Old and New Labour Narratives of Whitehall: Radicals,Reactionaries and Defenders of the Westminster Model

This article argues that throughout its history, the leadership of the Labour Party has chosen to embrace a benign view of the Civil Service, as part of a wider acceptance of the constitutional status quo reflected in the Westminster model. There has nevertheless been a long tradition in the wider Labour movement that has questioned whether Whitehall is capable of working for a government with radical aspirations. This article examines Labour's historical approach towards Whitehall, before reflecting on the extent to which the present Administration, while appealing to radical and reforming rhetoric has, like its predecessors, continued to embrace the status quo. It concludes by arguing that a contemporary and credible narrative capable of challenging the Westminster model has yet to emerge from the broader movement.     

The gender gap in comparative perspective

Abstract. Although the 'gender gap' in Western democratic publics has received an increasing amount of scholarly attention, one interesting anomaly has not been addressed. At the level of many specific issues, women appear to be more liberal than men. However, at the level of general ideological orientations, women are either more conservative, or there are no significant gender differences. We explore this disjuncture between levels of cognitive abstraction through the 1984 Eurobarometer data and conclude that the left-right continuum appears to have a different meaning for men and for women. Women seem much more likely to regard the left-right space as referring to 'preservationist' values of religion and cultural homogeneity, and men conceptualize the left-right space in economic and 'New Polities' terms.     

TIMELY AND TOPICAL

Oxford-FLTRP EnglishChinese,Chinese-English DictionaryPublished by Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press and Oxford University PressPages:2,064Price:RMB 199(China) (Published in UK as Oxford Chinese Dictionary at ￡45) IT is predicted that in a few years,the English-learning population in China will exceed the combined total population of all native-Englishspeaking countries.     

TRAJECTORIES OF CRIME AT PLACES: A LONGITUDINAL STUDY OF STREET SEGMENTS IN THE CITY OF SEATTLE*

Studies of crime at micro places have generally relied on cross‐sectional data and reported the distributions of crime statistics over short periods of time. In this paper we use official crime data to examine the distribution of crime at street segments in Seattle, Washington, over a 14‐year period. We go beyond prior research in two ways. First, we view crime trends at places over a much longer period than other studies that have examined micro places. Second, we use group‐based trajectory analysis to uncover distinctive developmental trends in our data. Our findings support the view that micro places generally have stable concentrations of crime events over time. However, we also find that a relatively small proportion of places belong to groups with steeply rising or declining crime trajectories and that these places are primarily responsible for overall city trends in crime. These findings are particularly important given the more general decline in crime rates observed in Seattle and many other American cities in the 1990s. Our study suggests that the crime drop can be understood not as a general process that occurred across the city landscape but one that was generated in a relatively small group of micro places with strong declining crime trajectories over time.     

BROKEN HOMES AND MIDDLE CLASS DELINQUENCY A Reassessment

This paper uses data from middle class suburban high school students to examine the relationship between broken homes and self-reported delinquency. Only small effects of family structure on delinquent acts are discovered. Methodological and theoretical problems which are common to research on broken homes are outlined and the contradictions between our results and those of other researchers are then analyzed from the alternative explanations of specification and spuriousness.