Regional Mobilization in the New Europe: Old Wine in a New Bottle?

This conclusion links the various contributions in light of the introductory framework. In line with our framework, scepticism towards the EU has increased since 2004 across most of the EU regions (old and new) and state-centric approaches (regional influence mediated through the central executives) have become the dominant strategy for regional mobilization. Unmediated access through direct regional representation in Brussels remains an important side-strategy though, especially for sub-state nations and regions with the highest level of regional authority, as theoretically expected. Regional authority—more so than the difference between competitive versus cooperative multi-level designs—is an important predictor against centralization pressures resulting from European integration. Overall, changes in the ‘New Europe’ have intensified but not transformed the dominant patterns of regional mobilization, while system-level and regional variables mediate impacts of Europeanization.     

Ratification of the 1992 Climate Change Convention: What Determines Legislative Delay?

The authors use a proportional hazards framework toinvestigate the impact of various countrycharacteristics on the duration of time taken toratify the United Nations Framework Convention onClimate Change (FCCC). The most significant findingsare that the conditional probability of ratificationis positively related to total CO₂ emissions andthe presence of civil liberties. The finding foremissions indicates that large, polluting countrieswere under great political pressure to ratify theFCCC. The latter finding is consistent with earlierresearch that found that democratic freedoms raisedthe probability of signing the Montreal Protocol.     

A New Progressive Coalition? The European Left in a Time of Change

This article examines changing patterns of voting for parties on the left in the UK and Europe. It shows that while combined support for social‐democratic, left and Green parties remains strong, the composition of the left's electorate has radically changed. Increasingly, left parties rely on a coalition of new middle‐class voters and traditional and new working‐class constituencies. This coalition is relatively cohesive on questions of economic redistribution, but divided on social and cultural issues. Recent instability in Labour's electoral coalition reflects broader structural trends facing left parties across Europe.     

No New Vision: the Gradual Death of British Social Democracy?

This article argues that the Labour Party has no new vision for British social democracy. New Labour in Government is intellectually tired and lacks ideological vision. Gordon Brown's leadership is managerial and lacking robust ideological content. These problems exist in a period of severe recession and whereby the Conservatives under David Cameron are in the ascendancy. The argument in this article asserts that revisionism is required in the Labour Party. An ideological revisionism which reconnects the Party with an overt vision of social democratic politics; which reconnects the Labour leadership with activists and supporters; and which inspires the next generation of Labour voters.     

Power at the Centre: is the National Economic Council a Model for a New Way of Organising Things?

The centre of power in the UK lies in No 10 Downing Street and is surprisingly weak in terms of numbers. This article, written by a former insider, looks at how power is exercised in a variety of ways, some formal, through cabinet and its committees some informal, through the force of personality of the Prime Minister and his team especially his policy unit. It goes on to examine the creation and functioning of the National Economic Council, set up by Gordon Brown in response to the financial and economic crisis of 2007–8. It argues that this was a successful innovation towards a more structured approach that delivered faster policy formation and delivery and created a sense of unity. While it is probably a model that works best in crisis moments, it could be taken forward in other ways.     

Change in Dutch political culture: A silent or a silenced revolution?

Dutch political culture is often regarded as an important example of the rise and spread of ‘New Politics’ since the late 1960s. Recently, some authors have argued that such expectations about changes in political values, political interest, political participation, and the party system would not survive empirical testing. However, by taking rates of change rather than absolute levels, by re‐examining the evidence in the light of more recent data, and by distinguishing short‐term period effects from a long‐term trend, it is shown that tremendous changes in Dutch political culture have taken place, and are still taking place.     

Follow the Candidates,Not the Parties? Personal Vote in a Regional De-institutionalized Party System

This article analyses how personal vote shapes electoral competition and predicts electoral results in a regional de-institutionalized party system. After having analysed the connection between unpredictable political environment and personal vote, we build an original empirical model that explores preferential vote and patterns of re-candidacies and endorsements of the most voted candidates in the Calabrian regional elections. The analysis shows that leading candidates retain a more stable and predictable support over time with respect to parties and that candidates and their system of interactions are able to predict the electoral results better than parties and their alliances.     

New Challenges in the Study of Right-Wing Propaganda: Priming the Populist Backlash to “Hope and Change”

Before the rise of the Tea Party, propaganda primed the backlash to Obama's election by controlling the media frame and much of the narrative about social forces capable of blunting the Right's resurgence in the 2010 midterm election. This article analyzes the right-wing propaganda campaign to advance paranoid stories about the political enemies of America. Specifically, the article discusses three propaganda stories and shows how they are tied to the Republican Party's electoral strategy: (1) the construction of a voter fraud myth as a foundation for attacking the voting rights of minorities and the poor; (2) the take down of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN); and (3) the launch of a Red scare and witch hunt by the pseudo-discovery of what the Right calls the “Cloward-Piven Strategy,” an alleged left-wing blueprint for destroying capitalism and collapsing the government. The application of new media techniques to electoral politics calls for a revival of the historical-critical tradition in propaganda analysis.     

Ministerial Importance and Survival in Government: Tough at the Top?

The Treaty of Lisbon introduces an early warning mechanism (EWM) which empowers national parliaments to intervene directly at the EU level; they may now raise objections to – and even play a role in blocking – EU legislation. The EWM represents a new model of parliamentary involvement in international relations: national parliaments now constitute a virtual third chamber for the EU. Though they do not meet together in the same physical space, national parliaments collectively form a body that can, at least to some degree, perform three key parliamentary functions – legislation, representation, and deliberation. First, it gives national parliaments the power to influence legislative outcomes at the EU level. Second, it provides a new channel of representation linking the citizen with the EU. Third, it creates a new forum for debating the substantive merits of proposed EU legislation, particularly regarding its compliance with the principle of subsidiarity.     

Workplace Bullying Policy in the Australian Public Sector: Why Has Gender Been Ignored?

This article examines the question of gender-neutral workplace bullying policy in the Australian context. It draws on the international workplace bullying literature and interview data gathered from policy actors located in Australian public service administrations, including managers, policy implementors and employee advocates. Our findings show that both the literature and the policy actors tend to present workplace bullying as a product of individualised behaviour, overlooking the nuances and dimensions of organisational power relations that include gender. As part of this tendency, policy actors insisted that workplace bullying be represented as gender-neutral. Our analysis reveals two key factors underpinning the defence and dissemination of workplace bullying as a gender-neutral problem: the tendency to individualistic remedies in public sector policies; and the idea among policy actors that if workplace bullying was portrayed as needing gender analysis, its current support as an important organisational issue would dissolve.     

Local E‐Government in the United States: Transformation or Incremental Change?

In this article, the authors address the recent trajectory of local e‐government in the United States and compare it with the predictions of early e‐government writings, using empirical data from two nationwide surveys of e‐government among American local governments. The authors find that local e‐government has not produced the results that those writings predicted. Instead, its development has largely been incremental, and local e‐government is mainly about delivering information and services online, followed by a few transactions and limited interactivity. Local e‐government is also mainly one way, from government to citizens, and there is little or no evidence that it is transformative in any way. This disparity between early predictions and actual results is partly attributable to the incremental nature of American public administration. Other reasons include a lack of attention by early writers to the history of information technology in government and the influence of technological determinism on those writings.     

In the woods: darkness at noon or Sunday in the park with Lin?

I discuss Elinor (Lin) Ostrom’s long journey into complex social systems and draw attention to her reliance on induction and the methods of experimental science. In her own words, the simple “organism” she has experimented on is a particular type of human situation—the common pool situation. I compare the philosophy of science associated with the European Enlightenment to Lin’s approach. I discuss the implication of problem difficulty and complexity for institutional policy, and conclude by comparing the tragedy of the commons to the tragedy of the anticommons, claiming that little is known empirically about the existence of the latter phenomenon.     

Social conflict over property rights: the end,a new beginning,or a continuing debate?

The ownership and control of private land is a core social value in the United States. Public planning can be seen as conflicting with this value. The long-standing tension between private property rights and public planning was heightened in the 1990s with the emergence of the so-called private property rights movement. This movement seeks to limit governmental authority over privately owned land through a multi-level strategy of legal, policy, political, and public relations actions. This paper explores the historical basis for this conflict, the legal framework within which it functions, and contemporary policy battles.

The paper concludes that there may be no final outcome to this debate. Property rights activists are impassioned and believe their view of history and law is correct. I argue that it may be best to see debate about land use and property rights as one of the central vehicles for a continual reframing of core values in the American experience.