The Meta-industrial Class and Why We Need It

The paper suggests that the appropriate 'agents of history' in an era of globalisation and ecological crisis are 'meta-industrial' workers. This hitherto nameless class carries out hands-on reproductive labours at the interface of 'humanity' and 'nature' using 'holding skills', a grounded epistemology and ethic consonant with genuine democracy and local sustainability. Pointing to the unexamined neo-liberal assumptions of many environmental philosophers, the author suggests that only an 'embodied materialist' epistemology and ethic can do justice to class, race, gender, and species diversity.     

Why We Still Need Bernard Crick

Bernard Crick's greatest polemic In Defence of Politics remains as relevant today as when it was written. As modern politicians try to contract out responsibility for more and more, Crick's argument that honesty about the limitation of what they can achieve is the best defence of their most important of all human activities is increasingly important. His attacks on scientism in political thought, on populism, and on the value‐free nature of market mechanisms, remain classic.     

Good Administration: Why We Need It More Than Ever

This article relates the concept of 'good administration' to a range of key constitutional issues, including The Governance of Britain , the debate about a British Bill of Rights, the creation of the Administrative Justice and Tribunals Council, and the Law Commission's consultation on public law remedy. It argues that 'good administration', far from being remote from these issues, is a critical component of much that we value most in public life. By drawing upon, for example, the Parliamentary Ombudsman's publication of Principles of Good Administration and the Court of Appeal judgment in a case concerning the Ombudsman's report on occupational pensions, the article suggests that the principles of deliberative democracy, human rights and restorative justice combine to make the Parliamentary Ombudsman an effective instrument for 'humanising the bureaucracy', as first envisaged when the Office was created by the Wilson government in 1967.     

Norms versus Action: Why Voters Fail to Sanction Malfeasance in Brazil

We show that Brazilian voters strongly sanction malfeasant mayors when presented with hypothetical scenarios but take no action when given the same information about their own mayor. Partnering with the State Accounts Court of Pernambuco, we conducted a field experiment during the 2016 municipal elections in which the treatment group received information about official wrongdoing by their mayor. The treatment has no effect on self‐reported voting behavior after the election, yet when informing about malfeasance in the context of a vignette experiment, we are able to replicate the strong negative effect found in prior studies. We argue that voters' behavior in the abstract reflects the comparatively strong norm against corruption in Brazil. Yet on Election Day, their behavior is constrained by factors such as attitudes toward local political dynasties and the greater salience of more pressing concerns like employment and health services.     

Do We Need More College Graduates?

President Obama has launched a major initiative hoping to increase the number of young people with college degrees. The article argues that more degrees would be desirable if more lower income students obtained them, because without a college degree social mobility can be difficult. However, the task will not be easy when one considers the important external factors related to degree completion including the quality of high school, parental income and wealth, and amount of schooling of the parent(s). The article concludes that early intervention programs offer the best opportunity to increase the number of degree holders from lower income families.     

Why Aren't We Laughing?: Grammatical Investigations in World Politics

This paper argues that the later Wittgenstein's notion of the autonomy of grammar opens up critical space for thinking about world politics. The claim that philosophy should be a 'grammatical investigation' involves considering how particular pictures, as representations of reality, hold us captive. Although the 'deep disquietudes' that are expressed in world politics may have similarities with the depth of a grammatical joke, I will look at a few reasons why we aren't laughing.     

Substituting the End for the Whole: Why Voters Respond Primarily to the Election‐Year Economy

According to numerous studies, the election‐year economy influences presidential election results far more than cumulative growth throughout the term. Here we describe a series of surveys and experiments that point to an intriguing explanation for this pattern that runs contrary to standard political science explanations, but one that accords with a large psychological literature. Voters, we find, actually intend to judge presidents on cumulative growth. However, since that characteristic is not readily available to them, voters inadvertently substitute election‐year performance because it is more easily accessible. This “end‐heuristic” explanation for voters’ election‐year emphasis reflects a general tendency for people to simplify retrospective assessments by substituting conditions at the end for the whole. The end‐heuristic explanation also suggests a remedy, a way to align voters’ actions with their intentions. Providing people with the attribute they are seeking—cumulative growth—eliminates the election‐year emphasis.     

Voters in a multi-member constituency: The 1977 Auckland election

Voters in multi-member constituencies typical of local government elections must decide how to allocate the votes at their disposal. The secrecy of the ballot has hitherto prevented study of how these preferences are distributed or of the composition of the vote received by individual candidates.Access was gained via a computer printout to the actual behaviour of voters in a five member constituency of the Auckland Regional Authority (New Zealand) in the 1977 local elections. It was contested by two full tickets and three distinctive independents.A computer programme which scanned over 12,000 combinations enabled the vote to be analysed for partisan and other forms of voting. It revealed that 80 per cent of voters were essentially partisan, 62 per cent being Citizens and 37 per cent Labour inclined. However, there was widespread refusal to vote the full ticket, but the ‘spare’ votes were given to independents rather than the opposition.There was little sign of feminist or alphabetical voting, but a weak local notables vote may have existed. The successful candidates depended less on their own partisan supporters.     

Voters and roll call voting: The effect on congressional elections

The subject of this research is whether ideological preferences play a major role in explaining voters' refusal to reelect some members of the U.S. House of Representatives. If ideological control is important, one would expect to find a large difference between the voting record of a rejected incumbent and his or her replacement. In distinction, whenever voters must replace a congressman or congresswoman because that person had died in office or chose to run for higher office, the hypothesis of ideological tracking implies that the newly elected member of Congress will resemble his or her predecessor. The data confirm these hypotheses and show, as well, that ideological control exists within parties and not only between them; that the degree of voters' ideological control is as great over senior congressmen and congresswomen as over junior ones; and that voters' concern about ideology has increased over the last two decades.