The Rise of the Far Right in Debtor and Creditor European Countries: The Case of European Parliament Elections

While the 2014 European Parliament elections were marked by the rise of parties on the far right‐wing, the different patterns of support that we observe across Europe and across time are not directly related to the economic crisis. Indeed, economic hardship seems neither sufficient nor necessary for the rise of such parties to occur. Using the cross‐national results for the 2004, 2009 and 2014 EP elections in order to capture time and country variations, we posit that the economy affects the rise of far right‐wing parties in more complex ways. Specifically, we compare the experience of high‐debt countries (the ‘debtors’) and the others (the ‘creditors’) and explore the relationship between far right‐wing party success on the one hand, and unemployment, inequality, immigration, globalisation and the welfare state on the other. Our discussion suggests there might be a trade‐off between budgetary stability and far right‐wing party support, but the choice between Charybdis and Scylla may be avoided if policy‐makers carefully choose which policies should bear the brunt of the fiscal adjustment.     

Conservative ministers in the Coalition government of 2010–15: evidence of bias in the ministerial selections of David Cameron?

The article uses a data set of the 2010–15 Parliamentary Conservative Party (PCP) to test a series of hypotheses in order to determine whether those selected for ministerial office during the coalition era were representative of the PCP as a whole. The findings show no significant associations or bias by Cameron in terms of age, schooling, regional base, morality, voting for Cameron in the Conservative Party leadership election and, most significantly, gender. Significant associations or bias were evident in terms of Cameron’s patronage with regard to university education and electoral marginality. The findings demonstrate that any critique of current Conservative ministers based on their supposed elitism stems from the institutional and structural biases within the Conservative Party at candidate selection level, and cannot be attributed to bias on behalf of Cameron.     

Legal moralism and retribution revisited

This is a slightly revised text of Jeffrie G. Murphy’s Presidential Address delivered to the American Philosophical Association, Pacific Division, in March 2006. In the essay the author reconsiders two positions he had previously defended—the liberal attack on legal moralism and robust versions of the retributive theory of punishment—and now finds these positions much more vulnerable to legitimate attack than he had previously realized. In the first part of the essay, he argues that the use of Mill’s liberal harm principle against legal moralism cannot be cabined in such a way as to leave intact other positions that many liberals want to defend—in particular, certain fundamental constitutional rights and character retributivism in criminal sentencing. In the second part of the essay, he expresses serious doubts—some inspired by Nietzsche—about the versions of character retributivism that he had once enthusiastically defended and now describes himself as no more than a “reluctant retributivist.”

Complaint reduction in Australian federal policing in the Australian Capital Territory

Across fifteen years to 2015–2016 the rate of public complaints against police in the Australian Capital Territory fell by an extraordinary 79%. This was a much larger and longer-term reduction in complaints than occurred anywhere else in Australia, and it is very unusual in the international policing literature. The paper attempts to examine the nature of this change in greater detail, and possible factors that may have influenced the change. Unlike some other studies, however, there was limited evidence of specific point-in-time innovations that may have affected the trend. Nonetheless, it is likely that a range of reforms in policing influenced the change, with possible lessons for other departments struggling with significant complaint problems. The main reforms included improved custody procedures, greater attention to ethics in recruitment and training, a complaints system focused on managing officer behaviour, enlarged external oversight, and more attention to de-escalation skills in use-of-force training.