How to Define Legislative Turnover? The Incidence of Measures of Renewal and Levels of Analysis

This article analyses different standard measures of legislative turnover. Two main concerns are discussed: (1) the very definition of turnover: incoming MPs versus first-term MPs; and (2) the level of analysis: the whole chamber versus political groups. To illustrate this discussion, turnover in the French lower chamber, the Assemblée Nationale, is studied. It is shown that the choice of a particular measure is not trivial since empirical results are affected by the definition adopted. If the distinction between incoming and first-term MPs does not greatly modify results, the choice of the level of analysis leads to contradictory results. It is shown that the very logic of electoral contests leads to renewal mostly among those who lost previous elections, while incumbent majorities that lose elections hardly experience renewal. As both these phenomena coexist for every single election, aggregate measures of turnover do not account for these contradictory tendencies and tend to concentrate on alternation rather than turnover.     

Prison and Democracy: Lessons Learned and Not Learned, from 1989 to 2009

Dostoevsky, Mandela, and others have long noted that prisons expose social realities, often hidden, particularly inequality and gaps between policy and practice. Prisons symbolize, mirror, and shape the communities and countries in which they exist. Although prisons informed and were intertwined with many of the defining moments of 1989, in the 20 years since, societies often failed to recognize the important role prison and punishment play in relationship to democracy. By not recognizing that “prison matters” in relationship to democracy, polities (whether in transition to democracy or established democracies) failed to adequately learn “prison lessons.” Starting with a case study of South Africa, this paper considers prisons during apartheid and under democratic governance. This case is connected to other comparative and international examples (including Russia, Brazil, and the USA) to identify five lessons learned and not learned concerning prison and democracy. First, policies and practices of imprisonment reflect social orders, especially structures of inequality and understandings of legitimate power and opposition. Second, countries transitioning to democracy seldom anticipate rising crime and invariably neglect the relevance of prisons. Third, nations do not adequately grapple with the role of prison in the past, especially the nondemocratic past. Fourth, in established and recent democracies, penal populism resulted as politicians defined prison as a solution to a host of social ills, ignoring the consequences of expanded punishment. Fifth, prisons shaped key substantive realities beyond their walls, from leadership to recidivism, scandals, fiscal deficits, and crises of legitimacy.     

Is Multiculturalism Bad for Social Cohesion and Redistribution?

Multiculturalism as an official policy strategy has recently come in for significant criticism in a number of Western European countries. A key criticism is that multicultural policies undermine redistribution policies, since they would erode the social cohesion upon which redistribution measures are built. However, empirical research does not univocally confirm this critique. This article explains why this is the case. The first argument is called the integration‐recognition paradox. Policies that focus on recognising minority groups may lead to a greater social acceptance of those minorities, and in turn may lead to their feeling more appreciated as participants in society. In a second argument, the authors discuss how multicultural policies could easily be combined with policies that invest in national unity and social cohesion.     

Religion between Nation and Europe: The French and Belgian ‘No’ to the Christian Heritage of Europe

Religion has new salience in contemporary European politics, but its range and nature are still not properly understood. In contrast with most other member states, France and Belgium held a common position of refusal regarding any reference to the Christian heritage of Europe in the now defunct Constitutional Treaty. The two countries were however motivated by two different models of laïcité anchored in distinct socio-political historical paths: the French all-encompassing laïcité, supposing the neutrality of the public space; and the Belgian institutionalised laïcité, organising the pluralism of philosophical and confessional worldviews. The analysis addresses the dynamics of each national configuration in the wider perspective of the interactions between religion and politics today; the patterns of European negotiations; the effects of this issue on domestic politics and mobilisations of civil society. It concludes that religion in the integration process is a way of reformulating old symbolic resources and of coming to terms with identity and social adaptations, rather than a source of political cleavages.     

A transformation in the French model of shareholding and management

This article explores the French model of shareholding and management, identifying a significant transformation in the pattern of shareholding in the largest companies. In earlier configurations of ownership, first the State and then the system of cross shareholdings were at the centre of French capitalism; the new pattern of shareholding operates under a different logic and motivation. In effect, France has undergone rapid change from a 'financial network economy' to a 'financial market economy'. This new pattern of shareholding has not only broken the traditional system of cross shareholding, but it has also facilitated the arrival of foreign institutional investors who bring with them new techniques and demands on corporate management.     

Keep Them in the Dark: Australian Government Strategy to Weaken Activism against Australia's new Nuclear Reactor

Martin O'Connor, editor: Is Capitalism Sustainable? Political Economy and the Politics of Ecology. New York: Guilford Publications, 1994.

Kate Soper: What is Nature? Oxford: Blackwell, 1995.

Jim Schwab: Deeper Shades of Green: The Rise of Blue‐Collar and Minority Environmentalism in America. San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books, 1994.

Michael E. Zimmerman: Contesting Earth's Future: Radical Ecology and Postmodernity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

Michael Hough: Cities and Natural Process. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Wayne Roberts and Susan Brandum: GET A LIFE! How to make a good buck, Dance around the dinosaurs, and Save the world while you're at it. Get A Life Publishing, Toronto, 1995.

Sara Berry: No Condition is Permanent: The Social Dynamics of Agrarian Change in Sub‐Saharan Africa. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993.     

Foucault,epistemology and history

This paper explores the way in which Michel Foucault utilized, re-worked and applied, in the field of the analysis of epistemological transformations, certain concepts from the history of the sciences that had been deployed the Bachelard and Canguilhem. More particularly, the paper focuses attention, on the one hand, upon the distinction between the present and the actual, from which derives the question of ‘recurrence’, and, on the other, on the idea of games of the true and the false.