Penal Populism and the Public Thermostat: Crime,Public Punitiveness,and Public Policy

This article makes the case that feedback processes in democratic politics—between crime rates, public opinion, and public policy—can account for the growth of penal populism in Britain. It argues that the public recognize and respond to rising (and falling) levels of crime, and that in turn public support for being tough on crime is translated into patterns of imprisonment. This contributes to debates over the crime–opinion–policy connection, unpacking the dynamic processes by which these relationships unfold at the aggregate level. This uses the most extensive data set ever assembled on aggregate opinion on crime in Britain to construct a new over‐time measure of punitive attitudes. The analysis first tests the thermostatic responsiveness of punitive attitudes to changes in recorded crime rates as well as self‐reported victimization, and then examines the degree to which changes in mass opinion impact on criminal justice policy.     

Threat Perception and American Support for Torture

When do Americans support the government’s use of torture? We argue that perceptions of threat undermine the extent to which American public opinion serves as a bulwark against government torture. Although surveys demonstrate that a slim majority of the American public generally opposes torture, using a nationally-representative survey experiment, we show that Americans are considerably more supportive of government abuse when it is directed at individuals who they perceive as threatening: specifically, when a detainee has an Arabic name and when the alleged crime is terrorism. Given the malleability of public opinion as a potential constraint on abuse, our results underscore the importance of institutional protections of human rights.     

Disunited in ethnicity: the racialization of Chinese Mainlanders in Hong Kong

In the current climate of increasing antagonisms and populist discontents surrounding the visible presence of mainland mobilities in postcolonial Hong Kong, there is an acute need to understand how those from Mainland China are racialized. Lowe and Tsang's article provides an examination of the campaign against Mainlanders prevalent in Hong Kong society. The emergent conflicts between Hong Kong and Mainland Chinese migrants overlap with the duality of time or differing time-inflected cultural habits of Mainlanders and Hong Kongers. As Hong Kong's citizenry and Mainlanders contest the status of the former colony and claim rights over it in ways aberrant to both factions' national consciousness, discrimination increases as Mainlanders are castigated by Hong Kongers for grazing their territory with mannerisms deemed unsettling to Hong Kong's everyday notions of time and space. Hong Kongers' sense of collective identity is shored-up as they reject the People's Republic of China’s favoured concept of pan-Chinese ethnicity by constructing Mainlanders as the inverse of themselves.     

Social Withdrawal and Aloneliness in Adolescence: Examining the Implications of Too Much and Not Enough Solitude

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - Adolescence is a developmental period when spending time alone becomes particularly important. The aim of this study was to explore adolescents’ experiences...     

Covid-19 and the Blunders of our Governments: Long-run System Failings Aggravated by Political Choices

More urgently than ever we need an answer to the question posed by the late Mick Moran in The Political Quarterly nearly two decades ago: ‘if government now invests huge resources in trying to be smart why does it often act so dumb?’. We reflect on this question in the context of governmental responses to Covid-19 in four steps. First, we argue that blunders occur because of systemic weaknesses that stimulate poor policy choices. Second, we review and assess the performance of governments on Covid-19 across a range of advanced democracies. Third, in the light of these comparisons we argue that the UK system of governance has proved itself vulnerable to failure at the time when its citizens most needed it. Finally, we outline an agenda of reform that seeks to rectify structural weaknesses of that governance capacity.     

Tilting Towards the Cosmopolitan Axis? Political Change in England and the 2017 General Election

The general election of June 2017 revealed a continued tilting of the political axis in England that has been long in the making. This was not a Brexit ‘realignment’—in that the vote is better seen as a symptom of a longer‐term divide that is emerging between citizens residing in locations strongly connected to global growth and those who are not. In this analysis, we explore constituency‐level patterns of voting in England between 2005 and 2017. Over this period, Labour's vote share has tended to rise in urban areas (that is, major cities), with younger and more diverse and more educated populations often working in ‘cosmopolitan’ industries, whereas the Conservative vote has tended to increase in less densely populated towns and rural areas, with older and less diverse populations. Significantly, Labour has also increased its vote in constituencies with a higher share of ‘precariat’ and emerging service workers—somewhat at odds with characterisation of a party that has lost the ‘left behind’. To the extent that changes in electoral support for the Conservatives and Labour are linked to the Brexit vote, the relationship far predates the referendum vote and should be expected to continue to reshape British politics in future.     

Rebel masculinities of star/director/text: James Dean,Nicholas Ray,and Rebel Without a Cause

Director Nicholas Ray is arguably most familiar to cinema culture as the American test case for la politique des auteurs, the influential mode of film criticism formulated at the French magazine Cahiers du Cinéma after World War II. Ray was elevated to the status of film ‘author’ for a consistency of vision and style associated with rebellion. Yet, he was known in the film industry as an ‘actor's director,’ both for his background in theater and for bringing Lee Strasberg's ‘The Method’ to Hollywood after it had gained considerable cachet at the Actors Studio in New York since the 1930s. Although Ray was relatively unknown among the movie-going public, his films were (and still remain) recognizable for their male stars, including James Dean, Robert Mitchum, and Humphrey Bogart. In this essay, I look at his most famous film, Rebel Without a Cause (1955 Rebel Without a Cause, 1955. Film. Directed by Nicholas Ray. USA: Warner Bros. [Google Scholar]), to argue that Ray's reputation as a rebel auteur was as much the product of highbrow auteurist film criticism as the mass cultural persona of ‘rebel male hero’ that the film's star James Dean cultivated. As an actor, Dean was promoted at the vanguard of an innovative and experimental new performance style. Further, his star-performance text reveals a construction of masculinity that the film asks us to view as socially rebellious, which is retroactively linked to Ray. Both the film and the popular press form Dean's image constituted by his self-fashioned sense of authenticity, his non-normative sexuality, his highly publicized death, and the identification with an alternative family structure his role invites.     

Psychological Barriers to a Peaceful Resolution: Longitudinal Evidence from the Middle East and Northern Ireland

Does individual-level exposure to political violence prompt conciliatory attitudes? Does the answer vary by phase of conflict? The study uses longitudinal primary datasets to test the hypothesis that conflict-related experiences impact conciliation. Data were collected from Israeli Jews, Palestinians, and Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland. Across both contexts, and among both parties to each conflict, psychological distress and threat perceptions had a polarizing effect on conciliatory preferences. The study highlights that experiences of political violence are potentially a crucial source of psychological distress, and consequently, a continuing barrier to peace. This has implications in peacemaking, implying that alongside removing the real threat of violence, peacemakers must also work toward the social and political inclusion of those most affected by previous violence.     

Pedagogy and deliberative democracy: insights from recent experiments in the United Kingdom

A growing body of research suggests the existence of a disconnection between citizens, politicians and representative politics in advanced industrial democracies. This has led to a literature on the emergence of post-democratic or post-representative politics that connects to a parallel seam of scholarship on the capacity of deliberative democratic innovations to ‘close the gap’. This latter body of work has delivered major insights in terms of democratic design in ways that traverse ‘politics as theory’ and ‘politics as practice’. And yet the main argument of this article is that this seam of scholarship has generally failed to explore the existence of numerous pedagogical relationships that exist within the very fibre of deliberative processes. As such, the core contribution of this article focuses around the explication of a ‘pedagogical pyramid’ that applies a micro-political lens to deliberative processes. This theoretical contribution is empirically assessed with reference to a recent project that sought to test different citizen assembly pilots around plans for English regional devolution. The proposition being tested is that a better understanding of relational pedagogy within innovations is vital, not just to increase levels of knowledge, but also to build the capacity, confidence and contribution of democratically active citizens.