Of change,training and public affairs in Europe

European public affairs practitioners need to be increasingly professional in their reactions to an EU undergoing transformational change. The paper offers a comprehensive summary of the subtleties of institutional change in Commission, Parliament and Council in 2004. In particular, the author argues that expansion from 15 member states to 25 has fundamentally changed the nature of the Union's politics and the skills required to influence it. This new EU requires more of practitioners than experience and amateur instinct: to achieve results and avoid restrictive regulation, the public affairs community must adopt effective training strategies, challenging competence targets and regular self‐assessment of its performance and ethics. Copyright © 2004 Henry Stewart Publications     

Explaining Public Support for Counterproductive Homelessness Policy: The Role of Disgust

Federal, state, and city governments spend substantial funds on programs intended to aid homeless people, and such programs attract widespread public support. In recent years, however, state and local governments have increasingly enacted policies, such as bans on panhandling and sleeping in public, that are counterproductive to alleviating homelessness. Yet these policies also garner substantial support from the public. Given that programs aiding the homeless are so popular, why are these counterproductive policies also popular? We argue that disgust plays a key role in the resolution of this puzzle. While disgust does not decrease support for aid policies or even generate negative affect towards homeless people, it motivates the desire for physical distance, leading to support for policies that exclude homeless people from public life. We test this argument using survey data, including a national sample with an embedded experiment. Consistent with these expectations, our findings indicate that those respondents who are dispositionally sensitive to disgust are more likely to support exclusionary policies, such as banning panhandling, but no less likely to support policies intended to aid homeless people. Furthermore, media depictions of the homeless that include disease cues activate disgust, increasing its impact on support for banning panhandling. These results help explain the popularity of exclusionary homelessness policies and challenge common perspectives on the role of group attitudes in public life.     

Class, territory and party: political change in Britain, 1945–1974

Abstract. Two theoretical traditions in the study of European voter alignments emphasize alternatively class and territorial structuring of mass politics. Until the 1970's the developmental paradigm resting on the class-based, stable polity model of the 1945–1970 period ruled the research agenda. The weakening of party alignments in the 1970's and the introduction of the competing territorial paradigm challenged the dominant model. This research tests both models in Britain against the supposed stability of the 1945–1970 period. The results demonstrate that while the developmental model fits Britain as a whole quite well, the introduction of regional polity analysis exposes considerable instability of voter and party alignments, uneven class development and the mobilization of cultural cleavages, dynamics which undergird the politics of cultural defence and find expression in the nationalist parties in the 1970's. In questioning the assumed stability of the 1945–1970 period the findings challenge the foundations of the current debates on realignment in Britain.