Pre‐existing condition: Taking media coverage into account when preparing for H1N1

This article examines the claim that the media exaggerated the threat of H1N1, prompting an immediate demand for limited vaccine. We compare The Australian's and the Daily Telegraph's coverage of H1N1 with that of The Globe and Mail, which was comparatively critical of government performance. The events of October 2009 underscore the difficulty and importance of responding to media coverage of “uncertain risks” (Renn 2008 ), risks for which there is a lack of scientific basis for decision making and potentially generate anxious public responses.     

Still Divided by a Common Language: Discontentment and the Semantics of Power

In a recent response to an article of mine on the 'faces of power' controversy published in this journal ( Politics Vol. 18. No. 1), James Doyle provides an important, sophisticated and provocative attempt to rehabilitate Lukes' three-dimensional conception of power from the criticisms of myself and others. He argues, in particular, that Lukes' understanding of power is not compromised by its reliance upon a distinction between subjective and objective interests since such a distinction is, in fact, 'an integral part of the logical grammar of the concept'. Nor, he suggests, is Lukes wrong to raise the spectre of the concept of 'false consciousness since the notion of 'duping others' is also 'internal to the logic of the concept' of power. Finally, Doyle argues that my chosen reformulation of the concept of power as context- and conduct-shaping unwittingly exposes me to precisely the same criticism(s) which I direct at Lukes. In this brief response I seek to clarify and defend my earlier position in the face of certain obvious misunderstandings in Doyle's reading, whilst re-stating my principal point of departure from Lukes' formulation.     

Research Note: Measuring the Level and Direction of Split-ticket Voting at the 1979 and 1997 British General and Local Elections: a Survey-based Analysis

Only in 1979 and 1997 have British general elections coincided with the annual local government electoral contests. This research note uses both survey and aggregate data to provide new estimates of the extent of split-ticket voting in England at those two elections, and to compare similarities and differences between them. It appears that no fewer than one in six of those electors who voted for one of the three major parties in both contests made a different choice at national as opposed to local level. The fact that the proportion of those splitting their vote in this way was so similar in 1979 and 1997 may surprise those expecting the phenomenon to have grown as part of a general process of partisan dealignment. Rather it appears that changing patterns of contestation between 1979 and 1997, especially at local level, may be better able to account for those variations observed.     

Willing Executors of Hitler's Will? The Goldhagen Controversy, Political Analysis and the Holocaust

Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1996) has won its author a succession of accolades, from the American Political Science Association's prestigious Gabriel A. Almond Prize in comparative politics in 1994 to the even more prestigious Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik's Democracy Prize (awarded last in 1990). It has also occasioned an unprecedented and intense controversy on both sides of the Atlantic. In this article I consider the attribution of responsibility for the Holocaust in the Goldhagen thesis and the controversy this has spawned. I argue that despite Goldhagen's efforts to restore the conscious human subject to the perpetration of the Holocaust, the logic of his thesis in fact serves largely to absolve German subjects of culpability for an act of barbarism he regards as at least latent in an 'exceptional' and 'eliminationist' anti-Semitism that predates the rise of fascism. I take issue with Goldhagen's identification of Hitler's willing executioners as 'Germans', arguing that if human subjects are to be restored to the analysis of the Holocaust (as, indeed, they should be), it is imperative that we acknowledge the distinctly unexceptional character of 'Ordinary Germans' and, consequently re-examine our own culpability in this most modern of atrocities.     

作为规制与治理工具的行政许可

源于私人生活中财产权人授权他人分享自己财产权实践的行政许可,正成为一种引人注目的政府规制与治理工具。作为治理工具,行政许可承载了一系列不同的社会目标,规制有时只是其中一个主要目标。当行政许可被限定为规制工具时,可以假定其核心是实现对特定行为的控制,具体机制包括信息收集、准入控制、行为监管以及许可的执行。尽管许可制度具有筛选市场主体并对他们进行识别和规制等积极作用,但同时也存在巨大的负面作用,如限制和阻碍竞争、可能导致权力滥用,而且许可制度是有成本的。政府在采取许可制度过程中,应考虑其他能够达成相同制度目标的替代性工具。