INDIVIDUAL DECISIONAL CONSISTENCY ACROSS COLLEGIAL COURTS

This article examines the decisional consistency of U.S. Supreme Court justices with lower collegial court experience in a twofold effort to expose the potential policy implications of consistent or inconsistent behavior and to show the value of longitudinal analysis of individual rather than aggregate decisional patterns. The results show a fairly high level of consistent behavior but with marked differences across the case subjects. The article concludes with an assessment of the implications for justice selection processes and Supreme Court decision-making theory.     

State of the field: What can political ethnography tell us about anti-politics and democratic disaffection?

This article adopts and reinvents the ethnographic approach to uncover what governing elites do, and how they respond to public disaffection. Although there is significant work on the citizens’ attitudes to the governing elite (the demand side) there is little work on how elites interpret and respond to public disaffection (the supply side). It is argued here that ethnography is the best available research method for collecting data on the supply side. The article tackles longstanding stereotypes in political science about the ethnographic method and what it is good for, and highlights how the innovative and varied practices of contemporary ethnography are ideally suited to shedding light into the ‘black box’ of elite politics. The potential pay-off is demonstrated with reference to important examples of elite ethnography from the margins of political science scholarship. The implications from these rich studies suggest a reorientation of how one understands the drivers of public disaffection and the role that political elites play in exacerbating cynicism and disappointment. The article concludes by pointing to the benefits to the discipline in embracing elite ethnography both to diversify the methodological toolkit in explaining the complex dynamics of disaffection, and to better enable engagement in renewed public debate about the political establishment.     

Steady as She Goes

"Oncethe door is open,it is impossible to close it again,"said a Chinese friend as we discussed this year's National People's Congress(NPC)debates on the snbject of the economy.     

South African Native Policy

This defence of Union policy is part of a lecture given by theUnion High Commissioner at a combined meeting with the RoyalEmpire Society under the chairmanship of Lord Clarendon on the28th February. Mr. Heaton Nicholls has had long practical experienceof administration both in British Colonies and in South Africa,where he is recognised as one of the principal architects ofthe prevailing liberalism in Government policy. He opened bystressing three cardinal facts. (I) Union native policy is partof the whole concept of national government. (2) The Union isa nation in full control of its own destiny. (3) Past clasheshave left both European and Bantu in certain clearly definedareas of their own choosing.     

Painful Memory

Anyone who has spent any time in the English-speaking world is likely to have heard of Sod's Law. Not a law of physics or mathematics, but one expressing a simple human truth: If a thing can go wrong it will go wrong (and usually at the most inconvenient moment). Sod's Law explains why the oven goes wrong