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How national parliaments adapt to the European Union is an important debate. However, scholars often overlook the regional aspect. This is particularly so for the UK where, despite devolution since 1999, scholarship remains largely devolution-blind. It is assumed that evaluating UK parliamentary adaptation only requires assessing the work of Westminster committees. This article takes a first step towards rectifying this oversight through reconceptualising UK–EU parliamentary engagement as multi-territory, not state-centric. This is demonstrated by comparing the social construction of practices in Scotland, Wales and at Westminster since 1999. Acknowledging devolution, however, does not just require comparing practices. Additionally, the paper asks how the ideas of devolution have been taken up by actors, potentially transforming the meaning of UK engagement for them. This necessitates new approaches drawn from interpretivist and constructivist institutionalist theories. Ultimately, therefore, the paper goes further than arguing for devolution-aware research to promoting change more generally in how parliamentary adaptation is theorised. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents a view of a changing landscape of both society and politics. First of all it will briefly situate current practices and methods of political engagement and representation within a recent historical framework. It will describe factors that are at work in relation to politics, the media and civil society and then situate these within a broader societal shift from citizen to consumer. Following this the paper will identify some key shifts in this modus operandi that hint at a return to more civic-focused responsibility, the emergence of issues-based politics and the role that digital media have played in this. Finally, the paper will describe how citizen-driven, issues-based politics might connect with the systems of power in a more effective and democratic way by harnessing digital media and by building on local skills, knowledge and ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the thesis of the agenda setting function, both the media and the political parties influence what people think about, if not what they think. Newspaper and television editors make judgements of news priorities, the judgements of one editor influence the views of another, and the result is a media consensus that affects the public's sense of the importance of various issues. Parties' formulation of preferences and priorities through their manifestos aims at promoting each party's proprietary issues and downgrading other issues; this clearly turns the electorate's attention to specific topics. This paper explores the extent to which voters, political parties, and media in Britain share the same issue concerns and reveals which of the two--parties or media--is better at influencing what the public is talking about. Content analyses of party manifestos and press coverage of the 2001 election campaign identify the issues most strongly emphasized by the parties and the press, respectively. Analysis of survey data from the British Election Study 2001/2002 identifies the issues voters are mostly concerned with and enables public opinion's issue concerns to be related to both party manifestos and the press coverage of the campaign. The paper also tests whether the political priorities of British parties are adopted by their own supporters, it explores the extent to which voters are concerned with issues that are not emphasized by the party they vote for, and finally, it explores which party's issues dominated the public agenda in 2001. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a commentary on a paper about the depoliticisation of economic policy and the study of governing regimes in Great Britain. The three important conclusions drawn in the paper are discussed. According to the authors of the article, external developments will be mediated by domestic political factors and indeed that national politics will influence the timing and precise content of externally driven changes. The assertion that the transition is best conceived in terms of evolutionary change is also tackled.

The paper concentrates on the realization of an inner city or urban problem in British politics in the mid-1960s. Rejecting the conventional explanation of the resultant ‘urban programme’ as solely the consequence of Labour erections to Enoch Powell's ‘rivers of blood’ speech in 1968, the paper assesses the utility of a number of explanations for the gestation and ultimate shape of this new policy direction. Interest-group, elite and Marxist interpretations are also rejected, while amorphous academic ideas and bureaucratic domination of an embryonic policy agenda are offered as the two most plausible explanations of the subsequent shape of the ‘urban programme’. The paper concludes with an assessment of the impact of poorly conceived policy responses in generating more viable alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: On 19th January 2004, the UK government published An Independent Review of Government Communications () known as the Phillis Review, and announced that it would implement the recommendations in full. In the early 2000s, under the Government of the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, there was some blurring of the lines between the role of impartial government communicators who were members of the Government Information and Communication Service (GICS) and politically appointed Special Advisors. In 1997, Alistair Campbell, Director of Communication, and Blair''s Special Advisor, had been given the power to direct government communicators and subsequently there were a number of incidents that reinforced the view that propriety lines were being breached. It was felt that the GICS was being increasingly politicised. The Phillis Review led to far reaching change, the most important being the appointment of a Permanent Secretary, a civil servant of the most senior rank to lead GICS. The impact on the GICS was significant. It re-established its independence from political advisors, its numbers increased and it found a renewed confidence and role in Government and public life. This apparent progress came to an abrupt halt in 2010. As part of its austerity measures to address the budget deficit, Government spending on communications was frozen and in January 2011, Matt Tee, the incumbent Permanent Secretary was made redundant and left Government service in March 2011. In June and December 2011, the Government made announcements that there would be far reaching changes to Government communications which will be implemented by the Spring of 2012. This includes the appointment of a civil servant of lesser grade to head the service. So, what does this mean for Government communications? This paper reflects on the changes in Government communications in the first decade of the 21st century and concludes that in many ways it has come full circle – history is in danger of repeating itself. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

There is a discernable mood in macro-level public evaluations of party issue competence. This paper argues that voters use heuristics to transfer issue competence ratings of parties between issues, therefore issue competence ratings move in common. Events, economic shocks and the costs of governing reinforce these shared dynamics. These expectations are analysed using issue competence data in Britain 1950–2008, and using Stimson's dyad ratios algorithm to estimate ‘macro-competence’. Effects on macro-competence are found for events and economic shocks, time in government, leader ratings, economic evaluations and partisanship, but macro-competence also accounts for unique variance in a model of party choice. The article presents an aggregate-level time-series measure to capture the long-term dynamics of ‘valence’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The political impact of 'social acceleration' has recently attracted much attention in sociology and political theory. The concept, however, has remained entirely unexplored in the discipline of history. Although numerous British historians have noted the prominent position of acceleration in the late-Victorian and Edwardian imagination, these observations have never expanded beyond the realm of rhetorical flourish. The present paper attempts to build a two-way interdisciplinary bridge between British political history and the theories of social acceleration that have been posited in the social sciences, arguing that both British political historians and acceleration theorists have much to gain from further dialogue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2005 UK general election resulted for the third successive time in the Labour party winning a much larger share of seats in the House of Commons than of the votes cast. Furthermore, with an equal share of the votes the Conservative party would have won 111 seats fewer than Labour. Commentators have used this outcome to criticise aspects of the country’s electoral system. This paper reports a decomposition of the pro-Labour bias in the 2005 result (in the context of the outcome of previous contests), which allows an evaluation of the validity of such criticisms. It shows that most of the bias can be attributed not to the operation of the first-past-the-post electoral system per se but rather to party and voter behaviour within the template provided by that system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Democracy in Britain would appear to be in decline. Fewer people are joining political parties; fewer people are participating in general elections; and mass protest on a wide variety of issues is rising. This apparent breakdown in formal political engagement in Britain and other liberal democracies has led to a renewed claim by many critics inside and outside of academia that traditional representative forms of democratic governance have had their day and need to be replaced by a more direct model of democracy. This paper argues that this would be a mistake, and that [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Capital to the best-known classification of Political Arguments is a distinction between want-regarding and ideal-regarding principles, upon which this paper bases alternative representations of the dynamics of political debate. These are discussed with specific reference tot eh possibility that want-regarding goals are served less well by British planning decisions than if ideal-regarding arguments were permitted. The representations provide a limited explanation of how such a situation might come about and be maintained. Initially the draw on Down's models of voting and party competition, but explore alternatives because of: (1) the possibility that some assumptions needed for a Downsian representation cannot realistically be made about political arguments; and (2) the probability that factors other than verbal arguments enter into planning decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Before World War f religion was a major determinant of voting in Britain. Butler and Stokes have used recent interview surveys, divided into cohorts, to trace the declining effect of religion on British partisanship or at least the present day results of that historic decline. This paper compares their findings with census based analyses of religion and voting at each election from 1918 to 1970 and for each major party. The results confirm and extend the Butler/Stokes conclusions. The Conservatives consistently benefited from the Anglican tradition, Labour consistently did badly in areas of high religiosity. But the Liberals connection with both class and religion varied. Religious effects were large between the wars. They dropped to a low level in 1950-1 and then increased again though not to the interwar level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article introduces several papers about gender in contemporary British politics. Women have made substantial inroads into the masculine world of politics. The articles provide a valuable and timely commentary on contemporary political developments and at the same time perfectly demonstrate both the quality and range of current research in this area. For both Sarah Childs and Nirmal Puwar the context is the House of Commons. Childs uses the experience of the 1997 intake of Labour women Members of Parliament (MPs) to ask whether they have a distinctive style of politics. Puwar reflects on the symbolically disruptive impact of the presence in parliament of women, black and other ethnic minority MPs. Judith Squires and Mark Wickham-Jones provide an assessment of what has been achieved in terms of mainstreaming gender concerns in the policy process, by what has been known as the Women and Equality unit. Vivien Lowndes uses data on women's participation in politics and social networks at local level to engage with the currently highly influential social capital thesis. Rosie Campbell explores current gender differences in ideology and issue preferences through a statistical analysis of data from the British Election Study.