Evidence Based EU Criminal Policy Making: In Search of Matching Data

EU criminal policy making is a relatively new policy domain and its credibility is said to be undermined by the lack of an evidence base. Because the EU claims to pursue evidence based policy making, this justifies reviewing the mechanisms put in place to that end. To properly evaluate the evidence base in EU criminal policy making, an assessment is made of the availability of comparable crime statistics. Crime statistics, a vital data source for criminal policy making, are considered highly problematic at EU level due to (amongst other reasons) the differences in the definition of the offences. In spite of the good intentions that can be read into the repeated acknowledgement of the importance of crime statistics and the efforts to commonly define EU worthy offences, a thorough empirical analysis leads to the conclusion that we are still in search of valid EU level data with respect to the EU level offences. The EU as a policy maker does not take its responsibility to ensure the availability of the necessary comparable crime statistical data serious enough.     

Fear and Anger in Great Britain: Blame Assignment and Emotional Reactions to the Financial Crisis

While we know that emotional reactions are important influences on political behavior, we know far less about the sources of these emotions. This paper studies the causes of fear and anger in reaction to a negative stimulus: the financial crisis. Anger should have been experienced among individuals who believed a specific actor was to blame for the crisis. Moreover, individuals should have been particularly angry if they blamed an actor who should be accountable to them, for example the national government. I test these expectations using a panel survey run in Britain between 2005 and 2010. This data shows that British citizens experienced anger if they held an actor responsible for the crisis. Moreover, they felt particularly angry if they held the Labour government (and to a lesser extent the European Union) responsible. These findings underline the importance of studying the causes of emotional reactions and show how these may be linked to common institutional distinctions between political systems.     

Which Issues do Parties Emphasise? Salience Strategies and Party Organisation in Multiparty Systems

Party system issue agendas are formed by the topics that individual parties decide to address, and these salience decisions are likely to be strategic. Two key strategies are commonly discussed in the literature: parties’ focus on (1) issues that they have ownership over and (2) issues that currently concern voters. Yet it is not known what explains the extent to which parties pursue each of these strategies. This paper argues that aspects of party organisation influence which salience strategy is pursued. Parties that have more resources will be able to ‘ride the wave’ of current concerns while parties with fewer resources are more likely to focus on their best issues. Furthermore, policy-seeking parties with strong activist influence will be less likely to ‘ride the wave’ and more likely to follow issue ownership strategies. An analysis of 105 election manifestos from 27 elections in 17 countries shows that aspects of party organisation are indeed strong and robust moderators of issue ownership strategies. Limited, albeit mixed, evidence is also found that party organisation affects the use of ‘riding the wave’ strategies. These results have important implications for our understanding of electoral campaigns, party competition and voter representation.     

Parliamentary control of CSDP: the case of the EU's fight against piracy off the Somali coast

Parliamentary involvement remains a key tool for the democratic control of executive policies. This article explores the web of parliamentary involvement in decision-making on European Union (EU) military operations, using insights gained in an in-depth case study on the EU's anti-piracy mission Atalanta. We find that parliaments at all levels became involved only after key political decisions had already been made. At the member state level, we find highly uneven involvement with only some parliaments being very well informed and closely monitoring, if not influencing government policy. The European Parliament became active only after the launch of the mission but then scrutinised it intensely, profiting (in contrast to national parliaments) from its access to top military officials and key decision-makers. Finally, transnational parliamentary assemblies as well as more informal networks provided opportunities to transmit information across the boundaries of individual parliaments and party-groups thus potentially enhancing the ability of parliamentarians to scrutinise government policies.     

British Intelligence and the Jewish Resistance Movement in the Palestine Mandate, 1945–46

At the end of the Second World War, British and Zionist interests came into conflict over the issue of Jewish immigration to Palestine, which raised the broader issue of what sort of National Home could exist within the British Mandate. As a result, in 1945–46, the three Jewish armed groups in the Mandate, the Haganah, Etzel and Lehi, started a loosely coordinated armed struggle against British rule. Even the moderates in the Jewish Agency rejected their former partner against Hitler, Britain, and used force against it in order to achieve their political goals. This article assesses British intelligence on these developments, and demonstrates that it failed to anticipate or even to understand the threat until the destruction of the King David Hotel. The article demonstrates that these mistakes occurred because British intelligence relied heavily on the intelligence organs of the Jewish Agency itself for intelligence about political threats within Palestine. The article assesses this intelligence failure, and its heavy costs. However, it denies that bad intelligence caused British failures in the Mandate. On the contrary, that failure stemmed from deeper problems of policy.     

Chinese tourist site entry tickets: intersemiotic complementarity in an ecosocial process

This article explores how tourist site entry tickets multimodally construe a coherent message and how they are integrated into a grander ecosocial process. Primarily using Royce's intersemiotic complementarity framework we focus on the ideational meanings of an entry ticket to a famous site called the Juyong Pass along the Great Wall of China. Our analysis reveals two types of cohesion: the internal and the extended. As for internal cohesion, intersemiotic complementarity is semantically established through a series of cohesive ties between features of the verbal and the visual modes on the front and the back of the ticket. The extended cohesion is construed through an integration of the multimodal text with the material–physical and other semiotic–discursive practices of its ecosocial environment. During the analysis and discussion, reference is made to another entry ticket to the same site as well as to a database of about 300 entry tickets from tourist sites in China. This article makes an important contribution to an understanding of intersemiotic complementarity in front–back multimodal/multilingual texts and to the relation between this type of complementarity and the concept of ecosocial process.     

Bible and Gun: Militarism in Jerusalem's Holy Places

Abstract

Violence is a regular occurrence at many of Jerusalem's holy sites. Ongoing civilian clashes play a role, but official modes of control through the Israeli army (IDF) and Border Police, as well as more informal private security operations are often involved. Such militarisation may keep violent upheavals in check, but it is carried out within the framework of a long and harsh occupation. The two sites considered here—the Western Wall in the Old City and Rachel's Tomb on the border of Jerusalem and Bethlehem—each have a history of war and are fixtures of the occupation. This study explores the mechanisms that embed religious and militaristic meanings at each site. In so doing, certain questions are addressed. Firstly, how are the sites being constructed and used as popular and dramatic settings for certain constituents to promote religious militarism/militarised religion in Jerusalem? In which ways do these characteristics act to intertwine with the religious and militaristic aspects of the sites, making them more extreme but also, in some circles, more attractive? And finally, how do these sites contribute to the character of Jerusalem, both in their own construction and image but also in the roles they play within the wider urban topography?     

Improving Legitimacy in Nanotechnology Policy Development Through Stakeholder and Community Engagement: Forging New Pathways

This paper reports on a multistakeholder engagement process conducted in an Australian policy setting that led to a new community engagement framework: Science and Technology Engagement Pathways (STEP). I describe the process in the context of a lack of awareness, experience, and culture of deliberative public engagement in Australia, particularly in relation to decision making concerning science, technology, and innovation. Increasing cautiousness in government and industry approaches to nanotechnology development, in Australia and elsewhere, creates an imperative and an opening for improved stakeholder and community engagement to improve the legitimacy and sustainability of decisions. In this context, STEP may stimulate movement toward deliberative engagement by raising awareness and commitment from diverse stakeholders and providing a structure for developments in engagement and public dialog. STEP potentially provides “rules of engagement” and “intervention pathways” for ongoing public engagement with science and technology developments and for critical “science in society” perspectives to inform policy.