Constructing and contesting City of London power: NGOs and the emergence of noisier financial politics

Existing literature on the City of London has tended to focus on its ‘structural power’, while neglecting political and narrative agency. This paper acts as a corrective by presenting evidence to show that since the financial crash of 2008 the political terrain the City operates on has become more contested, crowded and noisier. The contribution develops a middle course between a positive assessment of the role of civil society in relation to global finance, and a more pessimistic reading. We demonstrate how macro-narratives and public story-telling both construct and contest City and financial sector power. In a new pattern since the financial crash, NGOs have moved from campaigns of limited duration and narrow focus, to a more sustained presence on macro-structural issues. Adopting a supply–demand framework for assessing governance and regulatory change, we look at the emergence of TheCityUK as a new advocacy arm and the strategies of three of the more prominent and focused NGOs that have mobilized in the aftermath of the crash: the Tax Justice Network’s (TJN) use of the ‘finance curse’; Positive Money on private endogenous money creation; and Finance Watch counterweight strategies at the level of the European Union. We suggest these mobilizations highlight the need for a more concerted and orchestrated construction of a global institutional civil society infrastructure in finance (a global financial public sphere) to achieve greater access, resources, scrutiny and oversight for a range of specialist expert NGOs.     

Woman to Woman: Australian Feminists’ Embrace of Radio Broadcasting, 1930s–1950s

This article demonstrates the crucial importance of the radio medium in the post-suffrage era as a space in which women could expand their sphere of influence and enact their responsibilities as citizens. It challenges previous scholarship which has argued that during the early decades of radio women were confined to the world of the everyday and the domestic. In the interwar years, Australian feminist organisations were quick to take advantage of the still-developing radio medium, which they used to publicise their activities to mass audiences. One such organisation was the United Associations (UA), founded in Sydney in 1929 by Jessie Street and Linda Littlejohn. Perth feminist Irene Greenwood was introduced to radio broadcasting as a member of the UA in the 1930s, and she later drew on these media skills and her extensive feminist networks to create her own innovative and interactive radio program in Western Australia, Woman to Woman (1948–1954). Correspondence between Greenwood and her audience shows that the program provided women from diverse backgrounds with the opportunity to engage publicly with significant political debates, to create a new imagined community of listeners, to communicate across geographical and class boundaries, and to become media producers themselves.     

Threat Perception and American Support for Torture

When do Americans support the government’s use of torture? We argue that perceptions of threat undermine the extent to which American public opinion serves as a bulwark against government torture. Although surveys demonstrate that a slim majority of the American public generally opposes torture, using a nationally-representative survey experiment, we show that Americans are considerably more supportive of government abuse when it is directed at individuals who they perceive as threatening: specifically, when a detainee has an Arabic name and when the alleged crime is terrorism. Given the malleability of public opinion as a potential constraint on abuse, our results underscore the importance of institutional protections of human rights.     

The Partisan and Policy Motivations of Political Donors Seeking Surrogate Representation in House Elections

Political Behavior - Non-constituent donors constitute an increasingly important fundraising base for members of the U.S. House. These donors are theorized to be seeking “surrogate...     

The agro-industrial state: early agrarian influence on US state building

This contribution shows the influence of early agrarian movements on state institutional capacity building in the US, revealing how the two forces of state intervention and social movement pressure converged to produce a dynamic relationship between the transition to agrarian capitalism and industrialization or agro-industrialization. It will be shown how this protracted agro-industrial development fueled both social movements and state building responses that furthered capitalist development. By highlighting four specific categories of state building– land policy, infrastructure development, agricultural technology and agro-industrial development – this research reveals how the agro-industrial project developed out of rural class struggle spurred economic development and created unique capacities as the US state sought to quell and integrate this rural class struggle into capitalist development.