Pop Goes IR? Researching the Popular Culture–World Politics Continuum

In this article we offer a potential research agenda for the study of popular culture in IR and outline how this research agenda could be advanced. If the incorporation of popular culture into IR is going to be fruitful, there must be a willingness to go beyond an engagement with illustrations of world politics. Doing so will get us closer to what is at stake in the mutual implication of popular culture and world politics.     

Lobbying in the sunshine—hiding behind transparency?

Lobbying in Israel was unregulated for 60 years. Scholars have decried the fact that high value is attached to the written decree, but implementation does not necessarily follow: quite a few laws have remained at symbolic level in Israel. There were two unsuccessful bills submitted to legislate lobbying regulation: first by Knesset Member (MK) Merom in 1993 and the second one by MK Naot in 2001. The bill submitted by MKs Yechimovich and Sa'ar in 2007 resulted in passing the Israeli lobbying regulations in 2008, but the Lobbyist Law displayed unexpected characteristics, and there was a 500% growth in lobbyist numbers. In 2012, a scandal shook the Israeli lobbying world as a crew from the Israeli Channel 2's investigative show Uvda (‘Fact’) infiltrated the training program of the Gilad Government Relations & Lobbying firm. Following the Channel 2 exposé, the Speaker of the Knesset MK Rivlin instructed Knesset employees to immediately forbid the entrance of all lobbyists to areas heavily used by MKs. These steps, taken almost 4 years after that the Knesset had passed a weak Lobbyist Law, scoring 28 points according to the Center of Public Integrity score, did not create more transparency but only set certain restrictions on the lobbyists' movements in the Knesset building. In 2013, MK Koll submitted a bill to further regulate the lobbying followed by another bill by MKs Yechimovich and Tsur in 2014. However, these bills were thrashed as the Knesset was dispersed in December 2014. This paper would analyze the bills from 1993, 2001, 2007, 2013, and 2014 by measuring their strength according to the Center of Public Integrity Index in order to explore the path that resulted in passing the Lobbyist Law in 2008 and in the following developments. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Devolution in England—Is the Genie out of the Lamp?

This article explores the extent to which devolution within England can address the general malaise that is often described as ‘the English Question’. It considers how far the devolution genie might be considered out of the lamp. It takes as its basis three broad arguments for devolution—an economic case, a case concerning public service reform and a democratic argument for the decentralisation of power—and for each of these three it explores the theoretical underpinnings for the argument, how things are currently playing out in the current political context and what we might expect to see in the future. The article concludes with some suggestions as to how debates about the English Question might play out in the years ahead.     

Volunteering in the Arab World: Bringing Back People into Politics?

This article analyzes the concept of volunteering in the Arab world. The main argument is that the nature of the Arab world in addition to the historical development of civil society directly affected the philosophy of volunteering in the region. Since civic services were not framed nor included in the national agendas of the state, this had a direct negative effect on the development of the act. However, due to social, economic, and political factors, this trend is changing: As of 2000, organizations and societies started to understand the importance of volunteering and its link to the social and economic revival of societies; Arab states started to encourage the act by providing the right legal and political environment. However, these different policies are not building democratic societies nor encouraging civic engagement. The article concludes with recommendations for how to bring people back into civic and political society as well as suggestions for future research.     

Understanding Local Service Delivery Arrangements: Are the ICMA ASD Data Reliable?

The authors utilize the two latest ICMA Profile of Local Government Service Delivery Choices surveys to investigate whether the service provision and delivery arrangement information reported in the surveys accurately represents reality and, if not, what factors contribute to generating incorrect or unreliable survey responses. Interviews with practitioners are used to better understand both the accuracy of the survey responses and improvements that could be made to the survey instrument. Results suggest that the ICMA ASD survey data are highly erratic, with more than 70 percent of the cases (N = 70) investigated containing some inaccuracies. A qualitative analysis shows that the majority of the errors appear to be caused by the lack of a clear definition of service provision or by the service titles being too vague or too broad, both of which likely lead to discretion in interpreting survey questions and thus inconsistent answers by individual respondents over time.     

Do the IMF and the World Bank influence voting in?the?UN General Assembly?

Using panel data for 188 countries over the 1970–2008 period, this paper analyzes empirically the influence of the IMF and the World Bank on voting patterns in the UN General Assembly. Countries receiving adjustment projects and larger non-concessional loans from the World Bank vote more frequently in line with the average G7 country. The same is true for countries obtaining non-concessional IMF programs. Regarding voting coincidence with the United States, World Bank non-concessional loans have a significant impact, while IMF loans do not. This overall pattern of results is robust to the choice of control variables and method of estimation.     

Structural Budget Balance as a Fiscal Rule in the European Union—Good,Bad, or Ugly?

The EU's Fiscal Compact requires member states to legislate structural budget balance rule(s) (SBR). We use elite interviews and government documents from Austria, Ireland, and Portugal to assess the extent to which SBRs are perceived to have resulted in improved accountability, coordination, and credible commitment on the part of elected officials. We find that establishing the SBRs in legislation has not resulted in domestic ownership on the part of the member states. Furthermore, SBRs do not appear to have improved accountability due to questions about their accuracy. There is some evidence that SBRs aid finance ministries' coordination efforts.     

Indigenization of the Holocaust and the Tehran Holocaust Conference: Iranian Aberration or Third World Trend?

It is understandable that Iran’s December 2006 hosting of an international conference casting doubts on the historicity of the Holocaust would raise questions about treatments of the Shoah elsewhere in the Third World. In fact, indigenization the Holocaust—the manifold ways in which serious scholars, activists, and writers from Asia, Africa, and Latin America have come to incorporate the Holocaust in their intellectual work—has been positive overall. Within the framework of intellectual globalization, much of the Third World intelligentsia has come to include this most Western of human rights violations within the framework of their own cultures and histories. Although some of the indigenization of the Holocaust is political and instrumental, the deviant variant expressed at the Tehran Holocaust conference is atypical. Governmental respect for the memory of victims of genocide should be considered as an emerging human right.     

Britain's Wages Crisis—Is ‘Predistribution’ or ‘Redistribution’ the Way Forward?

Is ‘predistribution’ as championed by Ed Miliband, or old fashioned ‘redistribution’ as adopted, if stealthily, by Labour from 1997, the best way to create greater equality? Some critics have argued that a strategy of predistribution—aimed at closing the income gap before the application of taxes and benefits—would not work and that it will be necessary to rely mainly on redistribution. This article examines the potential impact of weak and more radical predistribution‐style measures on one of the key drivers of inequality—‘wage compression’. It examines the potential of a mix of policies for raising the wage floor. It argues that reliance on traditional redistribution would face its own set of constraints and that creating a more equal distribution of the cake, before taxes and benefits, is a necessary condition for lowering the risk of continuing economic crisis.     

Opposing Islamification or promoting Islamophobia? Understanding the English Defence League

ABSTRACT

The emergence and growth of the English Defence League (EDL) in the past two years as a socio-political mass movement are unprecedented in the British setting. Initially dismissed and duly condemned as a racist and Islamophobic far-right organization, little is known about the EDL. Allen's article begins by tracing the development of British far-right political groups that were trail-blazers in campaigning against the alleged threat posed by Muslims and Islam since 2001. The rise—and subsequent fall—of the British National Party is considered as a vehicle for understanding the climate in which hostility to Muslims has become increasingly apparent. It is in this context that the messages and discourse of the EDL are explored, as well as in regard to the organization's roots in the English football hooligan fraternity and specific events in Luton in the spring of 2009. Allen looks at the EDL's innovative use of social networking—in particular its use of Facebook—to support its street marches and protests, as well as its recognition of the economic impact it has had, given the costs associated with policing its marches and protests. Having established how the EDL is supported both actively and passively, not least through a somewhat unique coalition that brings together sometimes disparate groups on the basis of ‘the enemy of my own enemy is my friend’—including groups that have historically been discriminated against by the far right—Allen considers the the arguments for recognizing the EDL as a multicultural movement. He concludes that the messages of the EDL are indeed Islamophobic—understanding Islamophobia as an ideological phenomenon—in that they create a form of order that clearly demarcates Islam as the Other.