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This article seeks to stimulate a fresh and inter-disciplinary debate which revolves around the need to move from a ‘senseless democracy’ that is insufficiently attuned to the dilemmas and challenges of fostering meaningful political engagement to a more ‘sensory democracy’. It achieves this by first exploring and dissecting recent works within democratic theory that emphasise the role of ‘watching’ and ‘listening’ within sociopolitical relationships. It then goes on to develop a set of constructive criticisms by applying insights drawn from the fields of practical aesthetics and applied theatre. Not only does this exercise allow us to take the analytical lens far beyond the focus on voice-based forms of expression that have hitherto dominated political analysis, it demonstrates the value of inter-disciplinary scholarship in exposing sensory-subtleties that raise distinctive questions for both politics ‘as theory’ and politics ‘as practice’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers an argument of almost primitive simplicity: politics tends to promise too much and deliver too little. In order to substantiate this argument this article presents the results of the first attempt to analyse an experiment with participatory democracy through the lens of ‘gap analysis’. This approach focuses attention on the creation, management and fulfilment of public expectations vis-à-vis products, services or experiences. In a historical period in which the fiscal and social resources of democratic politics are severely limited the argument and empirical research set out in this article offer valuable insights for scholars and practitioners of politics and public policy. Central amongst these is the suggestion that responding to unprecedented levels of anti-political sentiment is likely to demand that politicians pay more attention to the management of public expectations (i.e. demand) and less on how to maximise political outputs in terms of public services (i.e. supply). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Charter 88 was committed to achieving one central aim—shifting the nature of British democracy from a highly majoritarian polity to a more pluralistic or consensual model of democracy. This article argues that New Labour has not demonstrated a clear commitment to a more consensual or pluralist model of democracy but has instead implemented a bi-constitutional system whereby a system of ‘modified majoritarianism’ has been retained at the national level while at the same time creating more consensual and pluralistic polities in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. However bi-constitutionalism within a unitary state is unlikely to prove unstable in the long-term. A focus on future dynamics opens up space not only for the assertion that it may still be too soon to comprehend the legacy and impact of Charter 88 (because the organisation's work planted certain seeds that may in the long-term indirectly lead to systemic change of the nature it campaigned for) but also because there exists a contemporary need for groups like Charter 88 in providing a new narrative in the form of a holist approach to understanding and shaping the constitutional configuration, thereby providing a form of constitutional morality and ending the current situation of constitutional anomie. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Although there is no doubt that the British constitution has been significantly reformed since the election of Labour in May 1997, the degree to which these reforms have altered the nature of British democracy remains deeply contested. A major problem within this debate is that it has become polarised around a binary distinction between consensual or majoritarian models of democracy when the contemporary situation is more complex. This article develops the concept of 'meta-constitutional orientations' in order to argue that the distinctive element of 'New' Labour's approach to constitutional engineering is not that it has shifted the nature of British democracy from one model to another but has, instead, sought to apply different models at the periphery and core: hi-constitutionality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the mechanism of government in Great Britain. Creation of new forms of delegated governance in 1980 and 1990; Interrelationship between elected arenas and the wider area administration; Failure of the Labour government to institute reforms that clarify the rationale and structure of the state.