New Labour: what's published is what counts

Books reviewed in this article:
Barrett-Brown, M. and Coates, K. (1996) The Blair Revelation: Deliverance for Whom?
Blackburn, R. and Plant, R. (eds) (1999) The Labour Government's Constitutional Reform Agenda.
Blair, T. (1996) New Britain: My Vision of a Young Country.
Brivati, B. and Bale, T. (eds) (1997) New Labour in Power: Precedents and Prospects.
Crewe, I., Gosschalk, B. and Bartle, J. (1998) Political Communications: Why Labour Won the General Election of 1997
Denver, D., Fisher, J., Cowley, P. and Pattie, C. (1998) British Elections and Parties Review, Volume 8: The 1997 General Election.
Driver, S. and Martell, L. (1998) New Labour: Politics after Thatcherism.
Ellison, N. (1994) Egalitarian Thought and Labour Politics: Retreating Visions.
Gamble, A. and Wright, T. (1999) The New Social Democracy.
Geddes, A. and Tonge, J. (eds) (1997) Labour's Landslide: The British General Election 1997.
Giddens, A. (1998) The Third Way: the Renewal of Social Democracy.
Hay, C. (1999) The Political Economy of New Labour: Labouring under False Pretences?
Hazell, R. (ed.) (1999) Constitutional Futures: A History of the Next Ten Years.
Jones, T. (1996) Remaking the Labour Party: From Gaitskell to Blair.
Shaw, E. (1996) The Labour Party Since 1945.
Taylor, G. (1997) Labour's Renewal? The Policy Review and Beyond.
Thompson, N. (1996) Political Economy and the Labour Party: The Economics of Democratic Socialism 1884–1995.
Worcester, R. and Mortimore, R. (1999) Explaining Labour's Landslide.     

A Feminised Style of Politics? Women MPs in the House of Commons

One hundred and one Labour women MPs were returned to the House of Commons at the 1997 general election. Constituting 24 per cent of the Parliamentary Labour Party, they were, according to critical mass theory, a 'tilted group' and in a position to effect change. Drawing on 23 in-depth interviews with Labour women MPs first elected in 1997, this article establishes that many of them believe that women politicians practise politics in a feminised way. This claim is, however, premised upon gender rather than sex differences and party identity is also identified as an important determinant. The women MPs' perception that women's style is less legitimate than men's is explored through a discussion of the newly elected Labour women MPs' loyalty in parliamentary votes.     

Popularity Function Forecasts for the 2005 UK General Election

The article provides a set of contingent forecasts for the forthcoming UK general election. The forecasts are based on popularity function derived from monthly time series data covering the period 1997–2004. On most likely assumptions, the forecasts produce a clear Labour victory in the early summer of 2005, with the Liberal Democrats increasing their vote share by roughly four percentage points.     

Book Reviews

Book reviewed in this article: POLITICAL DISCOURSE: Explorations in Indian and Western Political Thought. Women And Peace Through The Polls. Australian Public Opinion On National Security Issues. Why Oppose Racism. Public Enterpiuse And National Development. Selected Essays. Public Power And Public Administration. The Italians In Australia. Capital Labour On The Kimberley Diamond Fields 1871–1890. Culture, Identity, And Politics. The French Reconnaissance. Baudin In Australia 1801–1803. Gordon Chalk: A Political Life. A Very Small Insurance Policy: The Politics of Australian Involvement in Vietnam, 1954–1967. All The Way: Australia's road to Vietnam. A Documentary History Of Queensland. The Archibald Paradox: A Strange Case Of Authorship. Rail Transport And Australian Federalism. The War Despatches Of Kenneth Slessor, Official Australian Correspondent 1940–1944. Between Two Nations: The Indonesia-Papua New Guinea border and West Papua Nationalism. Highlanders And Foreigners In The Upper Ramu. The Kainantu area 1919–1942. Politics And Power In The Usa. Politics And Culture In Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honour of H.G. Koenigsberger. AN Edwardian Meed-Doubles: The Bosanquets versus the Webbs: Study in British Social Policy 189&1929. Feminism And Democracy. Women's Suffrage And Reform Politics in Britain. 1900–1918. Perestroika: New Thinking For Our Country and the World. Revisionmsm And Emplre: Socialist Imperialism in Germany 1897–1914. Bernstein To Brandt. A Short History of German Social Democracy. Population, Labour And Century Germany. Migration In 19Th And 20Th Century Germany. Einfeuhrung In Fragen An Die Geschichtswissenschaet In Deutschland Nach Hitler 1945–1950. Deutschlands Eneuerung 1945–1950. Der Krieg Und Die Schriiwsteller. Der Kriegsroman Der Weimarer Republik. Exil Und Engagement. Deutsche Schriftsteller Im Frankreich Der Dreissiger Jahre. The Ideological Origins Of Nazi Imperialism. Three Faces Of Imperialism; British And American Approaches To Asia and Africa 1870–1970. Saladm And The Fall Of Jerusalem.     

The Dove Flies East: Whitehall, Warsaw and the 1950 World Peace Congress

In 1950 the Cold War turned hot in Korea, the threat of atomic annihilation hovered menacingly and the spectre of another world war haunted Europe. The establishment of the World Peace Council that year was one response to these fears. In November 1950 the Council decided to hold a World Peace Congress in Sheffield. The British Labour government sabotaged this Congress and forced it to shift to Warsaw. This article analyses this event which, to date, has received no scholarly attention. It argues that the attitudes and actions of the protagonists were a microcosm of the Cold War in that each side, East and West, saw the Congress as an opportunity to achieve moral authority, political leverage and strategic advantage over the other. The article also highlights the role of the state in controlling major political events during the Cold War.     

Capitalist models and social democracy: the case of New Labour

Some of the more critical readings of the adequacy and effectiveness of New Labour in power have been developed by scholars willing to link arguments about the trajectory of Labour politics to wider arguments about the character of the contemporary global economy and the space within it for the construction and development of distinctive capitalist models. Mark Wickham-Jones and Colin Hay in particular have made that linkage in a series of important writings on the contemporary Labour party. Their arguments are here subjected to critical review, and set against a third position on New Labour and global capitalism: one informed by the writings of Ralph Miliband on British Labour and by the arguments of Leo Panitch and Greg Albo on the limits of the 'progressive competitiveness' strategies associated with 'Third Way' social democratic governments.     

Reforming sacred institutions,part II: the Soviet Party-State and the Roman Catholic Church compared

The Soviet Party-State and the Roman Catholic Church are conceptualized as hierocratic institutions that faced analogous challenges of adaptation to a changing world from the 1950s onward. Building upon an earlier publication in Post-Soviet Affairs, this article identifies four strategies of “selective inclusion” chosen by these institutions as their leaders sought to reduce the pre-1950s levels of sectarianism: hierocratic reformism; hierocratic managerialism; messianic revivalism; and anti-hierocratic radicalism. Parallels in the adoption of these strategies, and common features of a legitimacy crisis they both came to face, reveal the causal strength of common features, while possible differences in their institutional durability suggest the likely causal impact of differences between them.     

Changing patterns of social network structure in composer-singer relationships: A case study of the Korean popular music industry, 1927–1997

This study focuses on relationships between two different sets of actors in the Korean popular music industry—songwriters and singers—who were mutually connected in the production of hit songs during the period of 1927–1997. Data for the present study were obtained from a set of publications providing the following information about hit songs in Korea since 1925: title, musical style, year of recording and release, lyricist(s), composer(s), singer(s), and the label company producing the record or album. Data are used to test a series of hypotheses on the nature of relationships between songwriters and singers. Results of the present analysis show that composer-singer pairs are likely to have produced only one hit song together, due to a high degree of market competition in the popular music industry. Because composers tend to have more control over their relationships with singers than singers have in their relationships with composers, composers are more likely to have multiple hit songs with more than one singer than are singers to have multiple hit songs with more than one composer. Genres of popular music in Korea have changed significantly since 1950, and these changes have also affected composer-singer relations. The diversification of genres has reduced the concentration of hit songs by selected elite composer-singer pairs over time. Another important consequence of the changes in genres is that the proportion of hit songs by artists playing dual roles as composer and singer has dramatically increased in recent years.     

Forecasting the 2005 General Election: A Neural Network Approach

Although neural networks are increasingly used in a variety of disciplines there are few applications in political science. Approaches to electoral forecasting traditionally employ some form of linear regression modelling. By contrast, neural networks offer the opportunity to consider also the non-linear aspects of the process, promising a better performance, efficacy and flexibility. The initial development of this approach preceded the 2001 general election and models correctly predicted a Labour victory. The original data used for training and testing the network were based on the responses of two experts to a set of questions covering each general election held since 1835 up to 1997. To bring the model up to date, 2001 election data were added to the training set and two separate neural networks were trained using the views of our original two experts. To generate a forecast for the forthcoming general election, answers to the same questions about the performance of parties during the current parliament, obtained from a further 35 expert respondents, were offered to the neural networks. Both models, with slightly different probabilities, forecast another Labour victory. Modelling electoral forecasts using neural networks is at an early stage of development but the method is to be adapted to forecast party shares in local council elections. The greater frequency of such elections will offer better opportunities for training and testing the neural networks.     

英国工党的社会政策解读——观念变化与政策变迁

英国的福利国家是多重政治力量和思想妥协的一个产物,汇聚了不同的观念和政策。同时它也是一个变化的体系。不同政治力量围绕平等、分配和国家的观念分歧及其变化决定了实际政策选择范围和结果。作为该体系的主要缔造者,英国工党有关福利国家的观念直接影响了英国社会政策的演变。这种变化、多元的视角是我们理解英国工党社会政策的基本前提。     

Inner‐party reforms: The SPD and labour party in comparative perspective

In the wake of the crisis of the Keynesian Welfare State the social democratic parties in western Europe have been searching for new concepts to retain their image as reform parties. One way to achieve this is to democratise and renew the intra‐party structures. In the 1980s and 90s, the SPD and the Labour Party have developed different patterns to implement the process of intra‐party reforms. The objectives are to increase the autonomy of action for the parties’ various sub‐units, in particular the party elite, and to reduce the political influence of the body of delegates. On paper the individual member is to get greater rights to participate, in practice this coincides with greater influence of powerful elites. In between, there have been different problems of the intra‐party reforms. In the SPD, personal controversies and the old battles between old and new left and the right wing still determine the political agenda. Its reform got stuck halfway after Rudolf Scharping took office as party chairman. His counterpart Tony Blair tries to continue the reform process initiated by Neil Kinnock. In the Labour Party, the modernisers have had some success in reducing the internal power of the unions and in strengthening individual members. But these are only a few steps in becoming a ‘New Labour Party’.     

缅甸的穆斯林与缅孟关系

罗兴加难民是历时甚久的政治冲突的旁观者.1992年,大约25万难民从缅甸的若开邦逃亡到孟加拉国,他们声称缅甸当局践踏人权.遣返工作于当年开始,截至1997年4月止,已有23万人被遣返.然而,1997年年中遣反计划暂停.缅孟双方似乎没有解决难民困境的政治意愿,遣返工作进展非常缓慢.除非迫不得已,否则孟加拉国政府决不情愿给予那些剩余的难民以种族上的平等待遇.2002年12月17-18日缅甸联邦总理丹瑞大将访问孟加拉国,这次访问进一步加强了两国之间的关系.近来缅甸政府表现出希望尽快接回至今仍滞留在孟加拉国难民营里的缅甸公民的意愿.     

The 2008 Financial Crisis and the Flying Geese Model

In the twentieth century Japan embarked on an economic developmental path that came to be known as the Flying Geese Model. The geopolitical milieu after the Second World War provided Japan with favourable conditions for rapid economic growth and industrialization. By the 1950s, many had noticed the success of the model and it was subsequently adopted by other East Asian countries. They too enjoyed decades of remarkable economic growth. An important element of the model is growth driven by export to the USA and Europe. As a result of the 2008 financial crisis, the traditional markets of the geese are shrinking. The new situation poses grave challenges to both the existing flying geese economies and latecomer economies which wish to follow the model. East Asian countries are responding to the situation by broadening and deepening their existing economic linkages and developing new ones. This represents a continuation of East Asian regionalism in the wake of the 1997 financial crisis.     

Ethnic interests and national ideology during Israel's first decade: addressing the rational Oriental vote

The article offers an empirical foundation through which the electoral behaviour of the new Oriental immigrants into Israel during the 1950s can be interpreted, based on the assumption that their conduct was, in fact, rational. It focuses on the egalitarian wage policy in the important public sector, which led Ben-Gurion and the leaders of Israel's first ruling party, MAPAI, to a confrontation with the European academically educated middle class, and on the political–electoral strategy of MAPAI vis-à-vis the Oriental immigrants during the 1950s electoral campaigns. The article discusses three assumptions: first, that this wage policy was part of the ruling party's attempt to address the interests of the new Oriental working class; second, that this political strategy was publicly discussed, and it addressed the Oriental immigrants’ rational socio-economic calculations for the purpose of securing their political and electoral support; third, that the leaders of nascent Israel and its ruling party presented this policy as a measure towards creating a minimal socio-economic foundation for the process of nation-building during the 1950s.     

Reviews

Kaunda's Zambia, 1964 ‐ 1991. A Select and Annotated Bibliography compiled by Naomi Musiker.

South African Institute of International Affairs, Bibliographical Series No. 26, Johannesburg. 1993. viii plus 426pp.

Environment, Employment and Development edited by A.S. Bhalla. International Labour Office, Geneva, 1992. x plus 177pp. including bibliography.

Poverty in Developing Countries: A Bibliography of Publications by the International Labour Office World Employment Programme, 1975–91. International Labour Office Bibliography No 12. International Labour Office, Geneva, 1992. viii plus 152pp.

The South African Tripod: Studies in Economics, Politics and Conflict by B. Oden, T. Ohlson, A. Davidson, P. Strand, M. Lundahl, and L. Moritz. Scandinavian Institute of International Studies, Uppsala, 1994. 281pp. including tables and graphs.

Tears of the Dead, the Social Biography of an African Family by Richard Werbner. Baobab Books: Harare and Edinburgh University Press, 1991. xi plus 211pp. including genealogies and illustrations.

The Politics of the National Arts Festival by Kenneth Grundy. Occasional Paper, No. 34, Institute of Social and Economic Research. Rhodes University, Grahamstown. 66 pp. including notes.

The Agrarian Question in Southern Africa and Accumulation from Below: Economics and Politics in the Struggle for Democracy by Michael Neocosmos. Research Report No. 93, The Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, Uppsala, 1993. 79 pp. including notes and bibliography.

The Bushman Myth: The Making of a Namibian Underclass by Robert J. Gordon. Boulder, Westview Press, Colorado and Oxford, 1992. xiv plus 304 pp. including maps, tables, notes, references and index.

A Bed Called Home: Life in the Migrant Labour Hostels of Cape Town by Mamphela Ramphele. David Philip: Cape Town, 1993. vii plus 152pp. including illustrations, appendix, bibliography and index.

The Small and the New in Southern Africa: The Foreign Relations of Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia and Swaziland since their Independence. A Select and Annotated Bibliography compiled by L.E. Andor. South African Institute of International Affairs, Bibliographical Series No. 25, Johannesburg, 1993. x plus 526pp.     

'It's Labour, But Not as we Know it.' Media Lesson-drawing and the Disciplining of Social Democracy: A Case Study

A qualitative content analysis of New Zealand newspapers from 1997 to 2002 shows how the overwhelmingly conservative print media in that country used a highly partial version of Tony Blair's New Labour to try to help set parameters for its New Zealand counterpart and point it in what it saw as the right direction. Globalisation rests on the flow of ideas as well as the flow of trade: it has an important ideational component that the media—internationally owned though often parochially focused—helps construct by drawing lessons from abroad. The thrust of the coverage analysed was to transnationalise a business-friendly common sense concerning the proper—indeed the inevitable—response of a modern social democratic party to a globalised political economy. Whether this actually affected the behaviour of the New Zealand variant of social democracy, however, is a moot point. Finally, in keeping with Lijphart's seminal discussion of the purpose of case studies, this one generates the following hypothesis: that the print media in one country will interpret the domestic politics of other countries (other than those which are geographically closest or economically crucial) in such a way as to try to influence the outcome of political and policy debates at home.     

Rural industrialization in China: From backyard furnaces to township and village enterprises

This article examines the development of rural industrialization in China from the late 1950s to the mid-1990s. The initial attempt to industrialize China during the Great Leap Forward resulted in a short-lived rural industrialization program, epitomized by the frenzied establishment of hundreds of thousands of backyard furnaces. The second wave of rural industrialization came in the late 1960s and gave rise to the development of local “five small industries” aimed at providing goods and services for agricultural development. Since the introduction of economic reforms in the late 1970s, rural enterprises, known as township and village enterprises, have experienced explosive growth. They are no longer limited to the five small industries, but are engaged in producing consumer goods for both domestic and international markets. This article looks into the driving forces behind the growth of TVEs during the 1980s and examines the evolving roles and challenges they face in the 1990s. Li tu bu li xiang jin chang bu jin cheng. (Leave the land but not the village; enter the factory but not the city.) —A popular Chinese saying about rural industrialization in the 1980s This is based on a background review chapter of his doctoral dissertation, entitled “Industrialization and Energy Use: An Emprical Study of China's Township and Willage Enterprises,” University of Pennsylvania, 1997.     

The New German party finance law

In 1992 the Federal Constitutional Court decided for the sixth time since 1949 that the German legislation concerning political finance was unconstitutional. While the first five cases were important milestones in the development of German law on the public funding of parties and campaigns, this decision was notable for its rejection of key provisions of two laws that were passed in the 1980s and for overturning the Court's previous ban on direct aid to the parties. A commission of experts was formed to study and recommend changes, and a new law was passed by the Bundestag and Bundesrat in November and December 1993. Instead of focusing on reimbursements of parties for their campaign expenditures, the new law provides for direct financing of parties based on one DM for each vote in EU, national, and Land elections and DM .50 for each D‐Mark received in party dues and donations up to DM 6,000 per person (12,000 per couple). For the first five million votes, the parties receive DM 1.30 per vote. To encourage citizen involvement, parties are not to receive more than the sum of all of their own source revenues, and the total support for all parties is not to exceed the DM 230 million (adjusted for inflation) that was given to the parties as reimbursements for campaign expenditures in the period 1989–1992. To those who have followed the controversies over German political financing since the 1950s, it will be no surprise to learn that the new legislation has provoked criticism and sparked plans to bring the new law before the Federal Constitutional Court.     

The Politics of Public–Private Partnerships

Since 1 May 1997 the Labour government in the United Kingdom has implemented a number of public–private partnerships (PPPs) as a central tool of governance within their wider modernisation agenda. To date, the introduction of PPPs has largely been evaluated through conceptual lenses that emphasise either the administrative, managerial, financial or technical dimensions of this reform strategy. This article seeks to complement this wider literature by arguing that PPPs raise a host of political issues and tensions that have largely been overlooked. Five specific themes are set out in order to provide a framework or organising perspective. These are: efficiency; risk; complexity; accountability; and governance and the future of state projects. The main conclusion of the article is that PPPs represent a Faustian bargain in that forms of PPP may deliver efficiency gains and service improvements in some policy areas but these benefits may involve substantial political and democratic costs.     

Comparing British and American conservatisms through the prism of African development

Conservatism and conservative party politics in Britain and America is associated with neo-colonial attitudes, including pursuit of national interests ahead of post-colonial development. Based on interviews conducted in Washington and London with actors involved with African development, this article examines comparative shifts in conservatives’ engagements from the late Cold War era to the G. W. Bush and Cameron governments. Greater ideological heterogeneity and distinctiveness among American conservative interests groups, combined with a bureaucratic environment in the US allowing more direct channels for ideological input into policy, results in a more clearly conservative stamp on Africa policy in the US than in Britain where ideological lines on development have become more blurred since the 1997 New Labour election victory and the creation of the Department for International Development.