“If You've Got Friends and Neighbours”: Constituency Voting Patterns for the UK Labour Party Leader in 2010

Most attention in British electoral studies has been paid to the pattern of voting for parties, with relatively little to that for individual candidates. In intra-party elections, however, candidates may perform better in some areas than others, illustrating V. O. Key's well-known “friends and neighbours” effect. This paper explores whether that was so at the election for the leader of the UK Labour party in 2010, expecting each of the five candidates to perform better in their own constituency and its environs and also with those constituency parties whose MPs supported their candidature. The results are in line with the expectations, especially for one of the candidates who ran an explicitly geographical campaign.     

MPs' Responses to a Proposed New Constituency Map: Electoral Prospects,Community Ties and Party Organisation

Until new legislation was passed in 2011, community ties and continuity of representation were the major criteria deployed by the United Kingdom's Boundary Commissions when defining parliamentary constituency boundaries. Equality of electorates is now the paramount criterion, and the Commissions' first proposals using that new format substantially fractured many of the existing constituencies. MPs were able to respond to the Commissions' proposals under the altered public consultation procedures. Only a small majority did so, however: there were significant differences across the political parties in both response rates and the nature of the responses, the majority of which used community ties as the main grounds for either supporting or opposing the Commissions' proposals.     

Religious Intelligence

Sacred rituals and symbols can act as force multipliers that motivate and constrain the effectiveness of actors. Religious intelligence involves an assessment of how these rituals and symbols affect combat operations. The fourfold challenge faced by the religious intelligence analysts is to ascertain how prominent a role religion will play in a given conflict, what the relevant sacred phenomena are, how salient they are for the specific religious communities present, and how they will affect a given conflict. The case studies that form the core of this article highlight three issue areas open to religious intelligence collection and analysis, and exhibit variation in the ability of intelligence analysts to correctly assess those religious factors. Egyptian and Israeli decision making prior to the 1973 Arab-Israeli War illustrates how information about sacred time can influence war initiation. The diverging outcomes of two counterinsurgency operations at the same sacred site, “Operation Blue Star” (1984) and “Operation Black Thunder” (1988), demonstrate the utility of intelligence about the parameters of sacred space. A final case study explores the U.S. failure to grasp the importance of religious authority in the Iranian Revolution. I conclude by considering the actors best suited for gathering and processing religious intelligence. Religious intelligence requires interdisciplinary teams that combine expertise in religion, area studies, and military operations.     

Psyoping Hezbollah: The Israeli Psychological Warfare Campaign During the 2006 Lebanon War

The 2006 War between Israel and Hezbollah had a significant component of PSYOP. For the first time in its military history Israel deployed PSYOP as an inseparable part of its military operations. The performance of the PSYOP unit was less than satisfactory due to organizational factors and the general conduct of the war itself. This article analyzes the goals, the themes, and the delivery channels used throughout the PSYOP campaign. An attempt is made to answer the key question of whether this effort was effective.     

An analysis of multiple choices in MSL lineups,and a comparison with simultaneous and sequential ones

Abstract

Simultaneous lineups allow witnesses to compare lineup members, causing excessive mistaken identifications. Levi (1998b) has tested MSL lineups: they are sequential, larger, and allow multiple choices. [The MSL lineup was originally termed a Modified Sequential Lineup (Levi, 1998b). However, there are other modified sequential lineups.]

Each factor decreases mistaken identifications. However, witnesses make fewer single choices of culprits. Sometimes witnesses choose suspects more confidently than any foil. This analysis examines such multiple choices in four experiments. They account for half of multiple choices with culprits. Few foils are chosen, and such responses are rare in culprit-absent lineups, no more than single choices. They are therefore identifications too.

An experiment comparing simultaneous, sequential, and MSL lineups is also reported. The culprit was identified more in simultaneous lineups than in sequential ones. The simultaneous lineup had more mistaken choices than sequential and MSL lineups, whose results were identical. The simultaneous and sequential lineups were equally diagnostic, while the MSL lineup, four times larger, was more than four times more reliable.     

On The Receiving End: The Governance of the Police in Britain

Based on direct observation over a five‐year period, the article paints an intimate picture of how the police in Britain are governed. It analyses the complexity of the economic and political environment in which the police have to work: the insecure funding platform; the stream of initiatives, targets and official guidelines; the delicacy of handling community sensitivities; the inherent opaqueness of the national ‘tripartite’ system of governance; and the constant challenge of making balanced judgements under conflicting pressures. The central theme that runs through the article (which follows on logically from two previous articles published in Political Quarterly) is that of a ‘managerialist’ political class, with a distinctive ideology and mode of control, trying to get a policy grip on the real world of service delivery: in this instance, policing. Unlike the previous two articles, which had a top‐down focus, the emphasis here is primarily on how the thicket looks to those who have to navigate their way through it.