Nationalist Jāhiliyyah and the Flag of the Two Crusaders,or: ISIS,Sovereignty, and the “Owl of Minerva”

This article argues that by understanding Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) state-building processes we are able to understand how ISIS has developed while also developing a united citizenship body built from people in Iraq and Syria and those making hijra. The fragmentation of Iraq and Syria resulted in conditions that would prove conducive to the group's expansion and identifying these conditions is imperative to understanding Sunni extremism in the Middle East. The article argues that ISIS builds citizenship in two ways: first, by developing asabiyya—group feeling—among Sunni and second, by securitizing the Shi'a threat. Identifying and engaging with the concepts of sovereignty and citizenship helps to develop much stronger policy responses.     

‘A sort of land debatable’: female influence,civic virtue and middle-class identity,c 1830-c 1860[1]

The recent emphasis on the bourgeois public sphere as a predominantly masculine space means that the wider meanings and interpretations of respectable women's presence at public occasions have been ignored or misunderstood. This article addresses the contribution of urban middle-class women to the public construction and expression of middle-class identity in the mid-nineteenth century, and examines the way in which women were written into civic narratives as champions of public virtue. It is argued that the notion of ‘female influence’ allowed women to expand their public roles, and even to participate in potentially subversive political activities. However, it also effectively contained such activities by distancing ‘respectable’ women from the potentially corrupting arena of political controversy.     

Forecasting the 2013 German Bundestag Election Using Many Polls and Historical Election Results

This article reports on an attempt to forecast the outcome of the 2013 election to the German Bundestag. In contrast to the predominant academic approach to forecast incumbent vote shares from measures of government popularity, economic conditions and other fundamental variables, we entirely relied on data from published trial heat polls. Opposite to common practice in the news media, we did not take isolated polls as election forecasts in their own right. Instead, we used historical data to assess empirically the relationship between polls and election outcomes, and combined extrapolations from current polls in a Bayesian manner. The forecast was published one month ahead of the election. The retrospective evaluation of our method was added after the election. While our method is parsimonious and provides a large lead time, the performance at the 2013 election was underwhelming. We offer additional suggestions how the approach can be improved in future scenarios.     

Public Services after Austerity: Zombies,Suez or Collaboration?

Public services—in the UK and elsewhere—are under considerable pressure, not just from austerity, but also from a variety of social, demographic and technological changes (in effect ‘austerity plus’). In this context, three broad options are open to policy‐makers: continue with tried‐and‐tested approaches while spending less money, which in the UK means a reliance on ‘New Public Management’ (NPM); withdraw completely from certain public services; or develop new approaches to public administration. We argue that all of these approaches have been attempted in recent years, but it is the final option that is most interesting and potentially the most beneficial. In this article, we examine experiments with these new approaches in responding to ‘austerity plus’. In particular, we examine various attempts at ‘collaboration’ in public services and discuss the risks associated with them. We conclude by setting out the extent to which policy‐makers have moved beyond NPM and suggesting some of the benefits that this could bring.     

The Ends of Deliberation: Meta‐consensus and Inter‐subjective Rationality as Ideal Outcomes

Normative deliberative theory has contributed much to an understanding of ideal procedural standards, but there is considerable uncertainty regarding the appropriate nature of desired deliberative outcomes. In this paper we identify two inter‐related concepts of meta‐consensus and inter‐subjective rationality as outcomes that an authentic deliberative process ought to produce. Importantly, these deliberative ends are consistent with ideal deliberative procedure. They are also empirically tractable, where preference transformation can be described in terms of underlying values, and judgments. Methods for assessing deliberative ends are provided and demonstrated using a case study.     

An Early Community-Based Intervention for the Prevention of Substance Abuse and Other Delinquent Behavior

This paper presents the results of an evaluation of an early intervention, risk-reduction strategy versus a standard intervention approach in the treatment of inner-city youth at high risk of adopting a deviant lifestyle. It examines baseline and 1-year follow-up information provided by 408 youth admitted to 2 community-based Baltimore City Youth Bureaus offering counseling services for neighborhood youth referred for delinquent and other problematic behavior. In the study, one of these bureaus served as the experimental intervention clinic and the other as the control, or standard intervention, clinic. Outcome measures involved substance abuse; sexual activity; contact with juvenile authorities; and delinquent activity, including violence-related activity. Regression analyses of outcome measures revealed significant differential results for delinquent activity, which favored the experimental intervention. Relationships between risk/protective factors and outcome are discussed.