Notes on contributors

International comparisons of new radical right‐wing parties usually focus on differences in electoral fortunes, party organisations and leadership. This article uses a different angle by focusing on public policy impact and the role these parties play in the parliamentary and executive arenas. The research is driven by the hypothesis that under the conditions of stable democracy, holding office produces a net result in a ‘taming effect’ on radical right‐wing actors rather than a sharp ‘right turn’. Evidence f rom four countries (Germany, France, Italy and Austria) shows that parliamentary presence alone does not result in policy effects. When the radical right holds executive office, a ‘right turn’ occurs primarily in cultural policies. Overall, real effects of radical right‐wing politics occur largely as a result of the interaction between the radical right and established actors ‐regardless of the radical right's assuming power.     

Epistemic Communities and the Diffusion of Ideas: Central Bank Reform in the United Kingdom

In May 1997 the incoming Labour government gave the Bank of England operational independence in the setting of interest rates. This reform is puzzling as it was introduced by a party whose roots lie with the trade union movement, and resisted by the Conservatives whose political support comes largely from business, the financial sector and homeowners who stand to benefit most from price stability. Economic ideas are central to explaining the outcome. The Labour Chancellor was convinced by an epistemic community of monetary experts that central bank independence would achieve New Labour's electoral goals. These political incentives were absent for the Conservatives, who preferred to set interest rates strategically to increase their popularity with voters.     

Thirty Years of Territorial Politics

For many years, territorial politics was neglected in political science under the influence of a modernist paradigm according to which territory gives way to function as a principle of social and political organisation. In the last 30 years it has received more attention as territorial political movements have made an impact. This has provoked a reconsideration not just of the present but also of the past, as scholars have identified the persistence of territorial politics even within unitary states. There is a continuing separation of the study of local and urban from regional politics, although the respective literatures address similar issues and use similar concepts. The ‘new regionalism’ literature examines the emergence of territorial systems of action under the impact of state transformation and transnational integration. There are marked differences in territorial politics in western and east-central Europe, not because of primordial ethnic characteristics, but because of the evolution of the state in the post-war era.     

Patrimonial Economic Voting: Legislative Elections in France

Patrimonial economic voting has been neglected in favour of classical economic voting studies. This assertion holds less, however, with French election investigations, where the neglect is relative rather than absolute. Whereas classical economic voting holds the economy to be a valence issue, patrimonial economic voting regards the economy as a positional issue. Voters who own more property, in particular high-risk assets, are held to be more right-wing in their political preferences. This patrimonial effect shows itself to be statistically and substantively strong in one of the few election data-sets with sufficient measures available – surveys on the National Assembly contests of 1978, 1988, 2002. The electoral effect exceeds that from the traditional ‘heavy variables’ of class and income. Moreover, further work might show its impact comparable to that of classic sociotropic retrospective evaluations of the national economy. Certainly a case can be made for further study of patrimonial economic voting, as compared to classical economic voting.     

Bletchley Park and the Holocaust

A common substantive topic in intelligence studies is the analysis process. The addition of active-learning techniques to reinforce key concepts like competitive analysis, ‘wheat’ versus ‘chaff’, and the different ‘ints’ of intelligence can be an important supplement to existing teaching methods. Moreover, a deeper appreciation of the intelligence analysis process is likely to be best achieved through simulation learning. Drawing on the growing literature that recognizes active learning and simulations as important pedagogical tools, this teaching note presents an original active-learning simulation for the college-level intelligence studies classroom in which students face an analysis challenge that highlights different components of the analysis process. This simulation increases appreciation for intelligence analysis and serves as a student-friendly method for enhancing intelligence studies pedagogy.     

Multi-dimensional economic voting in Spain: The 2008 election

Economic voting studies remain contentious in Spain. The notion is widely-held that there is no economic vote in that country, due to the pervasive and effacing influences of left-right ideology. Still, a growing number of investigations show a significant impact of economic evaluation on the vote choice in Spanish national elections. At least one possible exception here is the 2008 election, where the question has received no systematic treatment. In this study, we explore the impact of economic voting in that contest. We find, first, the presence of strong economic voting of the valence kind. Second, we find that two hitherto unstudied dimensions of economic voting – position and patrimony – have their own independent effect.