Quangos—Why Bother Counting Them When Whitehall Can't?

‘Mindless’ empiricism rules in British central government, bolstered by the use of prerogative powers and the absence of any ‘court of appeal’ to insist on definitions and uniformities. This gives arguments about quangos—arm's‐length bodies—a surreal quality. The Cameron coalition has created many new quangos, while claiming a cull. Unless and until Whitehall acquires, or is forced to acquire, better habits of mind, it may be a waste of time for academics and reformers to prepare taxonomies and call for more administrative rationality.     

Is the Sun Setting on Cosmopolitan Justice?

Reports on the UN criminal tribunals and the related hybrid courts raise grave concerns about their sustainability in terms of costs and their legal standards in respect of evidence. The effectiveness of the current courts is compared to the domestic prosecution of offenders from the Auschwitz concentration camp. Although the Auschwitz court failed to capture the enormity of the crime of genocide, there are nonetheless good reasons to re-visit the use of domestic courts and other remedies for such crimes today, particularly after adoption of the genocide law by nation states. Ideals of cosmopolitan justice behind the UN courts are being exported to societies that are ill-equipped to apply or afford them; and domestic legal development suffers as a consequence.     

Missing the Point on Hard and Soft Power?

This article is a critique of two reports of parliamentary inquiries, into intervention and soft power, respectively. Neither report includes any discussion of Britain's involvement in and culpability for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Despite a more radical approach taken by the report on soft power, the article argues that the failure to address recent wars is symptomatic of a deeper and more dangerous inability to face up to profound and dangerous changes taking place in the world.     

Positive versus normative economics: what’s?the?connection? Evidence from the Survey of?Americans and?Economists on the Economy and?the?General?Social?Survey

Previous research suggests that positive and normative beliefs about economics are largely unrelated. Using questions from two national surveys, this study finds that: (a)?the underlying determinants of positive and normative beliefs are strikingly similar; (b)?education is by far the strongest overall determinant of both positive and normative beliefs; and (c) the variables known to push positive beliefs in the same direction as formal economic training—education, male gender, income growth, and job security—also push normative beliefs in the same direction. These results strongly suggest that the positive-normative connection has been underestimated.     

Campaigning on behalf of the party? Party constraints on candidate campaign personalisation

This article analyses what makes political candidates run a party‐focused or personalised election campaign. Prior work shows that candidates face incentives from voters and the media to personalise their campaign rhetoric and promises at the expense of party policy. This has raised concerns about the capacity of parties to govern effectively and voters’ ability to hold individual politicians accountable. This article builds on the literature on party organisation and considers the possible constraints candidates face from their party in personalising their election campaigns. Specifically, it is argued that party control over the candidate nomination process and campaign financing constrains most political candidates in following electoral incentives for campaign personalisation. Using candidate survey data from the 2009 EP election campaign in 27 countries, the article shows how candidates from parties in which party officials exerted greater control over the nomination process and campaign finances were less likely to engage in personalised campaigning at the expense of the party programme. The findings imply that most parties, as central gatekeepers and resource suppliers, hold important control mechanisms for countering the electoral pressure for personalisation and advance our understanding of the incentives and constraints candidates face when communicating with voters. The article discusses how recent democratic reforms, paradoxically, might induce candidate personalisation with potential negative democratic consequences.     

The more,the better? Counterfactual evidence on the effect of compulsory voting on the consistency of party choice

Compulsory voting (CV) undoubtedly raises electoral turnout. Yet does it also affect individual party choices and aggregate election outcomes? Previous studies have focused on partisan or ‘directional’ effects of CV in favour of, for example, social‐democratic or anti‐establishment parties. These effects are usually small, however. Using survey data from the Belgian General Elections Study, this article finds that CV primarily affects the consistency, rather than the direction, of party choices. In particular, the analyses suggest that CV compels a substantial share of uninterested and less knowledgeable voters to the polls. These voters, in turn, cast votes that are clearly less consistent with their own political preferences than those of the more informed and motivated voluntary voters. Claims that CV promotes equal representation of political interests are therefore questionable.     

The demise of the last westminster system? Comments on the report of New Zealand's Royal Commission on the Electoral System

The New Zealand government set up a Royal Commission to consider the country's electoral system. It produced an unexpectedly radical Report, challenging some of the basic assumptions of the Westminster system under which New Zealand has been governed for 100 years. This article considers the wider implications of the Report, criticizing some of its assumptions, but accepting its basic analysis—a general philosophical dislike of the principle of concentrating power in the hands of the majority. It also explores the Report's treatment of alternative forms of proportional representation.     

National Parliaments after Lisbon: Administrations on the Rise?

In the wake of the Lisbon Treaty, much of the academic debate on national parliaments in the EU has focused on the new powers of national parliaments and the potential for the politicisation and parliamentarisation of the EU. In the process, the role of administrators in the parliamentary control of EU affairs has been neglected. This article addresses that gap by comparing parliamentary administrations to a set of ideal types on the basis of in-depth interviews and a comparative survey of parliamentary staff. This leads to the observation that the roles of parliamentary administrators have been further expanded after Lisbon to a range of tasks that go beyond technical support and include elements of agenda-setting.     

Is development uniquely modern? Ancient Athens on the doorstep

Public Choice - By offering out-of-sample observations, pre-modern case studies can provide unique insights into the process of economic development. We focus on the case of ancient Athens in the...     

Do We Want a Referendum on the Common Market?

In March 1975 Britain quarrelled about whether to hold a referendum on membership of the European Community. The Hansard Society organised an important debate about it between Enoch Powell, Geoffrey Howe, John Mackintosh and Keith Kyle. This is a report on that event drawn from a recently discovered recording. Many of the arguments deployed then are being repeated in today's debate about a ‘people's vote'—including the long‐term effects on the UK's constitution of having recourse to the referendum device.     

Women on the Battleground: Does Gender Condition the Use of Negative Campaigning?

This article presents the findings of an explorative study examining to what extent and under which conditions gender influences the use of negative campaigning in Western Europe. It advances existing research in two ways. First, it is one of the few empirical examinations to date exploring gender differences in negative campaigning outside the US context. Second, it brings to bear novel data on this topic from British, Dutch and German parliamentary election campaigns between 1980 and 2006. In essence, this study explores whether we can find gender effects on the use of negative campaigning in Western Europe. These effects are less likely to be found in these three Western European countries than in the United States, because we expect smaller candidate effects in parliamentary systems than in presidential systems. The analysis suggests that female party leaders are significantly more likely to “go negative”. However, this difference between male and female party leaders is entirely due to the inclusion of Margaret Thatcher in the analysis. Without her, the difference disappears.     

What Motivates the Gatekeepers? Explaining Governing Party Preferences on Immigration

Most scholarship on immigration politics is made up of isolated case studies or cross‐disciplinary work that does not build on existing political science theory. This study attempts to remedy this shortcoming in three ways: (1) we derive theories from the growing body of immigration literature, to hypothesize about why political parties would be more or less open to immigration; (2) we link these theories to the broader political science literature on parties and institutions; and (3) we construct a data set on the determinants of immigration politics, covering 18 developed countries from 1987 to 1999. Our primary hypothesis is that political institutions shape immigration politics by facilitating or constraining majoritarian sentiment (which is generally opposed to liberalizing immigration). Our analysis finds that in political systems where majoritarianism is constrained by institutional “checks,” governing parties support immigration more strongly, even when controlling for a broad range of alternative explanations.     

Why do Historians Ignore Digital Analysis? Bring on the Luddites

This article argues that historians have failed to grasp the profound opportunities afforded by computational analysis. Despite the abundance of machine-readable data liberated by digitisation—alongside tools and exemplar studies—there has been no widespread embrace of text mining or revival of cliometrics. This ambivalence has arisen mainly through apathy and side-lining of computational analysis to a specialist methodological niche. The absence of justification is damaging to the intellectual vitality of the discipline and its capacity to face the dawning age of data science. The article calls for an urgent debate about the historian and the computer. More than anything else, this requires sceptics to come forward to meet the advocates to discuss how we face the future. British political history has a proud tradition of methodological innovation and there is no better subfield in which to begin a debate that has fundamental implications for the whole discipline.     

What do judges say on the protection of intelligence secrets?

This article discusses the role of the discourse of law in legitimizing the protection of intelligence secrets. It draws on examples from the United Kingdom and the United States to illustrate rhetorical regularities with respect to the need to protect intelligence officers, agents, sources and methods, the effectiveness of intelligence agencies, international intelligence relationships and the effects of a mosaic of disclosed information. It concludes that judges produce specialized knowledge on state secrecy that plays a part in shaping the understanding of state secrecy in society.