A method for measuring and decomposing electoral bias for the three-party case, illustrated by the British case

The measurement of bias in election results, whereby one or more parties are advantaged in the translation of votes into seats at the expense of others, is attracting increasing attention. So far, almost all of the analytical work – aimed at both identifying the extent of bias in an election result and establishing its causes – has focused on either two-party systems or on the largest two parties in multi-party systems. Building on the firm foundations of one such approach, this paper introduces an original procedure for analysing bias in three-party systems using a readily-appreciated metric for both evaluating the degree of bias and decomposing it into the various causal factors. This is illustrated using the example of the 2005 British general election and a comparison of the results from two-party and three-party analyses of six recent elections there.     

A Disruptive Influence? “Prevent‐ing” Problems and Countering Violent Extremism Policy in Practice

This article describes how disrupting the activities of suspected violent extremists has become an increasingly significant construct in the policy and practice of the Prevent strand of UK Counter‐Terrorism. Informed by empirical data collected during semi‐structured interviews with police officers involved in conducting disruptions and members of the communities where these occurred, blended with a limited amount of field observation, the analysis documents how and why a logic of disruption has assumed increasing prominence in counter terrorism work. In respect of police interventions in particular, implementing disruptions, rather than pursuing fully‐fledged prosecutions, represents a pragmatic way of reconciling increasing demand with limited resources, as well as managing some of the difficulties of translating intelligence into legal evidence. Conceptualized in this way, the analysis positions disruption as a distinctive mode of crime prevention; one premised upon logics of near‐event interdiction. As such, it is understood as rather different in its operations and functions to other forms of “early intervention” that are increasingly prominent in much contemporary crime prevention policy. By focusing upon how specific Prevent interventions are implemented and performed this analysis makes a particular contribution to our knowledge of counter terrorism work. This reflects the fact that most previous studies of Prevent and other countering violent extremism programs have provided analyses of community perceptions and reactions to policing and the policy frame, rather than the configuration of the interventions themselves.     

A Two‐Level Model for Evidence Evaluation in the Presence of Zeros*

Abstract: Likelihood ratios (LRs) provide a natural way of computing the value of evidence under competing propositions. We propose LR models for classification and comparison that extend the ideas of Aitken, Zadora, and Lucy and Aitken and Lucy to include consideration of zeros. Instead of substituting zeros by a small value, we view the presence of zeros as informative and model it using Bernoulli distributions. The proposed models are used for evaluation of forensic glass (comparison and classification problem) and paint data (comparison problem). Two hundred and sixty‐four glass samples were analyzed by scanning electron microscopy, coupled with an energy dispersive X‐ray spectrometer method and 36 acrylic topcoat paint samples by pyrolysis gas chromatography hyphened with mass spectrometer method. The proposed LR model gave very satisfactory results for the glass comparison problem and for most of the classification tasks for glass. Results of comparison of paints were also highly satisfactory, with only 3.0% false positive answers and 2.8% false negative answers.     

Circular Migration: A View from Destination Households in Two Urban Informal Settlements in South Africa

This article analyses dual household membership and the return intentions of migrants, using data collected from migrants living in two informal settlements in South Africa. While dual household membership is very common among the migrants we surveyed, less than half of these migrants wanted to return to their other household in the future. We explore the correlates of dual household membership and intended return migration and we consider the implications of our findings for measures of circular individual migration using existing cross-sectional datasets.     

Information‐Theoretical Assessment of the Performance of Likelihood Ratio Computation Methods

Performance of likelihood ratio (LR) methods for evidence evaluation has been represented in the past using, for example, Tippett plots. We propose empirical cross‐entropy (ECE) plots as a metric of accuracy based on the statistical theory of proper scoring rules, interpretable as information given by the evidence according to information theory, which quantify calibration of LR values. We present results with a case example using a glass database from real casework, comparing performance with both Tippett and ECE plots. We conclude that ECE plots allow clearer comparisons of LR methods than previous metrics, allowing a theoretical criterion to determine whether a given method should be used for evidence evaluation or not, which is an improvement over Tippett plots. A set of recommendations for the use of the proposed methodology by practitioners is also given.     

Change in European Societies since the 1970s

Sociology lags considerably behind political science in its comparative research on European societies, but enough material now exists to enable us to talk broadly about the major changes that have taken place since the 1970s across western Europe, and also to some extent central and eastern Europe too. Attention is here concentrated on those social trends that seem particularly salient for the study of politics, with occupational structure as the starting point. Although this dominant theme of classical sociology has tended to be neglected by much recent research in favour of such areas as deviance, gender and the formation of identities, working life remains fundamental to social organisation and in particular to politics. In fact, the theme of gender is easily accessed through consideration of changes in occupations, and considerable attention will be devoted to it here. This leads in turn to consideration of the family, then on to other aspects of demography including immigration and cultural diversity. This relates clearly to the final theme that will be discussed: the state of religion in Europe. In the conclusions some of the political implications of these changes are brought together.     

The normalizing role of rationalist assumptions in the institutional embedding of neoliberalism

The political economy of Britain over the past three decades provides an interesting example of the consolidation, normalization and institutionalization of a new economic paradigm – neoliberalism. As such, it serves as a potentially instructive focus for debate both about the conditions under which economic paradigms are replaced and consolidated and the evolution of such paradigms through the process of institutionalization. In this paper I suggest that the institutionalization of this new economic paradigm has been associated with the shift from a normative to a normalized and necessitarian neoliberalism. I examine the role played by rationalist assumptions in this extended process of normalization-institutionalization. After presenting a stylized account of the evolution of British neoliberalism, I show how New Labour's monetary policy regime is the heir to the legacy of monetarism and its agenda of labour-market reform is the heir to Thatcherism's supply-side economics. I suggest that the time-inconsistency thesis and the business school globalization thesis have played an equivalent role, for New Labour, to that played for the new right by monetarism and supply-side economics in legitimating neoliberalism. In this way neoliberalism has been normalized. In the final sections of the paper I reflect on the implications of the normalized and necessitarian character of neoliberalism in Britain for its contestability and for democratic economic governance more broadly.     

Shareholder value and Financialization: consultancy promises,management moves

In the pages of the daily financial press, 'shareholder value' is a loose rhetoric. For business consultants who sell financial metrics and implementation, shareholder value is also a product and a promise that purposive management action will be rewarded. This paper begins by considering the consultant's promise and the more guarded academic responses. It then presents empirics on micro performance and the meso limits to shareholder value and argues that most corporate managements cannot easily deliver what consultants promise and the capital markets demand. The paper ends by taking a broader view of value-based management as part of a process of financialization. If the results are contradictory and disappointing, a persistent gap between expectations and outcomes can nevertheless drive management behaviours, which change the world.     

How the United States justified its war on terrorism: prime morality and the construction of a ‘just war’

Just war theory has a long established reputation in the social sciences for evaluating the morality of the military actions of states. However, this analysis has rested upon assumptions of territorial sovereignty and the equal rights of states. The actions of hegemonic powers violate these twin assumptions through their expression of extra‐territorial reach. To avoid charges of immoral behaviour hegemonic powers must use the just war rhetoric of territoriality to justify their extra‐territorial acts. A world‐systems theory conceptualisation of hegemony allows for an interpretation of hegemonic military actions as the defence of a universal prime modernity. Prime modernity refers to an ideal organization of society projected by the hegemonic power as a form of integrative power. For the hegemonic power, threat is perceived as a rejection of the prime modernity anywhere rather than the language of border violations that dominates the foundations of just war theory. Using the language embedded in government and non‐government documents justifying the War on Terrorism, the manner in which a hegemonic power constructed military extra‐territoriality in a system of sovereign states as just is examined. The development of a ‘prime morality’ allowed the hegemonic power to claim that it was operating at the scales of the individual and ‘humankind’ rather than inter‐state power politics. The analysis challenges the implicit geographic assumptions of just war theory and extends our understanding of the imperatives underlying the hegemonic power's construction of its military actions as morally right.