The Restoration and Renewal of the Palace of Westminster: Avoiding the Trap and Realising the Promise

By failing to acknowledge the link between the design of our political institutions and growing levels of anti‐political sentiment, the restoration and renewal programme risks falling into a trap of its own making. Involving the public from the outset in an open review of the (re)design options for Westminster—in a positive and confident conversation—ensures the best opportunity for meaningful engagement between the public and the future of their democracy.     

Judging from a Guilty Conscience: The Chilean Judiciary's Human Rights Turn

Since the detention of General Pinochet in London in 1998 on charges of crimes against humanity, Chile's judges have sentenced more former officials of the military regime for human rights violations than judges of any other country in Latin America. This article argues that the prosecutorial turn reflects the judiciary's attempt to atone for its complicity with the dictatorship. The London arrest created pressure for prosecution of Pinochet-era human rights violations; but it is the contest over the judiciary's legacy, as an important piece of postauthoritarian memory struggles, that explains why Chile's notoriously illiberal judiciary ceded to that pressure. By reconceptualizing judicial culture as contested, heterogeneous, and dynamic, this article opens the door to richer understandings of judicial politics, transitional justice, and the reception of international human rights.     

State-led bricolage and the extension of collective governance: Hybridity in the Swiss skill formation system

This paper explores the extension of collective governance to sectors without collective governance tradition. We introduce the concept of state-led bricolage to analyze the expansion of the Swiss apprenticeship training system – in which employer associations fulfill core collective governance tasks – to economic sectors in which training had previously followed a school-based and state-oriented logic. In deindustrializing societies, these sectors are key for the survival of collectively governed training systems. Through a mixed-methods analysis, we examine the reform process that led to the creation of new intermediary organizations that enable collective governance in these sectors. In addition, we compare the organizational features of these organizations with the respective organizations in the traditional crafts and industry sectors. We find that the new organizations result from state-led bricolage. They are hybrid organizations that reflect some of the bricoleur's core policy goals and critically build on the combination of associational and state-oriented institutional logics.     

The Individual-Level Determinants of Exiting German Parties

With respect to explaining declining party membership, the question who leaves political parties and why has so far been neglected. This article aims to fill this gap by applying Hirschman’s theory of “Exit, Voice, and Loyalty” to both current and former party members, and at combining it with the resource model of political participation. We find that neither individual resources nor reasons for discontent are sufficient to explain the different reactions to discontent, but that the exit-voice-loyalty model has a certain explanatory power.     

Témoignage and Responsibility in Photo/Graphic Narratives of Médecins Sans Frontières

This article analyzes photographic and graphic narratives of missions conducted by MSF in the Sahel (1984–1985), Afghanistan (1986), and Democratic Republic of the Congo (2005) for the ways in which the narratives construe the responsibility of their readers toward what they see as well as of MSF's missions toward those they serve, particularly in relation to MSF's official policy of témoignage or witnessing as advocacy. I read the chronotopes (space-time) within these books for how they represent suffering and position the reader as voyeur, philanthropist, or protester (Chouliaraki 2006). In their distinctive forms, these texts bridge the presence of immediate crisis and the larger historical framework through which it may be understood. As simultaneously visual and literary media, photo/graphic narratives work through the dual compulsions to show and to tell, both of which manifest through their formal manipulations of the structure of a humanitarian crisis. In their framing devices, these books play with constructions of temporality and distance (moral, intersubjective, and geographical) that govern “the ethics of mediation[,] the humanization of vulnerable others” (Chouliaraki 2011: 363) upon which humanitarian responsibility depends.     

Small but Significant: Why Small Parties Benefit from a Presidentialised German Party System

Poguntke and Webb suggest a trend toward the presidentialisation of modern democracies. Small parties would seem to be disadvantaged by presidentialisation, given a traditional lack of emphasis on personalities in their governing and campaign styles. This study attempts to show that smaller parties in the Federal Republic are actually advantaged by presidentialisation as the policy convergence of the larger CDU and SPD coupled with declining levels of partisanship in the electorate have made smaller parties more relevant in the politics of the Federal Republic.     

Justice in democratic transitions

Transitional Justice: How Emerging Democracies Reckon with Former Regimes, Vol.1 General Considerations edited by Neil J. Kritz. Estover, Plymouth: Plymbridge Distributors Ltd. Pp.xxx + 604. £36.95. ISBN 1 878 37945 3

Transitional Justice: How Emerging Democracies Reckon with Former Regimes, Vol.2 Country Studies edited by Neil J. Kritz. Estover, Plymouth: Plymbridge Distributors Ltd. Pp.xl + 780. £31. ISBN 1 878 37943 7

Transitional Justice: How Emerging Democracies Reckon with Former Regimes, Vol.3 Laws, Rulings and Reports edited by Neil J. Kritz. Estover, Plymouth: Plymbridge Distributors Ltd. Pp.xxxii + 834. £36.95. ISBN 1 878 37944 5     

The politics of human rights in democratic Brazil: ‘A lei não pega’

In spite of the important democratic advances registered since Brazil returned to democracy in 1985, widespread human rights violations associated with the right to life continue to be reported. This article examines the nature of human rights violations and the government's attitude to them. Since 1985 there has been a fundamental shift in the relationship between the perpetrators of violations and the state authorities, in the identity of the victims, the motives behind the crimes and the political context in which they take place. During the same period the governments’ response to human rights violations has evolved from a reactive to a pro‐active strategy, culminating in the launching of the country's first National Plan for the Protection of Human Rights, in May 1996. The article concludes that despite some positive developments, the underlying causes, pattern and intensity of human rights violations continue essentially unabated.