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Elected politicians in the UK are likely to be middle-aged white males leading to concerns that significant social groups, particularly women and those people from minority ethnic populations are under-represented. Various measures have been proposed to facilitate the recruitment and entry of such groups into national and local government. Although much is known about the people that are elected to the national parliament less is understood about other types of candidate - those that contest but lose at general elections and candidates generally that challenge for local elected office. The paper considers a pooled data set comprising two surveys of candidates that contested recent general elections and a further three surveys of local election candidates in the UK. The aim is to identify similarities and differences between candidates contesting seats at the two levels of government. If the candidates that are challenging incumbents are similar to those people they are seeking to replace then the process of changing the elected demographic is likely to be slow. The data show both similarities between incumbents and challengers but also differences between those that contest at the parliamentary and local level. Candidate attitudes towards increased representation for women are also explored in order to assess the level of support for the government's modernising agenda. The paper finds significant differences in the attitudes of parliamentary and local election candidates that may impact on the process of engineering more balanced representation. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do corporations wield undue influence in politics? If so, how do they achieve this? And if business interests are so powerful, why do they sometimes seem to lose political battles, e.g. against trade unions or environmental groups? This paper investigates the claim of signaling models of lobbying that business can wield political influence by advising policymakers about the consequences of policy on the ground. To this end, a dataset of almost 200 policy proposals advanced by the UK government between 2001 and 2007 has been compiled to measure central variables in informational accounts of lobbying: the lobbying effort made by firms and trade associations, their reputation in the eyes of policymakers, the commitment to the policy made by the policymakers, and the costs and benefits of the policy in the view of the lobbyist and policymaker, respectively. The paper will present results from the initial analysis of these new data. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Labour government's post- 9/11 counter-terrorism policy for international terrorism has caused much controversy in the United Kingdom due to its similarity to pre- 9/11 counter-terrorism legislation for terrorism in Northern Ireland and its willingness to perpetuate the subjugation of civil liberties. Since 9/11 much has been made in academia, the press and within the US administration of the lessons that can be learned from the UK's experience countering terrorism in Northern Ireland, but the validity of this experience must be questioned. This paper will assess the evolution of British governments' responses to domestic and international terrorism in the UK since 1969, to draw out common themes from counter-terrorism policy over forty years. The aim will be to determine what lessons (if any) were learned from the experience of countering terrorism in Northern Ireland and how these lessons were applied to the new threat from international terrorism post- 9/11. The focus of this paper will be on how counter-terrorism legislation may subjugate civil liberties and perpetuate the conditions on which terrorism thrives. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Confronting terrorism from within as well as from without is a fraught and complex task for any government. First and foremost, there is the crucial challenge of holding the balance between public safety and fundamental democratic liberties and values. Terrorism shapes interactions among political actors over long periods of time through a dynamic process in which violence alters the conditions under which it initially occurs. Many consequences are unintended, but it is rare that the government's responses in countering terrorism do not alter political institutions, values, and behavior, as well as the overall function of society. This paper will argue that it is critically important to assess the effects, not only of terrorism, but of counter-terrorism on social and political structures as they relate to stability and democracy. It is this paper's view that certain models of counter-terrorism policy and rhetoric can actually do more harm than good. Drawing on the UK's post-7/7 counter-terrorism experiences this paper will try to answer the question of how does a society assess how many of its values should be surrendered in order to increase protection from terrorist attacks, and whether the resulting policies should preserve both value-driven politics, as well as liberal democracy on which these policies are based. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between government policy and public preferences is a core concern of democratic theorists. One particularly powerful method of relating policy to opinion is the 'dynamic representation' approach. Scholars in this tradition test to what extent current policy changes are a function of past public preferences. This paper derives hypotheses from the dynamic representation approach and tests them for the United Kingdom in a left-right context from 1976-2006. First, it is shown that government policy on the left-right scale changes as a consequence of changing public preferences (the direct mechanism of 'rational anticipation'). Second, a right-wing public results in the election of the Conservative Party, which consequently pursues right-wing policies in office (the indirect mechanism of 'electoral turnover'). Third, government responsiveness is found to be conditional on electoral vulnerability. Popular incumbents are less likely than unpopular incumbents to adjust their policy position to the public. While the Westminster system has received much criticism for its failure to reliably link rulers to the ruled, this paper finds that dynamic representation on the left-right scale in the United Kingdom functions quite admirably. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that agenda/opinion dynamics should be represented in the form of an error-correction model, where political agendas and public opinion coexist in a long-run equilibrium that is subject to short-run corrections. As such, responsiveness is theorised as an interdependent relationship between the political agenda and public opinion, where dynamic effects include both short-run corrections (i.e. negative feedback) and long-run equilibrium forces/friction. This paper considers time series data for the United Kingdom for the period between 1959 and 2001 on the content of the legislative agenda articulated in the Queen's Speech at the opening of each parliamentary session, coded according to the framework of the Policy Agendas project (see Baumgartner and Jones 1991; 1993; Jones and Baumgartner 2005), plus reconstituted public opinion data on Gallup's "most important problem" from British Political Opinion 1937 - 2001 (King et al 2001) and the original Gallup Index. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the current behaviour of government MPs in the British House of Commons, from the 2005 election to the Summer recess in 2006. Labour backbench rebellion so far in the 2005 parliament is running at the rate of a rebellion in 27 per cent of divisions. If Labour MPs keep that up, this session is on target to be the most rebellious first session of any post-war parliament, and the parliament will be on target to be the most rebellious parliament of the post-war era. The paper explains where this rebellion has come from (not where all commentators think) and the consequences for the rest of the parliament (not - yet - as serious as it could be). ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper addresses the problem of explanation in comparative politics. Accepting the principles of methodological individualism, the analysis equates social mechanism with the general class of explanatory principles. Successful explanations join social mechanisms with rigorous empirical analyses. Advances in statistical modeling allow the application of these methods of detailing and defending the validity of the empirical claims to complex, reciprocal, and multi-level political phenomena, the stuff of comparative politics. The paper illustrates these general principles. It offers theoretical support for reciprocal political influence in households and it tests this interpretation against alternative social mechanisms, matters of importance in the politics of Germany and Britain, and it employs appropriate statistical methods to model these complex reciprocal relationships. More generally, seeking to demonstrate the power of the explanation offered -and not just to offer a plausible account or a story in line with theoretical principles the explanatory power of its claims -the analysis insists on the need of both social mechanisms and rigorous empirical tests. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current literature suggests that Britain’s major parties traditionally have had weak relations with their MEPs, and only limited control of their legislative behavior. However, since the growth in codecision power of the European Parliament, the Labour and Conservative Parties have, in fact, created coordination systems to provide control of MEP legislative decisions. The paper outlines a model based on these new coordination systems, and the rewards and sanctions created to provide greater control. The paper concludes with discussion of implications of this change for the national parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper surveys the changing role and position of the Foreign Secretary in British government since 1974 in nine stages. First, it discusses the background, appointments and careers of Foreign Secretaries in this period. Next, it compares and contrasts the Foreign Secretaryship with other ministerial positions before going on to analyse the heavy demands placed on the Foreign Secretary. The fourth section examines the relationship between the Foreign Secretary and officials in the Foreign Office, discussing also the assistance given to the Foreign Secretary by the junior ministers and special advisers appointed to the department. The role of the Foreign Secretary in relation to the security and intelligence services is the subject of the fifth section. The role and power of the Foreign Secretary can only be understood in the context of the relationship between him and the Prime Minister, and the ups and downs in that crucial relationship since 1974 are analysed in the next section of the paper, leading in to a discussion of the Foreign Secretary’s position in the Cabinet. Before concluding, the paper discusses the role of the Foreign Secretary in parliament. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Health makes up nearly half of each devolved government’s budget, unfailingly wins headlines, and across the UK is perceived to be in a state of crisis. It has thus been thrust into the headlines across the four countries, and has been the subject of heated debates. How this important policy sector is governed sheds light on what can and will be changed by devolved assemblies, and the divergence already showing between countries with similar baselines until 1998 provides a natural experiment in the mechanics of policy formation. This paper examines the divergence from two perspectives. First, it looks at the areas where there has been change and where policy and practice has remained the same, highlighting the continuing similarity in regulation and financing and the important divergence in governance, accountability and formal oversight. It explains this continuity, present and past divergence, and changes in countries’ trajectories by analyzing the relationship between the strengths of policy advocacy coalitions and the political opportunity structures of the four systems. Rather than being four systems "moving apart" or "holding together," health policy in the UK should be seen as multi-arena politics in which some groups win in some places. Check author’s web site for an updated version of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews the span of abortion politics in Great Britain from the enactment of the 1967 Abortion Act through legislative activities in the 1990s. The paper is drawn from research on Britain I conducted as part of the project of the Research Network on Gender Politics and the State (RNGS), a cross national study of women’s movement impact on the state in post-industrial democracies and the role of women’s policy agencies in opening up the policy making process to women and women’s interests (Stetson 2001a). This project covers policy debates in several areas in addition to abortion: job training, political representation, prostitution and priority issues of the 1990s (RNGS 2002). The goal of the paper is to determine if there is a ?typical? British pattern of abortion politics by examining three policy debates that typify the British political system’s response to the competing interests over the regulation of the procedure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The doctrine of "passive obedience" is familiar to political theorist studying early-modern British political thought. Englishmen, especially royalists, employed this doctrine in order to render passive obedience and passive disobedience morally legitimate. In this paper, I unearth the early-modern discourse of honoring. Royalist living in the seventeenth-century also summoned this discourse when explaining a subject's political obligation. However, I argue that when we conceptualize political obligation in terms of honoring, rather than in terms of passive obedience, we must envision a Christian subject who is morally obligated to be active, rather than passive; willing rather than indifferent; zealous in his or her obedient actions rather than grudging. The account of political obligation offered through the discourse of honoring conjures up a relationship between a godly subject and a godly ruler according to which the former is a humble, obedient, blind, and dangerously zealous political subject. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Law and order is a collective good, enabling all groups to plan their lives, free from coercion. However, the police are also agents of the prevailing regime. As such they may target dissenting groups, particularly when socio-ethnic divisions threaten regime stability. Policing may therefore exacerbate conflict rather than contain it. The democratic response to this danger is to subject the police to the scrutiny of elected representatives. However, does this oversight encourage impartial policing, or do politicians seek protection for their own group(s), at the expense of minorities? This paper uses debates and questions from the UK and Canadian legislatures to determine the kind of policing demanded by politicians from Northern Ireland and Quebec - regions with deep divisions. Data is compared to the interventions of politicians from more homogenous regions. I therefore examine the reciprocal relationship between conflict and police accountability. Firstly, I detail the impact of inter-group conflict on the type of policing favoured by politicians. Secondly, I assess the likely effect of such demands - are the police cast as the defenders of one group to the exclusion of another, or do politicians co-operate to resolve conflicts over policing? ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An important property of any party system is the range of issues it presents to the electorate. Party systems are often characterized in terms of the level of ideological polarization, but rarely in terms of the relative amount of issue choice afforded to voters; what we refer to as issue fractionalization. In this paper, we present an innovate approach to measuring issue fractionalization and we examine what explains variation in issue fractionalization over time. Following the issue competition literature, we would expect that parties emphasize different issues (issue divergence is the norm) and that parties in opposition are more likely to diversify their issue appeal than parties in government. This theoretical approach does not, however, explain why issue fractionalization changes over time. We present an alternative explanation that draws upon the dynamic representation model. We argue that issue fractionalization is primarily driven by public opinion, and that parties in government as well as opposition parties are driven by the same incentives to diversify (or narrow) their issue appeal (issue convergence is the norm). These propositions are tested by analyzing party leader speeches in two parliamentary systems, Britain and Denmark, in the period 1953-2007, using time series analysis. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why is the public concerned with poverty in the developing world? Is it rational self-interest associated with the classic rendition of Adam Smith (1776) or concern for distant strangers that is in Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)? Recent events such as the G8 Summit in Gleneagles and the Make Poverty History Campaign have been successful in focussing the public's attention to the problem of world poverty, but recent research (OECD 2003) shows that people's understanding of poverty and development issues remains shallow and the media remain a primary source of information about developing countries. We examine public attitudes towards poverty in developing countries and the relationship to media framing and ask three questions: (i) how does the media frame poverty in developing countries; (ii) what factors drive individual-level attitudes for concern for poverty reduction programmes; and (iii) are those attitudes correlated to media framing of poverty? We suggest that attitudes toward concern for poverty can be characterised as moral/altruistic or rational, self-interested.The data for the paper come from DFID's 2005 Omnibus survey of public attitudes towards development and a content analysis of eight major newspapers from January to December 2005. Using a binary logistic regression model, we estimate individual concern for poverty in developing countries as a function of moral sentiments and economic self-interest (UK jobs, cheap imports) controlling for a host of demographic variables. The data show two key findings. First, economic and political frames dominate media coverage of poverty in developing countries and second, concern for poverty is driven by moral sentiments. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1997 New Labour government set about modernising British foreign policy by devising new ways of conceptualising, making and talking about Britain’s role in the world. First, in May 1997 Foreign Secretary Robin Cook famously announced that he wanted to give British foreign policy an ‘ethical dimension’. Second, in April 1999 the Prime Minister set out his ‘doctrine of the international community’ in which he spelt out the multifarious security challenges posed to individual nation states by global interdependence and the ‘circumstances in which we should get actively involved in other people’s conflicts’. Finally, Chancellor Gordon Brown has returned time and again to the potential gains to be had from exploiting what he calls the ‘British genius’ on the world stage.New ways of representing foreign policy, together with a sophisticated communications strategy on the part of the government since 1997 demands new ways of researching British foreign policy. In this paper I consider two questions arising from this challenge: first of all, what can discourse analysis contribute to political research in general? Second, how can we design a workable research programme into New Labour’s European policy that has discourse analysis at its very centre? ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reveals a strategic tension between the gains parties accrue by moving towards the median voter and the losses they incur when they converge with other parties. I predict that parties lose more votes to abstention and voter volatility when they converge than they gain from moderating their policies, and hence the implications of 'indifference' outweigh those from 'alienation'. Using British Election Study data these expectations are tested in the 2005 British general election when voters perceived minimal differences between the major parties. The findings reveal that the Labour party lost votes due to perceived policy similarities and that these losses outweighed those votes gained from its spatial location. However, the Liberal Democrat party benefited, suggesting that Britain's two-and-a-half party system significantly alters the logic of Down's two-party spatial theory. The implications are important for theories of party competition. Vote-seeking politicians will diverge rather converge due to voter indifference, contrary to existing theoretical predictions. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What aspects of prime-ministerial personality, skill or style matter and make a difference to politics and government? What qualities have served well or poorly in Number 10 Downing Street? This paper applies the model developed by Fred Greenstein in his book "The Presidential Difference" to analyse prime-ministerial performance and the strengths and weaknesses of British prime ministers since 1945 in terms of: (1) their proficiency as public communicators, (2) organisational capacity, (3) political skill, (4) policy vision, (5) cognitive style and (6) emotional intelligence. There is at least as much to be learned from their failures and limitations in these terms as from their successes and strengths. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares the "official stories" of political party finance in the United Kingdom and Germany to explore similarities and differences in the ways that party financing affects democratic governance. It looks at the 2 biggest parties in each of these countries, and asks what the patterns of giving may indicate about the motivations of the donors. this cross-national comparison highlights the British patterns of what looks like donors' pursuit of selective benefits, with a few donors giving at very high levels, with the governing party reaping disproportionate rewards, and with few donors giving across the political spectrum. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Quangos" (quasi-autonomous, non-governmental organizations) are ubiquitous in British policymaking, often assailed as lacking a direct accountability to the electorate given their quasi-independent status. This paper argues that quangos provide an avenue for understanding the "personal vote" and political control of administrative policymaking in Britain. Quangos deal in policies that directly impact particularistic aspects of a member's constituency. Moreover, governments can expend political capital, gleaned through electoral support, to influence quangos when actions raise more universal policy issues. Statistical analysis of 246 British quangos observed from 2001-2005, suggests that increases in backbench salience (personal vote) and public satisfaction with government (government strength) increase the transparency by which quangos make decisions, thus decreasing their independence. Public satisfaction with the status quo of public service provision, by contrast, decreases transparency, increasing independence. These results suggest that far from being independent, quasigovernmental organizations are subject to political control through well-known channels. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to give a practitioner perspective on the influence of American campaign techniques on British politics. My view is that US electioneering methods have certainly influenced UK elections, but it is important to acknowledge the limits of that influence, and look at how other factors have shaped the approach and style of modern British campaigns. Moving forward, it is also useful to look at how changes in US political campaigning are likely to influence British politics in the near future. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the ambiguities in Montesquieu's account of the British Constitution paying particular attention to the role of history in the development of parliamenatary sovereignty in Britain. We argue that Montesquieu is much more critical of British constitutionalism than is typically supposed, and that his version of an ideal or best regime would be an "Anglo-Gothic" constitutional order combining the British principle of horizontal separation of powers with the Gothic principle of a vertical devolution of power. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the UK should be veiwed as a state of unions rather than a unitary or even union state and that this has implications for citizenship. Devolved governnment entrenches distinct aspects of distinct citizneship. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews the last year in British politics with an emphasis on government, complementing Anthony King’s presentation on politics. It covers the tense relationship between Prime Minister Blair and Chancellor Brown; the Butler Report; the role of the Bank of England in economic policy-making; the effective delivery of public services, especially health; and the role of Britain in the EU. It concludes by suggesting that there is a new upsurge of populist opposition to the political class in Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the issue of differential levels of electoral participation at national, sub-national and supra-national elections within Britain. Electoral turnout is regarded as a key indicator of civic engagement in systems of multi-level governance. Using a combination of aggregate and individual level data it describes a process of electoral turnout decline from the late 1970s onwards. Britain is unusual for the range in recorded turnout for different types of election and various explanations for this are explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Britain has frequently been portrayed as a ?reluctant European?. But does this mean that it is also a reluctant supranationalist? This question is explored: (a) by contextualising the type of supranationalism experienced within the European Union by reference to a range of other examples; (b) by examining historic British attitudes to supranationalism, and British experience of supranational entities on rather different lines from that of the EU. In the process issues of sovereignty, management and accountability within supranational entities are also considered. The paper concludes by arguing that Britain is not a reluctant supranationalist. The key variable is seen as the way in which sovereignty is handled ambiguously in the EU, whilst it is argued that supranationalism in the British imagination and experience has used ambiguity for other purposes, but the locus of sovereignty has been clear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is widespread agreement amongst commentators on British politics that devolution marks a radical change in its constitutional politics. However, the focus of the changes that are generally discussed tends to be on the new devolved institutions in Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast. Manifestly, the Scottish Parliament, Welsh and Northern Ireland Assemblies and the executives associated with them are radical departures from what went before. However, any effort to understand the nature of devolution and territorial politics requires to take account of its impact on the centre as well. This is done in the paper from a traditional, Diceyian perspective. It should be stressed at the outset that the Diceyian framework has been adopted not out of reverence for the late nineteenth century English legal thinker but first because of Dicey’s extraordinary influence on constitutional politics in the UK which continues to this day and second its value as an organising framework. It is also contended that Dicey’s work on these matters, unlike some of his better know work on Parliamentary sovereignty, contains consistent lines of argument that have been neglected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An examination of the extent to which it still remains appropriate to use the term civic culture in the 21st century. Can the term be used in a political system in which there is dwindling public trust and respect for politicians and political institutions? How should we describe the contemporary political system? This paper looks at the recently conducted citizen audit of Britain to examine the public’s contemporary attitudes and behaviour in relation to these questions; in particular, it examines the public attitudes towards the political system in general, levels of political trust. political competence and efficacy, the level and range of political activities and associational involvements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]