Fiction,Faction and Intelligence

There is a demonstrable overlap between authentic intelligence operations and the way they have been portrayed in works of fiction, which is not entirely surprising considering the number of distinguished, and some lesser-known, novelists who have worked for MI5 and the Secret Intelligence Service over the years. Setting aside for a moment the work of Compton Mackenzie, Graham Greene, John le Carré and Somerset Maugham, arguably SIS's most renowned authors, what about Kenneth Benton, David Footman and Jack Cordeaux? The writing culture was especially prevalent in the Security Service, where the legendary case officer Jack Bingham, for whom David Cornwall once worked, raised no objection to the employment of authors. His colleague Max Knight wrote some terrible thrillers, and his assistant, William Younger, chose the interesting pen-name William Mole. Bingham's wife Madeleine and daughter Charlotte, who also worked for MI5, wrote many books, and they were not alone. Curiously, however, it is Ian Fleming who has attracted the greatest attention for his great invention, 007. Yet there remains some doubt about whether Bond may not have been inspired by his former tutor in pre-war Kitzbuhel, Phyllis Bottome, whose 1946 novel The Lifeline introduced a suave, German-speaking, Swiss-educated, mountaineering, British agent a full five years before the publication of Casino Royale. A coincidence? Maybe, but the paths taken by these two authors criss-cross on many occasions.     

Measuring Attitudes toward the United States Supreme Court

It is conventional in research on the legitimacy of the U.S. Supreme Court to rely on a survey question asking about confidence in the leaders of the Court to indicate something about the esteem with which that institution is regarded by the American people. The purpose of this article is to investigate the validity of this measure. Based on a nationally representative survey conducted in 2001, we compare confidence with several different measures of Court legitimacy. Our findings indicate that the confidence replies seem to reflect both short-term and long-term judgments about the Court, with the greater influence coming from satisfaction with how the Court is performing at the moment. We suggest a new set of indicators for measuring the legitimacy of the Court and offer some evidence on the structure of the variance in these items.     

False advertising and experience goods: the case of political services in the U.S. senate

This study uses the voter-shopping construct to analyze signaling of moderateness in the U.S. Senate. We compare legislator-provided signals (advertising)—such as membership in the U.S. Senate’s Centrist Coalition—with actual voting histories in order to characterize these types of advertising cues as sincere or insincere. Following recent research indicating that moderate legislators receive greater financial support, we test whether or not Political Action Committees (PACs) are willing to support financially those who send false signals of moderateness. Our results show that the mean level of real PAC contributions garnered by non-moderate Democrats who send false signals exceeds that of the non-moderate Democrats who do not do so by $182,078. This figure is about 74% of mean level of real PAC contributions for those non-moderate Democrats who do not send false signals.     

Confirmation Politics and The Legitimacy of the U.S. Supreme Court: Institutional Loyalty, Positivity Bias, and the Alito Nomination

Gibson, Caldeira, and Spence (2003a, 2003b, 2005) expound the theory of positivity bias in their analysis of the legitimacy of the U.S. Supreme Court in the aftermath of Bush v. Gore. This theory asserts that preexisting institutional loyalty shapes perceptions of and judgments about court decisions and events. In this article, we use the theory of positivity bias to investigate the preferences of Americans regarding the confirmation of Judge Samuel Alito as an associate justice of the Supreme Court. More specifically, from the theory of positivity bias, we derive the hypothesis that preferences on the Alito confirmation are shaped by anterior commitments to the Supreme Court. Based on an analysis of a national panel survey, we find that those who have a high level of loyalty toward the Supreme Court rely much more heavily on what we term judiciousness—in contrast to ideology, policy, and partisanship—in forming their opinions on whether to confirm Alito. Thus, institutional loyalty provides a decisive frame through which Americans view the activity of their Supreme Court.     

Making Short Politics Placements Work

Short placements can provide an important and meaningful experience of politics in action for students who are unable to benefit from the generally lengthy placements currently on offer. This article is based on the findings of the three-year HEFCE-funded project The Scholarship of Engagement for Politics and explores the potential of short, local, research-based placements, which are embedded in modules, supported by online journaling and effectively assessed, to enrich students' understanding of politics and enhance their employability.     

Reexamining the Relationship Between Fiscal Stress and Outsourcing

The determinants of outsourcing in local government are widely studied from a variety of frameworks. One concept consistently used to explain local government outsourcing is fiscal condition, with many noting that outsourcing is more likely when a local government’s fiscal condition declines into fiscal stress. Despite the ubiquity of this expectation in the outsourcing literature, several articles reviewed suggest that the findings for this relationship remain uncertain. As a result, the research presented in this article sought to examine and extend what is known about the relationship between fiscal stress and outsourcing in U.S. municipalities. The research includes previous measures of fiscal stress and adds new measures. In addition, it tries to overcome the limited theoretical testing of the relationship between fiscal stress and outsourcing by examining both direct and indirect effects of fiscal stress on outsourcing. It finds that municipalities in the United States that are experiencing fiscal stress are more likely to engage in outsourcing, particularly municipalities that are experiencing fiscal stress and have a positive evaluation of the external market to provide services.