A New ‘New Liberalism’? – Directions in Government and Public Policy in Britain

Books reviewed in this article:
David Marquand and Anthony Seldon (eds.), The Ideas that Shaped Post-War Britain
Geoff Mulgan (ed.), Life After Politics – New Thinking for the Twenty-first Century     

Race,Social Welfare,and the Decline of Postwar Liberalism: A New or Old Key?

Fifty-one years ago, when liberalism and social welfare democracy were expanding in all advanced industrialized nations, V.O. Key, Jr., forecast the decline of postwar liberalism in the United States. Current discussion of the decline of liberalism has ignored Key or, when evidence is lacking, has incorrectly cited him. In contrast to Key's relatively direct, simple, and heavily documented reasoning, current explanations are multifactorial, complex, less well documented, and often ideologically loaded. Some explanations for the "postwar" decline identify causal factors more than six years after the war, yet they ignore events in 1945–47. At the fifty-first anniversary of V.O. Key's Southern Politics in State and Nation, attention to Key's forecast and Occam's razor is called for. Key argued that racism in the South, exerted through congressional committees, would lead to a decline of liberalism in the nation. Using "legislative histories," this article compares Key's single-factor "racial" explanation with a two-factor explanation—and by implication with multifactor ones—and finds Key's more compelling and parsimonious. Archival sources indicate that more than two years before the 1948 Democratic Convention, Charlie Ross, Truman's closest advisor, and Truman himself encouraged Key to assess the emerging postwar politics of the South. As Key anticipated, institutionalized racism sunk the Fair Deal and postwar social democracy, despite Truman's efforts. The effects of racism on postwar and current politics and public administration should be reexamined as a key to understanding American distinctiveness or exceptionalism.     

Reinvention As Reform: Assessing the National Performance Review

The conclusion of the Clinton Administration presents an opportune time to investigate the outcomes of the National Performance Review (NPR). Any such evaluation, however, is complicated by the nature of the objectives sought, many of which relate to subtle and elusive elements of organizational life: empowering employees, inducing a less risk-adverse culture, and enhancing the quality of service delivery. The strategy employed here as a means of gaining insight into such phenomena was to couple a broad review of government-wide survey results with an in-depth investigation into the impact of NPR on a single agency, the Social Security Administration. A conclusion is that many of the NPR's "higher-order" objectives have not been met on a systemic basis. While a variety of proximate explanations for this finding can be identified, a more fundamental explanation relates to a failure by the sponsors to adjust their strategy to account for basic differences between NPR and past reforms.     

Innovation or Inertia: The U.S. Military and the Learning of Counterinsurgency

Following its encounter with insurgent violence in Iraq, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has sought to improve the U.S. military's ability to conduct counterinsurgency. This effort suggests a potential turning-point in the history of the U.S. military, which has traditionally devoted its attention and resources to “high-intensity” or “conventional” combat. Given this institutional culture, what are now the prospects of the U.S. military ‘learning counterinsurgency’? In many ways, the ongoing reorientation is promising and targeted, informed directly by the U.S. campaign in Iraq. At the same time, Pentagon priorities still reveal a remarkable resistance to change, and this in spite of the radically altered strategic environment of the War on Terror. Given this intransigence - and the eventual fall-out from the troubled Iraq campaign - the ongoing learning of counterinsurgency might very well fail to produce the type of deep-rooted change needed to truly transform the U.S. military.     

A novel histological technique for distinguishing between epithelial cells in forensic casework

There are a number of forensic cases in which the identification of the epithelial cell type from which DNA originated would provide important probative evidence. This study aimed to develop a technique using histological staining of fixed cells to distinguish between skin, buccal and vaginal epithelium. First, 11 different stains were screened on formalin-fixed, wax-embedded cells from five women. Samples were analysed qualitatively by examining staining patterns (colour) and morphology (absence or presence of nuclei). Three of the staining methods – Dane's, Csaba's and Ayoub-Shklar – were successful in distinguishing skin epithelial cells from buccal and vaginal. Second, cells were smeared directly onto slides, fixed with one of five fixatives and stained with one of the three stains mentioned above. Methanol fixation, coupled with the Dane's staining method, specific to keratin, was the only technique that distinguished between all three cell types. Skin cells stained magenta, red and orange and lacked nuclei; buccal cells stained predominantly orange–pink with red nuclei; while vaginal cells stained bright orange with orange nuclei and a blue extracellular hue. This staining pattern in vaginal cells was consistent in samples collected from 50 women aged between 18 and 67. Identification of cell type from unlabelled micrographs by 10 trained observers showed a mean success rate of 95%. The results of this study demonstrate that histological staining may provide forensic scientists with a technique for distinguishing between skin, buccal and vaginal epithelial cells and thus would enable more conclusive analyses when investigating sexual assault cases.     

Judging Bias: Juror Confidence and Judicial Rulings on Challenges for Cause

The judge in a jury trial is charged with excusing prospective jurors who will not be impartial. To assess impartiality, prospective jurors are typically asked whether they can be fair. Using an experimental paradigm, we found that small changes in jurors' self‐reported confidence in their ability to be fair affected judges' decisions about bias but did not affect the judgments of either attorneys or jurors. We suggest why a judge's role and unique relationship with jurors is likely to foster a decision strategy based on reported juror confidence, and we discuss the implications of our analysis for current legal debates over jury selection practices. Unexpected patterns in our results also highlight the ways in which perceptions of impartiality are affected, in part, by the social characteristics of the observer.     

History, War, and the Future

This article aims to delineate several issues raised by an historically based approach to understanding the present and the future. Beginning with a discussion of the profound impact that drastic changes have had on the international environment, the article then outlines what history suggests about human nature's influence on the course of future events; the future of war; the nature of governance and the United States. This essay does not attempt to provide answers, but rather suggests how policy makers, strategists, and military leaders might think through the complex political and cultural questions they need to be asking in the making of strategy. This is the essential first step for Americans. If they fail to ask the right questions, most answers will prove irrelevant to the challenges of the future.