Unravelling Osman

The judgment of the European Court of Human Rights in Osman v United Kingdom , decided in October 1998, has proved very controversial. Its implications for the UK law of negligence appear to be immense. Not the least of the complexities associated with the decision is the widespread perception that the reasoning of the Court is extremely difficult to understand, indeed, that it is at times contradictory. This article subjects the Osman judgment to close analysis. It explains the Court's approach to Article 6(1) by reference to the way in which the Strasbourg court has over many years developed its case law on this provision. The article includes an overview of the way in which, so far, the decision has been deployed in UK law. The author suggests that, whatever about the actual result of the case, the reasoning of the European Court in Osman is deeply flawed, and that the UK judiciary should be mindful of this fact when considering its deployment in domestic law.     

Why Fair Procedures Always Make a Difference

Section 31(2A) of the Senior Courts Act 1981 (as inserted by the Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015) requires judges to refuse relief in judicial review of administrative decisions if it is ‘highly likely’ that the conduct complained of did not make a significant difference to the outcome of the decision. The strongest justification for this ‘Makes No Difference’ principle is provided by a ‘narrow instrumental view’ of fair procedures, according to which their value lies only in their producing the correct outcome. This conception of procedural fairness, however, is impoverished and flawed as a matter of political morality. Fair procedures reflect a conception of citizens as participants in their own governance and play an important communicative role in democratic legal orders. Inasmuch as it leaves no room for these aspects of the value of fair procedures, the Makes No Difference principle embodied in section 31(2A) is pro tanto unjust.     

What Accounts for Party System Stability? Comparing the Dimensions of Party Competition in Postcommunist Europe

Why do party systems stabilise quickly in some new democracies while others remain in extended flux? As a core variable of comparative politics, party system stability has led scholars to generate various theoretical explanations, but consensus is still lacking. Given its widely divergent party systems, postcommunist Europe presents an important opportunity to revisit stability's determinants. Applying hypotheses derived from theories about competition in multidimensional policy spaces, I find that they better explain variation in a 14-case sample than contending hypotheses about the electoral system, economic performance, constitutional design, political culture, or previous democratic experience.     

The State of Freedom in Europe

The reaction to 11 September damaged the liberty of those living in Europe who found themselves targeted as suspect terrorists while seeming to do little to ensure the security of the wider community. More recently a second emergency, rooted this time in the financial and economic collapse of 2008 onwards, has caused a further unravelling of Europe's constitutional project, even threatening the gains of past generations of European idealists. In today's Europe universal liberty and security have no meaning for many even if their shape is retained in structures that in truth mock rather than deliver democracy and human rights. This article traces the origins of the crises that have afflicted so directly the breadth of liberty and human security in the Union, demonstrating their roots in ‘viruses’ that have been present from the start of the European movement but which have now spiralled out of control. The essay ends by asking what can be done to prevent the full decline of the region into a state of neo‐democratic/post‐democratic unfreedom, one in which capital unbound from democracy thrives at the expense of the people.     

Do Perceptions of Ballot Secrecy Influence Turnout? Results from a Field Experiment

Although the secret ballot has been secured as a legal matter in the United States, formal secrecy protections are not equivalent to convincing citizens that they may vote privately and without fear of reprisal. We present survey evidence that those who have not previously voted are particularly likely to voice doubts about the secrecy of the voting process. We then report results from a field experiment where we mailed information about protections of ballot secrecy to registered voters prior to the 2010 general election. Consistent with our survey data, we find that these letters increased turnout for registered citizens without records of previous turnout, but they did not appear to influence the behavior of citizens who had previously voted. The increase in turnout of more than three percentage points (20%) for those without previous records of voting is notably larger than the effect of a standard get‐out‐the‐vote mailing for this group. Overall, these results suggest that although the secret ballot is a long‐standing institution in the United States, beliefs about this institution may not match the legal reality.     

Big Five Personality Traits and Responses to Persuasive Appeals: Results from Voter Turnout Experiments

We examine whether Big Five personality traits are associated with heterogeneous responses to commonly used Get-Out-The-Vote (GOTV) appeals in both a survey and a field experiment. The results suggest that Big Five personality traits affect how people respond to the costs and benefits of voting highlighted in GOTV appeals. Our evidence also suggests that one trait—Openness—is associated with broad persuasibility, while others shape responses to particular types of messages. In some cases the conditioning effects of Big Five traits are substantial. For example, in the one-voter households (HHs) included in our field experiment, we find that a mailer that raised the specter of social sanctions increased the likelihood of voting by a statistically greater amount among those scoring high on Openness. The findings constitute an important step forward in understanding how core personality traits shape responses to various aspects of the act of voting.