Constituency Congruency and Candidate Competition in U.S. House Elections

Research on candidate competition has focused on how much context matters in emergence decisions and election outcomes. If a candidate has previously held elected office, one additional consideration that may influence entry decisions is the relative degree of overlap between the candidate's current constituency and the “new” set of voters she is seeking to represent. Using GIS software, we derive a measure of the challenger's personal vote by focusing on constituency congruency between state legislative and congressional districts. Results suggest state legislators are more likely to run for a seat in the U.S. House if constituency congruency is relatively high.     

Wasting a Crisis? Democracy and Markets in Britain after 2007

The banking crisis of 2007-2008 briefly threatened to overturn a system of market government that had lasted for nearly three decades—a system designed to minimise democratic control over markets. The crisis drew politicians once more into financial politics and exposed bankers and banking institutions to popular criticism and control. But the development of regulatory debates, and of the institutions designed to manage the crisis, have combined to avert this threat to the established order. The crisis is being 'wasted': it is failing to produce radical reforms. The paper establishes the intellectual and institutional origins of this failure, and argues that, while the reform window is closing, it is not yet fully shut: there exists yet scope for radical argument and popular mobilisation in the creation of a financial system with fewer pathological features.     

Towards a management renewal of the United Nations—Part I

This article addresses the hitherto largely neglected subject of administrative reform of the United Nations—without which, the capacity of the Organization to carry out its increasingly critical global mandates effectively and efficiently, is severely constrained, with efforts in this direction being for the most part incremental, indecisive and ineffectual. The problems arise partly from the originating and continuing model for the UN's organization and culture, which predate the advent, for example, of modern automated systems of personnel and financial management. Other elements of the problem arise from the UN's system of governance—the oversight committees, senior staff nominations by Member States, allocation of funds or approvals for critical management and administrative reforms. As at the national level, impactful UN reform also requires internal management leadership, follow-up, the continuity and UN experience of top officials, capacity to design and implement measures, and budget flexibility to procure outside expertise. In a second, concluding, part of the article, the authors will suggest a strategy for UN reform and a process for carrying forward a ‘renewal exercise’ to equip the Organization for its role beyond the year 2000. © 1996 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Policy positions and jobs in the government

Abstract.  This article conducts a theoretical and empirical analysis of the allocation of the full set of jobs – both cabinet and junior ministers – in the Prodi Government that formed after the Italian election of 1996. We first discuss theoretical arguments linking forecasts of government policy to the policy positions of both cabinet and junior ministers. We then estimate the policy positions of cabinet and junior ministers appointed to the Prodi cabinet, applying a new technique for computerized content analysis to the collected legislative speeches of each minister during the 1996–1997 parliamentary session. Having considered the face validity of these results, we then use them to explore to observable implications of the various theoretical approaches. We conclude that, in this case, there does appear to be systematic evidence linking both the allocation of government jobs and the evolution of spending patterns between departments to the policy positions of senior politicians.     

The Four Predicaments of American Liberalism: Challenges and Opportunities in a Presidential Election Year

The presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have indicated an apparent resurgence in American liberalism. More significantly, they have underlined both the highly problematic nature of the liberal legacy within the Democratic Party and the difficulties of mobilising liberal themes in the battle of ideas that characterises the conduct of politics in the United States. The article examines the difficulty of the issue by reference to four predicaments that persistently condition the status and deployment of liberal themes. In analysing the problems of strategy, historical narrative, political positioning and ideational engagement, the study analyses the negative connotations of contemporary liberalism, the multiple limitations of liberal reform, and liberalism's deficiencies in the politics of America's core ideas. A revived liberal prospectus will depend upon the ingenuity of liberal forces in challenging the conservative ascendancy in ideational competition, and in renegotiating a public settlement of their own with the central strands of political legitimacy.     

Changing the Boundaries but Keeping the Disproportionality: The Electoral Impact of the Fifth Periodical Reviews by the Parliamentary Boundary Commissions for England and Wales

Parliamentary boundary reviews in the UK are undertaken to remove — as far as is practicable — inter-constituency variations in the number of electors. Their impact has almost invariably favoured the Conservative party — largely because population shifts between reviews tend to favour Labour with the movement of electors away from the inner cities and old industrial areas. That has been the case again with the Fifth Periodical Reviews conducted by the Boundary Commissions for England and Wales. The next general election will thus be slightly easier for the Conservatives to win than if the boundaries used for the 2005 contest were to be retained. But not much easier. Recent elections have seen very substantial biases operating in the translation of votes into seats favouring Labour. The biases are the result of the interaction of several geographies — of constituency size, abstentions and party support- only one of which (size) is directly tackled by the reviews. Unless those other geographies are changed the next two or three UK general elections are likely to see a continuation of these marked biases.