Electoral institutions and campaigning in comparative perspective: Electioneering in European Parliament elections

This article develops and tests a number of competing expectations (institutional, party and individual) about what influenced the campaign activity of individual parliamentary candidates for the 2004 European Parliament elections. The principal interest is in the effects of variations in the design of electoral institutions across the Member States of the European Union. Based on the analysis, it is argued that an important distinction needs to be made between campaign effort and campaign goals, with electoral institutional factors having a more significant role over the latter.     

BEYOND THE WILLOW PALISADE: MANCHURIA AND THE HISTORY OF CHINA'S INNER ASIAN FRONTIER

Dr David Sneath is the Director of the Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit at Cambridge University and a lecturer in Social Anthropology. He is a Fellow of Corpus Christi College where he is Deputy Tutor for Advanced Students and Director of Studies in Archaeology and Anthropology. He is the Co-editor of the journal Inner Asia and his most recent book Changing Inner Mongolia: Pastoral Mongolian Society and the Chinese State was published in 2000 by Oxford University Press (reviewed in Asian Affairs, June 2002). The following article is based on a lecture which he gave to the Society on 17 July, 2002.     

ESCAPING CRIME: THE EFFECTS OF DIRECT AND INDIRECT VICTIMIZATION ON MOVING*

This article investigates the impact of criminal victimization on household residential mobility. Existing research finds that direct experiences with crime influence mobility decisions, such that persons who suffer offenses near their homes are more likely to move. The current study extends this line of inquiry to consider whether indirect victimization that involves neighbors also stimulates moving. The analysis uses the National Crime Survey to estimate multilevel models that incorporate data from individual households and their spatially proximate neighbors. The results show that the link between direct victimization and moving continues to hold after controlling for neighborhood context. Indirect property victimization also leads to moving, with effects about equal in size to those of direct victimization. In contrast, no evidence is found that violent victimization that occurs in neighboring homes influences mobility, probably because most of these events are nonstranger violence that provokes less anxiety for neighbors.     

Special Elections to the U.S. House of Representatives: A General Election Barometer?

Vacancies in the U.S. House of Representatives are filled using special elections. These elections occur off the usual American electoral cycle, and their results are routinely portrayed by the American mass media as indications of what to expect in the next general election. We examined the predictive power of special elections results with respect to the general election outcomes for the U.S. House of Representatives from 1900 to 2008. We found that special elections that yield a change in partisan control do have predictive power regarding general election results.     

REMOVING THE CULTURAL AND MANAGERIAL BARRIERS IN PROJECT‐TO‐PROJECT LEARNING: A CASE FROM THE UK PUBLIC SECTOR

Project‐based initiatives form a major part of government investment and, so, learning from past projects should be a major concern for public sector organizations. Previous research has explored systems and processes for project‐based learning but little research has examined the social and cultural factors that enable this learning to be applied with useful effect. This paper reports on two successive major UK government projects. The introduction of independent learning accounts (ILAs) and the subsequent introduction of educational maintenance allowances (EMAs) following the scrapping of the former. Although similar in many respects, the first was a major failure while the second, having learned the lessons of the first, was acclaimed as a success. Using a cultural analysis, this case study shows how project‐to‐project learning enabled the EMA project team to learn from the failed project. This resulted in two significant changes in government and civil service organizational culture.