The anatomy of Liberal support in Britain, 1974–1997

This article uses data from the British Election Study series since 1974 and qualitative data from interviews with key party personnel to investigate the social and political basis of Liberal support in Britain. There are three main sections to the article: the first deals with the social and demographic profile of the Liberal vote, while the second examines the political characteristics of its supporters. In the final section these findings are used to assess the Liberal Democrats' electoral strategy at the 2001 General Election and beyond. We find that Liberals tend to be drawn from a similar social background to Conservative supporters (particularly in term of class), but politically there has been an increasingly close relationship between the Liberal Democrats and the Labour Party.     

An Examination of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) and New Political Participation

The mobilisation of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) on New Years Day 1994 in Mexico attracted considerable attention from those concerned with the democratic deficits of neoliberal globalisation and the increasing sense of individual powerlessness as states synchronise economic and public policy with the ideas and institutions of global capital. The paper argues that as a critical social movement the EZLN explores the meaning and practice of economic, political and social democracy. The EZLN practises a politics of radical democracy that incorporates a variety of strategies for enriching the democratic project. However, the EZLN's democratic project has little in common with the inclusive democracy project and yet the EZLN's project of radical democracy does cultivate a useful way of rethinking the site and nature of democracy in an age of globalisation when such institutions seem so increasingly inept.     

Apportionment and the boundary commission for England

Political apportionment is the allocation of an integer number of seats to each of a number of subunits into which a legislature is divided. This paper introduces the theoretical issues, and then applies the theory to the apportionment of parliamentary seats in the United Kingdom. It shows that the outcome is defective by comparison with desirable and achievable standards, and that the defects lead to predictable biases of representation in favour of certain parts of the country. The defects have arisen partly through manipulation for party advantage, but largely because of a failure of all concerned to understand the theory of apportionment.     

A Range of Postmortem Assault Experiments Conducted on a Variety of Denture Labels Used for the Purpose of Identification of Edentulous Individuals

Abstract:  Forensic organizations worldwide have recommended that dental prostheses should be labeled with at least the patient's name and preferably with further unique identifiers such as social security number, etc. The practice of denture marking has been conducted over many years and several denture marking systems have been reported in the dental literature. However, very little is known about the resilience of such systems to conditions experienced in the majority of post- and perimortem assaults. The purpose of this investigation therefore, was to expose a selection of 10 denture labels to a series of hostile environments. Results of the study indicate that the majority of the denture labeling systems appear capable of withstanding a range of common, and not so common postmortem assaults. With regard to thermal insult, however, most performed badly with the exception of a label constructed from stainless steel orthodontic band. However, another label in the form of an electronic RFID-tag performed above expectations in the majority of experiments. Furthermore, its cosmetic appearance has proven most popular with many patients.     

After Dark and Out in the Cold: Part-time Law Students and the Myth of 'Equivalency'

This paper presents the findings of the first major research study of part-time law students. It argues that many face multiple disadvantages, largely unrecognized by universities, whose emphasis on the formal equivalency of part-time and full-time law degrees ignores the distinctive backgrounds and needs of part-time students. As a result, many are marginalized, impacting on their retention, overall performance, and work prospects. It is also argued that the context within which part-time law students experience legal education contributes to a collective habitus which may structure what is 'thinkable' for their futures. Such concerns are of particular importance given the strong vocational drive amongst part-time law students. An effective response requires action by both universities and the legal profession. Without this, part-time legal education will remain a fundamentally paradoxical experience, offering broader access to legal practice for non-traditional entrants, while continuing to inhibit their chances of success by entrenching their difference in the eyes of the profession.     

Local Context, Retrospective Economic Evaluations, and Voting: The 1997 General Election in England and Wales

Local context is widely believed to influence voting behavior with, for example, the voters' evaluation of the state of their local economy affecting whether they choose to reward or punish the incumbent government. Such reward-punish models apply in the United Kingdom at the national scale: those who believe that the government has delivered prosperity vote for its return, whereas those who believe that its policies have produced a worsening economic situation vote against it. This article shows that the operation of this calculus varies spatially, according to the level of unemployment in the voter's home area: the higher the local level of unemployment the lower the probability of someone who thought that government polices had delivered national prosperity voting for the incumbent government. It also shows that this is a consequence of cross-pressured situations. Those who thought that the government's policies had delivered both national and local prosperity were very likely to vote for it; those who thought that the policies had delivered national but not local prosperity were less likely to vote for it—especially in areas of high unemployment.     

Trade at the margin: Estimating the economic implications of preferential trade agreements

Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) have become the most prevalent form of international trade liberalization in recent decades, even though it remains far from clear what their effects on economies and their key units, firms, are. This paper evaluates the distributional consequences of trade liberalization within industries differentiating two distinct aspects in which trade liberalization could result in higher trade flows: the intensive vs. the extensive margin of trade. In particular, we analyze whether trade liberalization leads to increased trade flows because either firms trade more volume in products they have already traded before (intensive margin) or because they start to trade products they have not traded previously (extensive margin), or both. We test these arguments for the Dominican Republic–Central America–United States Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR) and exporting firms based in Costa Rica for the time-period 2008–2014. The results of our study suggest that the effects of CAFTA-DR depend not only on whether we analyze the extensive versus the intensive margin of trade but also whether the product in question is homogenous or differentiated and whether the exporting firm under analysis is small or large. In particular, we find support for the theoretical expectation that firms exporting heterogeneous products, such as textiles, gain from trade agreements, such as CAFTA-DR, in that they can export more varieties of their products. Yet at the same time, they tend to lose at the intensive margin by a reduction in their trade volume while the opposite pattern occurs for firms exporting homogenous products.     

Political fragmentation, fiscal deficits and political institutionalisation

One line of research finds the size of the deficit to be positively correlated with the number of political actors. This ‘political fragmentation’ hypothesis has been tested on OECD countries. We successfully replicate Volkerink and de Haan’s (Public Choice 109:221–242, 2001) model on an OECD sample. However, when we add ten non-OECD countries, the effect of political fragmentation disappears. We argue that the importance of political fragmentation varies according to the institutionalization of political systems. When we interact the age of a democracy with political fragmentation, we find that legislative fractionalisation increases the budget deficit as a democracy becomes more institutionalised.