Agency has released two official histories which indirectly have added significant detail to the story. With these new releases, it is now possible to explain the genesis of the Report and chart its effects through the remainder of President Nixon's presidency. The Schlesinger Report marked a watershed for the intelligence community, helping the Nixon Administration to conceive and enact reforms that were both consequential in themselves and presaged the findings of later surveys and inquiries. A better understanding of the Report's background, text, and results can shed light not only the policymaking process in the Nixon Administration but also the trajectory of the intelligence community – and of foreign intelligence establishments that may, in some respects, be following in its path.     

Ensuring the after-life of the Ciano diaries: Allen Dulles' provision of Nuremberg trial evidence

The relationship between Western intelligence officials and Nazi war crimes prosecutors has been, and in some aspects remains, a difficult one. It is increasingly apparent that it is precisely the selective nature of support war crimes prosecutors can expect from intelligence officials that merits particular scholarly attention. One such example in this case of positive assistance concerns the provision of a specific piece of evidence, the diaries of Ciano, Mussolini's Foreign Minister, obtained for the Allies by Allen Dulles, a senior US wartime intelligence official with the OSS, based in Bern, Switzerland, and used in the prosecution case against Ribbentrop at the Nuremberg war crimes trials. This article, based largely upon recently declassified American security files, closely examines Dulles' actions undertaken to retrieve the diaries and pass them to the prosecution.