Putting it Right? The Labour Party's Big Shift on Immigration Since 2010

Under pressure from voters, and from other parties, Europe's centre‐left has had to re‐evaluate its position on migration. The UK Labour party is no exception. Public concern about large‐scale immigration clearly contributed to its heavy defeat at the 2010 general election. Since then it has been slowly but surely hardening its stance on the issue, although this is by no means unprecedented: while the rise of UKIP may have upped the ante in recent months, Labour has a long history of adjusting policy in this area so as to remain competitive with its main rival, the Conservative party. Labour is now asking itself whether it will be possible to do this without challenging one of the fundamental precepts of EU membership—the right of free movement of people. Whatever the result of this internal debate between the party's ‘beer drinkers’ and its ‘wine drinkers’, Labour may still have difficulty in neutralising immigration as an issue since, for the most part, it continues to insist on giving an essentially economic answer to what for many voters is actually a cultural question.     

Moralizing metaphors: Veit Ludwig von Seckendorff on parliamentary oratory

SUMMARY

It is commonly assumed that real political eloquence can only exist under a free and popular government. But in monarchies, public oratory has had little effect on decision-making processes and therefore seems to have degenerated into an ideological affirmation of princely rule and is judged a negligible phenomenon. But recent research has shown that political power is much more than the taking of collectively binding decisions. It also has a symbolic dimension that is related to the performative representation of the commonwealth's socio-political order. To assess political eloquence in monarchies, the article focuses on the parliamentary oratory of Veit Ludwig von Seckendorff, the only German-speaking practitioner of political oratory in the seventeenth century to have published some of his orations in book form. Analysing the speeches shows Seckendorff as an erudite and experienced political thinker. A deep understanding of both the reality and theory of the Ständestaat found expression in the most prominent feature of his oratorical practice: his ingenuity to find or create new metaphors depicting the relationship between ruler and subjects. Seckendorff crafted political metaphors to expose the moral foundations of a good commonwealth and to exert moral pressure on his audience. His oratory was about ‘moral education’. Seckendorff himself, however, overlooked the fact that the very ceremoniousness of his speeches carried a performative force that shaped and reshaped the socio-political order of the commonwealth.     

From Gaokao to Knowhow

A new type of science education has been introduced to help Chinese students get practical experience and problem-solving skills that they can use later in life.     

Obama or Romney, China Stays

WELL, it’s over. The tumult and the shouting dies; the captains and the kings depart. We now know that there will be no change in the broad di- rection of American policy.     

WHEN MISSING DATA ARE NOT MISSING: A NEW APPROACH TO EVALUATING SUPPLEMENTAL HOMICIDE REPORT IMPUTATION STRATEGIES*

The Supplemental Homicide Reports (SHR) are widely used in criminological research and inform a broad range of research topics and subsequent policy applications. A serious issue with the SHR is missing information about the offender and incident in many recorded homicides. Although it is convenient to discard cases with missing data before analysis, such discarding is not theoretically justified and can lead to incorrect substantive conclusions. Recently, several techniques for imputing missing SHR data have been proposed, but it is difficult to evaluate their effectiveness. This research presents a new approach to testing and evaluating SHR imputation techniques. Offender data that are missing in the SHR are often found in police records available for individual cities. We examine similarities and differences among cases with known offender characteristics in the SHR, cases with such information missing in the SHR but available in police records, and cases with such information missing in both sources. We then use these data sets to evaluate four different imputation techniques suggested in the literature (Fox, 2004; Messner, Deane, and Beaulieu, 2002; Pampel and Williams, 2000; Regoeczi and Riedel, 2003). We apply each imputation technique to the SHR, and for cases with information missing in the SHR but known in the police records, we see how well the imputed values correspond both with the individual known values and with the overall distributions in the police records. We discuss the outcome of our assessment of these strategies, and we outline important implications this assessment has for research using SHR data.