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This paper aims to clarify the dynamic interplay between immigration and nationality legislation and policymaking in post-imperial and pre-Brexit Britain. In 1981 and 2002, the years on which this paper focuses, three pieces of legislation were enacted marking watershed moments for British policy regarding immigration and nationality. The British Nationality Act of 1981 established 'British citizenship' in the statute book. The Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act of 2002 claimed to introduce new meaning and value to the acquisition of British citizenship by introducing a citizenship test and pledge. Furthermore, the British Overseas Territories Act of 2002 expanded the geographic scope of British citizenship by, in theory, providing citizenship to all those eligible in the existing dependent territories. Debates on the meaning of Britishness and the political projects linking immigration and nationality legislation to it, continue today in government, academia, and the media, all of whom are competing to have a tangible impact on policy. This paper addresses two questions. First, how can we account for the protracted nature of the debate on Britishness, and government efforts to enact immigration and nationality legislation based upon it? Second, if the meaning of Britishness has evolved over time, how has it been shaped by the course of these ongoing political debates? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues for a more sustained consideration of how fandom – as both a set of practices and topic of political conversation – underpins a broader "celebritization" of politics and public life. It analyses, via a Twitter-based qualitative content analysis, the ways in which fandom is expressed and spoken about in relation to three contrasting politicians from the UK, namely Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and Jeremy Corbyn. While the precise dynamics of fandom vary depending on the politician in question, our analysis identifies a more general tendency whereby overtly fannish discourses and practices co-exist with expressions of unease or hostility toward the figure of "the fan." This in turn reflects longstanding cultural representations of the figure of the fan as improper and excessive, particularly in the context of democratic politics. These contradictory responses to fandom in politics are crucial to understanding the ambivalent character of the celebritization of politics more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2010 the UK government has undertaken extensive spending cuts which have manifested in significant reductions in welfare, local authority and justice system spending. The cuts have been linked with rising poverty, food bank use and serious health issues. Such extreme cuts are likely to affect how citizens view and interact with government. This paper argues that the theories of civic voluntarism, grievance and policy feedback in combination explain why austerity has provoked relatively little political participation in the UK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, Solomos provides an account of the impact of Powell's 'Rivers of Blood' speech on policy agendas about race relations and immigration. He argues that Powell's intervention helped to shape policy frames around race and immigration in its immediate aftermath and beyond. By exploring the impact of the speech on the policy climate, his paper argues that perhaps the most important aspect of the speech is the way it helped to shape the policy agendas of both the Conservative and Labour parties, even as Powell himself was marginalized from mainstream politics. He concludes by suggesting that Powell's intervention links up with contemporary debates and preoccupations about race and immigration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is the second of two linked papers that focus on the work of the Royal Fine Art Commission (RFAC), which for three quarters of a century held the mantel of the UK Government's advisor on design in the built environment. This paper tells the story of the organization's final 15 years when, under a new and charismatic leader, the Commission substantially changed its modus operandi, and came out of the shadows, although without ever fully embracing the modern era of government. Analysis of the archives are supplemented by what the limited available literature tells us about the RFAC and by a small number of interviews with key stakeholders with firsthand experience of the operation of the RFAC; those who either worked for it, were responsible for it within Government, or were reviewed by it. The experience offers valuable insights into the practices and problematics of design governance that today, internationally, forms one of the keystones of modern day planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The winter of 2010–11 saw a significant upsurge of student protest in Britain. This paper analyses the numerous references to 60s’ radicalism which circulated in responses to the protests, with a focus on left-wing media. Drawing on performativity theory, the paper traces the highly polarised divisions between affirmations and repudiations of ‘1968’ in responses to the protests. This polarisation, I argue, reflects an absence of a clear-cut collective memory of the British radical 60s. More broadly, the paper sheds light on the hitherto under-explored mechanisms through which memories of ‘1968’ shape the discursive and affective landscape of contemporary radical politics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the historical formation of the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) in the United States and argues that programme emergence depended on the ability of policy entrepreneurs to link the economic concerns of agricultural production with the ideational concern of national security. Using a historical institutionalist framework this paper stresses the critical juncture of the Second World War and the positive feedback loop created between agricultural industries and schools to understand the emergence of the NSLP. In addition, it stresses the role of frames in policy-making and focuses on the use by policy entrepreneurs of a security frame whereby child malnutrition was cast as a national security issue. The policy window of war gave policy entrepreneurs the chance to use the politically and culturally resonant frame of security, in the contexts of agricultural subsidies, to push for the creation of this programme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates whether five English political parties are differentiating themselves based on the brand personality they are communicating through their websites. The relative brand positions of five English political parties are analyzed using Aaker's brand personality scale. The text from each party website is analyzed using content analysis and a dictionary-based tool. The results are plotted in relation to one another on a correspondence analysis map. We find that the two main dimensions on which parties’ brand personalities differ relate to the trade-offs between communicating competence and communicating sincerity and between communicating sophistication and communicating ruggedness. We find that parties’ brand personalities are distinctive, with the exception of the Green Party, and that the position of one party, the United Kingdom Independence Party, is particularly distinctive. Our research uses Aaker's existing framework for thinking about brand personalities, rather than creating a new framework for politics. By using an existing framework, we are able to use tools developed in other disciplines and show their usefulness for the study of political marketing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Driven by a desire to improve academic outcomes and transform ‘failing’ schools, governments around the world have often turned to the development of new forms of state-funded school. This paper looks at three such instances of the introduction of new forms of schooling, within three urban localities (academy schools in London; charter schools and small schools of choice in New York City; and Schools of Tomorrow in Rio de Janeiro). It considers the extent to which these types of school did improve academic outcomes for their students and draws comparisons across each case study in order to understand their similarities and differences. It concludes that although the quasi-marketisation of school systems through the introduction of new (often private) providers might improve outcomes, this is not the only means by which improvement can be attained; and that instead the introduction of new forms of school may be successful because this enables certain other changes to happen. It highlights the limited nature of impact evidence available in all instances, which restricts our ability to properly evaluate the effect of new school types on outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The image of Margaret Thatcher appearing on television dressed in a ‘peacock blue sari’ must seem rather farfetched—and yet, for a brief moment, it appeared a distinct possibility. That such an event seemed plausible reflected the growing recognition among senior Conservatives of the electoral significance of ethnic minority voters. While Conservatives had begun to experiment with measures to appeal to BAME voters as early as 1951, from the mid-1970s formal party structures dedicated to the recruitment and representation of BAME voters began to emerge. In 1976 the Party launched the Anglo Asian Conservative and the National Anglo West Indian Conservative Societies, both of which sought to address poor performance among black and Asian voters. This paper explores the development of Conservative electoral strategies targeting BAME voters in the period after 1951, and reflects on what these strategies reveal about Conservative narratives of the nation in the 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For the past six years successive UK governments in England have introduced reforms intended to usher in less aggregated, top-down, bureaucratically overloaded models of service delivery. Yet the ‘hollowing out’ of local government has not resulted in less bureaucracy on the ground or less regulation from above, nor has it diminished hierarchy as an organising principle of education governance. Monopolies and monopolistic practices dominated by powerful bureaucracies and professional groups persist, albeit realised through the involvement of new actors and organisations from business and philanthropy. In this paper I adopt a governmentality perspective to explore the political significance of large multi-academy trusts (MATs) – private sponsors contracted by central government to run publicly funded schools – to the generation of new scalar hierarchies and accountability infrastructures that assist in bringing the gaze of government to bear upon the actions of schools that are otherwise less visible under local government management. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An upsurge of historical research in this century has assessed various campaigns that promoted European Community (EC) membership to the British people. This article, concentrating on the Labour government’s approach to the 1975 referendum on the EC, uses sources such as official records at The National Archives and political papers of some of the key agents; these sources have hitherto been underused for investigating public opinion-related activities on Europe in 1975. Although acknowledging that the interpretation of a government-controlled referendum applies up to a point, the article emphasises, as its key theme, the government’s difficulties in controlling events during the campaign itself. Despite having much support from newspapers, the government often had difficult relations with the mass media as a whole, and the article challenges the belief that it was effective here. This article also contests the idea that the campaign made much impression on the public. These findings further apply to other campaigns on the EC in the 1960s and 1970s and potentially in contemporary British politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The campaign consulting business in the United States is the largest in the world and has had some success in globally exporting its expertise in terms of both personnel and technique. This paper reflects on the so-called “Americanization” of British elections and draws attention to some of the significant landmarks in the relationship between strategists in the two countries. The discussion does, however, identify the limitations of this idea as an organizing concept for understanding how election campaigning has developed in the United Kingdom. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Drawing upon a national database of unimplemented planning permissions and 18 in-depth case studies, this paper provides both a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the phenomenon of stalled sites in England. The practical and conceptual difficulties of classifying sites as stalled are critically reviewed. From the literature, it is suggested that planning permission may not be implemented due to lack of financial viability, strategic behaviour by landowners and house-builders, and other problems associated with the development process. Consistent with poor viability, the analysis of a national database indicates that a substantial proportion of stalled sites are high density apartment developments usually is located in low house value areas. The case studies suggest that a combination of interlinked issues may need to be resolved before a planning permission can be implemented. These include; the sale of the land to house-builders, renegotiation of the planning permission and, most importantly, improvement in housing market conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the decades since the Conference on Devolution's proceedings concluded in stalemate in April 1920, the Conference has been consigned to the margins of political and constitutional history. However, within this limited literature, one interpretation of the Conference's proceedings has been universally held: that the subject of the powers the devolved legislatures should enjoy was a rare source of consensus. This article challenges this orthodoxy, using archival evidence from the Conference to demonstrate that while a consensus on powers may have existed on paper, such agreement certainly did not exist in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper reports findings from a study of the changing nature of the narrative contents and production formats of Party Election Broadcasts (PEBs) produced by the Labour, Conservative, and Liberal Democratic parties for UK general elections from 1979 to 2010. This analysis tracked production changes that might signal a movement on the part of the political parties toward using marketing-oriented techniques of the kind found in televised advertising. Although PEBs are not technically classified as advertisements by the broadcasting industry, but rather as programs, they nevertheless present an opportunity to political parties to promote themselves and their policies. Using content analysis, it was found that PEBs have grown progressively shorter from 1979 to 2010 and become faster paced. They have become more sophisticated as productions with wider use of dramatized documentary formats rather than talking heads, popular music, and professional performers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper outlines several methods for forecasting the next British general election on a daily basis from 20 months prior using opinion polls. It discusses their performance for previous electoral cycles and shows that the two models with the best historical record lead to substantially different predictions for 2015, but they can be averaged. The historical relationship between the polls and the vote suggests that government support rises substantially in the run up to elections, that Conservatives outperform but Labour underperform relative to the polls, and parties generally recover from low points or decline from high ones. Approximate prediction intervals and probabilities for key events are also generated. Despite the Conservatives trailing in the polls by 7 points in early October 2013, the models suggest a substantial Conservative lead at the 2015 election with a 64% chance of being the largest party and 42% chance of an overall majority. The estimated probability of a hung parliament (40%) is instructive for understanding the operation of the electoral system. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The school system in England is undergoing rapid change, with the government creating more than 4000 ‘independent publicly funded schools’, known as academies, since 2010. The potential for fragmentation is considerable with diversity of governance emerging as a key feature of the new schooling landscape. Consequently, a major and widely recognised issue to which these reforms give rise concerns the future of the ‘middle tier’ –that layer between individual schools or groups of schools and central government. There are competing visions of how a future middle tier might evolve: one focuses entirely on a middle tier of individual schools and chains as a ‘self-improving system’; others conceive a continuing but revised role for the local authority (LA). The aim of this paper is to begin to explore the latter position, and in particular the potential role of the LA as a ‘broker’ of new patterns of school organisation. Drawing on interview data from three very different LA areas, the findings show that LAs differ in how they conceive their role and, consequently, on the strategies that they pursue. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Research on the impact of parties on public policy, and on immigration policy in particular, often finds limited evidence of partisan influence. In this paper, we examine immigration policy-making in the UK coalition government. Our case provides evidence that parties in government can have more of an impact on policy than previous studies acknowledge, but this only becomes apparent when we open up the ‘black box’ between election outcomes and policy outputs. By examining how, when and why election pledges are turned into government policies, we show that partisan influence depends not only on dynamics between the coalition partners, but how these dynamics interact with interdepartmental conflicts and lobbying by organised interests. In-depth process tracing allows us to see these complex dynamics, which easily get lost in large-n comparisons of pledges and outputs, let alone outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]