How Michael Foot Won the Labour Party Leadership

This paper examines the voting motivations of Labour parliamentarians in the final parliamentary ballot of the Labour party leadership election of 1980. By constructing a data set of the voting behaviour of Labour parliamentarians and by determining the ideological disposition of the 1980 parliamentary Labour party (PLP) this paper examines the ideological disposition of the candidates' vis‐à‐vis their electorate, and offers a challenge to traditional interpretations of how and why Foot was elected. The traditional interpretation has sought for explanations as to how a right‐wing dominated PLP elected a left‐wing candidate. Whilst citing the traditional interpretations of the impact of the impending Electoral College, mandatory reselection and the assumed weaknesses of the Healey campaign, this paper argues that there was considerably more left‐wing sentiment within the 1980 PLP in terms of economic management, defence and the Common Market, than previously considered. As such this paper suggests that, taken with the impact of the other factors, the victory of Foot should not be seen as that surprising.     

Putting it Right? The Labour Party's Big Shift on Immigration Since 2010

Under pressure from voters, and from other parties, Europe's centre‐left has had to re‐evaluate its position on migration. The UK Labour party is no exception. Public concern about large‐scale immigration clearly contributed to its heavy defeat at the 2010 general election. Since then it has been slowly but surely hardening its stance on the issue, although this is by no means unprecedented: while the rise of UKIP may have upped the ante in recent months, Labour has a long history of adjusting policy in this area so as to remain competitive with its main rival, the Conservative party. Labour is now asking itself whether it will be possible to do this without challenging one of the fundamental precepts of EU membership—the right of free movement of people. Whatever the result of this internal debate between the party's ‘beer drinkers’ and its ‘wine drinkers’, Labour may still have difficulty in neutralising immigration as an issue since, for the most part, it continues to insist on giving an essentially economic answer to what for many voters is actually a cultural question.     

From Gaokao to Knowhow

A new type of science education has been introduced to help Chinese students get practical experience and problem-solving skills that they can use later in life.     

Obama or Romney, China Stays

WELL, it’s over. The tumult and the shouting dies; the captains and the kings depart. We now know that there will be no change in the broad di- rection of American policy.     

WHEN MISSING DATA ARE NOT MISSING: A NEW APPROACH TO EVALUATING SUPPLEMENTAL HOMICIDE REPORT IMPUTATION STRATEGIES*

The Supplemental Homicide Reports (SHR) are widely used in criminological research and inform a broad range of research topics and subsequent policy applications. A serious issue with the SHR is missing information about the offender and incident in many recorded homicides. Although it is convenient to discard cases with missing data before analysis, such discarding is not theoretically justified and can lead to incorrect substantive conclusions. Recently, several techniques for imputing missing SHR data have been proposed, but it is difficult to evaluate their effectiveness. This research presents a new approach to testing and evaluating SHR imputation techniques. Offender data that are missing in the SHR are often found in police records available for individual cities. We examine similarities and differences among cases with known offender characteristics in the SHR, cases with such information missing in the SHR but available in police records, and cases with such information missing in both sources. We then use these data sets to evaluate four different imputation techniques suggested in the literature (Fox, 2004; Messner, Deane, and Beaulieu, 2002; Pampel and Williams, 2000; Regoeczi and Riedel, 2003). We apply each imputation technique to the SHR, and for cases with information missing in the SHR but known in the police records, we see how well the imputed values correspond both with the individual known values and with the overall distributions in the police records. We discuss the outcome of our assessment of these strategies, and we outline important implications this assessment has for research using SHR data.