British foreign policy (Political Science)

In an age where nothing seems clear-cut it is wonderful to have a hero and an even clearer villain. Putin is the new Hitler, an obsessive maniac with no respect for human life. The Ukrainians, by contrast, remind us of our parents and grandparents and their pluck during World War II, when Britain stood alone. But, of course, nothing is ever quite so simple. So, at this stage in the war, what is the balance of the good, the bad and the ugly?

This research Note has two complementary theoretical objectives. First, we shall attempt to place the form of interest representation and the involvement of interest groups in policy formation known as corporatism – or as democratic, societal, liberal or neo-corporatism – in a broader political context: is corporatism systematically linked with other democratic institutions and processes? Secondly, we shall try to fill a gap in the theory of consensus democracy. This theory holds that types of party, electoral, executive and legislative systems occur in distinct clusters, but it fails to link interest group systems to these clusters.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Why did historical anti-poverty programs in Britain, Denmark and France differ so dramatically in their goals, beneficiaries and agents for addressing poverty? Different cultural views of poverty contributed to how policy makers envisioned anti-poverty reforms. Danish elites articulated social investments in peasants as necessary to economic growth, political stability and societal strength. British elites viewed the lower classes as a challenge to these goals. The French perceived the poor as an opportunity for Christian charity. Fiction writers are overlooked political agents who engage in policy struggles. Collectively, writers contribute to a country's distinctive ‘cultural constraint’, or symbols and narratives, which appears in the national-level aggregation of literature. To assess cross-national variations in cultural depictions of poverty, this article uses historical case studies and quantitative textual analyses of 562 British, 521 Danish and 498 French fictional work...

Brexit shocked liberal elites across Europe, instigating a burgeoning new field of research. Brexit scholarship tends to puzzle over two questions: what happened? What will happen now? This article addresses the latter and builds upon scholarship that suggests that “identity” mattered as much as economics. Digging deeper into British identity, this essay borrows from social-psychology to analyse how temporal status comparisons contributed to Brexit. It argues how the peculiar qualities of British identity narrative make Eurosceptic complaints about sovereignty, Brussels and “control”, particularly salient to nationalists. In short, negative temporal status comparisons with Britain’s former self underpins its longterm Euroscepticism: When Brits learn they once “ruled the world”, the European Union’s practices of compromise compare poorly: Cooperation is easily presented as subordination. Brexit can thus be understood as a radical attempt to arrest Britain’s decline by setting sail for a future based on a nostalgic vision of the past.

Claims of inter-state ‘specialness’ are commonplace in international politics. But how do some relationships between states come to be seen and categorized as ‘special’ in the first place? And what impact, if any, do recurring public representations of specialness have on states’ political and diplomatic interaction?

While much scholarly work exists on alleged instances of special relationships, and on inter-state cooperation and alliances more generally, little systematic and theory informed research has been conducted on how special relationships evolve and unfold in practice. This book offers such a comprehensive study. Theorizing inter-state relations as on-going social processes, it makes the case for approaching special relationships as constituted and upheld through linguistic representations and bilateral interaction practices. Haugevik explores this claim through an in-depth study of how the bilateral relationship most frequently referred to as ‘special’ – the US-British – has unfolded over the last seventy years. This analysis is complemented with a study of Britain’s relationship with a more junior partner, Norway, during the same period.

The book offers an original take on inter-state relations and diplomacy during the Cold War and after, and develops an analytical framework for understanding why some state relationships maintain their status as ‘special’, while others end up as ‘benignly neglected’ ones.

Numerous empirical studies have examined the role of third-party peacekeeping in reducing violence around the world. Their results reveal an extraordinary relationship between peacekeepers and peace, notwithstanding a number of well-known problems. This review article has three goals. The first is to summarize the results of past empirical research to move the debate beyond the question of whether peacekeeping works to the more pressing questions of how, when and why it works. The second is to reveal the limitations of the current quantitative research in order to identify areas in which scholars can make big, new contributions to the field. The final goal is to propose a new research agenda that is heavily evaluative – one that informs policy makers about the specific practices, mission compositions, and mandates that work, and identifies the local, regional, and international conditions that amplify or diminish peacekeeping's effectiveness. This type of research could help red...

Advocates of proportional representation (PR) often cite its potential for increasing citizen involvement in politics as one of PR's fundamental advantages over plurality or first-past-the-post systems. The assumption is that plurality electoral systems distort the translation of votes into seats, discouraging and alienating small party supporters and other political minorities. In contrast, PR systems are believed to provide greater opportunities for representation which are assumed to instil greater efficacy and participation. We examine this theory linking institutions to electoral participation across a diverse set of countries using data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems. Using a multi-level approach we find evidence consistent with the expectations about the negative influence of disproportional systems on political minorities. Voters are also likely to have stronger partisan preferences in PR systems, which enhances political efficacy and increases voter participation. The effects of PR, however, are not all positive; broad coalitions, which are likely to be a feature of these systems, reduce political efficacy.

Nations have historically sought power and prosperity through control of physical space. In recent decades, however, territorial empire has largely ceased. Most states that can take and hold territory no longer appear eager to do so, while the weak are unable to expand. Have powerful countries become "kinder and gentler," or has something fundamental changed about the logic of empire? We offer a theory of imperialism and decolonization that explains both historic cycles of expansion and decline and the demise of the urge to colonize. Technological shocks enable expansion, while rising labor costs and the dynamics of military technology gradually dilutes imperial advantage. At the same time, economic development has led to a secular decline in the payoffs for appropriating land, minerals, and capital. Once conquest no longer pays for great powers, the systemic imperative to vertically integrate production also becomes archaic.

The early 1980s were a momentous era in recent Irish political history. The post-Hunger Strikes rise of Sinn Féin threatened British policy in Northern Ireland and—alongside severe economic problems—also endangered what establishment figures called political and social ‘stability’ in the Irish Republic. In the same period, moreover, the appeal of Irish Republicanism resurged among the traditionally and (from the Dublin élite’s perspective) dangerously ‘green’ Irish in the United States.

In one or both parts of divided Ireland, a combination of censorship, repression, mass migration, and the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 maintained ‘acceptable levels’ of violence and dissent. At the same time, however, the British and Irish political establishments also relied on academics and journalists. Their task was to ‘revise’ and destabilize ‘traditional’ Irish and Irish-American understandings of the history and contemporary implications of British imperialism and Irish resistance—on the grounds that popular perceptions of past events, such as the Great Famine and Partition, generated ideological, emotional, or even practical support for militant Irish Republicanism.

In an essay published in 1983, Dr. Raymond James Raymond (latterly, Ray Raymond), a young Irish historian teaching in the United States, succinctly described what, he contended, should be modern Irish history’s principal functions. It should refute, he avowed, one or more of three Irish nationalist beliefs, all of which he characterized as ‘romanticized and un-historic’. These beliefs were: first, ‘[that] the history of Ireland is a history of British oppression’; second, ‘[that] the British presence in Ireland has been disastrous for the Irish people’; and third, ‘[that] Irish freedom had to be achieved through violence’.

Such scholarly opinions naturally seemed authoritative, and, indeed, in the early 1980s no young historian of Ireland appeared to have a brighter future and greater potential influence, especially in the United States.....

To discover what happened next.... read  on.

Field Day Review, 7, 2011, Editors: Seamus Deane & Ciarán Deane, Paperback: 270 pages, ISBN 978-0-946755-51-6

El profesor Waddell es un valor probado en obras similares a ésta cuya presentación es motivo de honra para mí. Nacido en Edimburgo (Escocia) en 1927, hizo sus estudios secundarios en la Roy al High S chool de Edimburgo, y los superiores en la Universidad de Saint Andrews (M. A. 19U9) y en la de Oxford (Ph. D. 195J,\). Dedicado a la docencia ha tenido larga actividad en la enseñanza de la historia en el University College of the West Indies, en Jamaica; en la Universidad de Edimburgo; en la University of the West Indies, de Trinidad; y en la Universidad del Valle, en Cali (Colombia), hasta alcanzar su actual posición de Catedrático de Historia Moderna, en la Universidad de Stirling (Escocia), desde 1968. Ha sido Profesor Visitante en la Universidad de California, Irvine, en 1971. Una brillante carrera, subrayada por notables publicaciones; tales como British Honduras: a Historical and Contemporary Survey (1961) y The West Indies and the Guianas (1967). Autor, asimismo, de numerosos artículos en revistas especializadas y en obras colectivas sobre la historia del imperio británico y la de Latinoamérica. Ha colaborado además en los Bicentenarios de Bello y de Bolívar. Sigue dedicado a las investigaciones históricas, particularmente en el tema de las relaciones británicas con los países hispanoamericanos durante el tiempo de la independencia, lo que augura sazonados frutos. Es fellow de la Roy al Historical Society, desde 1965. Estos antecedentes, son garantía de la obra que hoy se edita en Caracas en homenaje al Bicentenario del nacimiento de El Libertador. PEDRO GRASES. Julio, 1983. AGRADECIMIENTO El autor desea expresar su profundo agradeci miento a las siguientes personas e instituciones por su ayuda en el curso de la investigación como durante la fase de redacción de este estudio: Ci o B arbados ß o A rubâ CU RAZAO^G r e n a d a M argarita a o 30 35

The latest batch of papers released by the Margaret Thatcher Foundation includes two letters from her then Japanese counterpart, PM  Zenko Suzuki, dated 12 and 24 April 2013. They make interesting reading, illustrating the Japanese position in the Falklands conflict. While hoping that diplomacy would succeed, Tokyo was firm in rejecting the invasion. At that time Tokyo held a seat at the UN Security Council.  This short paper discusses the first of these letters and the wider Japanese posture in the war.

“Conciliation is useless” wrote the 1937 Peel Commission “there can be no question of fusion or assimilation between Jewish and Arab cultures” (p.223). It was brave of Gardner Thompson, an expert on British colonialism in East Africa, to immerse himself in the cauldron of the Arab-Israel dispute. The result, however, is a book of impressive clarity as he charts the story of the Zionists’ quest for a homeland in Palestine from the days when it was the dream of a small minority of world Jewry.

Thompson remains reasonably balanced throughout. For him the main culprits are the British for sticking to an idea which was fatally flawed from the outset. Although admiring of the skills of Theodor Herzl and Weizmann he is critical of some Zionists for concealing an intention to dispossess the Palestinians of their land and, in some cases, their right to remain

Сборник статей V Международной научно-практической конференции «Научное творчество XXI века» отражает результаты научных исследований и содержит материалы по следующим основным направлениям: лингвистика и межкультурная коммуникация; литературоведение и языкознание; история, философия, социология и культурология; экономика и менеджмент.

This article analyses the relationship between the representatives and the represented by comparing elite and mass attitudes to gender equality and women's representation in Britain. In so doing, the authors take up arguments in the recent theoretical literature on representation that question the value of empirical research of Pitkin's distinction between substantive and descriptive representation. They argue that if men and women have different attitudes at the mass level, which are reproduced amongst political elites, then the numerical under-representation of women may have negative implications for women's substantive representation. The analysis is conducted on the British Election Study (BES) and the British Representation Study (BRS) series.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

FOR too long now the Left has been embarrassed about the role of the state. Indeed, for too long it has acquiesced in the methodological individualism about values that lies at the heart of the Thatcherite agenda. These two faults are not the same, but I shall argue that in redressing the latter we must overcome the former. In this paper I want to slowly undo the knots and blockages which, in public spokesmen at least, have frequently left the Left not only speechless, but thoughtless at the destruction of the welfare state over the past ten years. My enquiry is a philosophical one and does not attempt to derive specific policy suggestions. I make no apologies for the abstraction of my enterprise. It seems to me to be one of the attractions of Thatcher's appeal that her policies all appear to derive from a clean and simple vision of the nature of society and the role of the state and individuals within. We must first get the overall picture right. The theoretical structure has to be in place before we can address policy decisions with any confidence.

Preferences over jurisdictional architecture are the product of three irreducible logics: efficiency, distribution and identity. This article substantiates the following claims: (a) European integration has become politicized in elections and referendums; (b) as a result, the preferences of the general public and of national political parties have become decisive for jurisdictional outcomes; (c) identity is critical in shaping contestation on Europe.

The article uses the legislative history of some 5,000 Parliamentary amendments (see http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/tsebelis) to analyze the role of the Commission, the Parliament, and the Council in the two main legislative procedures in the European Union: cooperation and codecision (I). These procedures have been the subject of theoretical controversies, because according to conventional wisdom codecision increases the powers of the European Parliament, but according to revisionist approaches, the conditional agenda setting powers accorded to the Parliament by cooperation are more important than the veto powers ascribed by codecision.

A raft of new research on the causes and effects of political corruption has emerged in recent years, in tandem with a separate, growing focus on the effects of political institutions on important outcomes such as economic growth, social equality and political stability. Yet we know little about the possible role of different political institutional arrangements on political corruption. This article examines the impact of territorial sovereignty (unitary or federal) and the composition of the executive (parliamentary or presidential) on levels of perceived political corruption cross-nationally. We find that unitary and parliamentary forms of government help reduce levels of corruption. To explain this result, we explore a series of seven potential causal mechanisms that emerge out of the competing centralist and decentralist theoretical paradigms: (1) openness, transparency and information costs, (2) intergovernmental competition, (3) localism, (4) party competition, (5) decision rules, (6) collective action problems, and public administration. Our empirical findings and our analysis of causal mechanisms suggest that centralized constitutions help foster lower levels of political corruption.

Bringing the State Back In Until recently, dominant theoretical paradigms in the comparative social sciences did not highlight states as organizational structures or as potentially autonomous actors. Indeed, the term "state" was rarely used. Current work, however, increas-ingly ...

In recent years some of the best theoretical work on the political economy of political institutions and processes has begun surfacing outside the political science mainstream in high quality economics journals. This two-part paper surveys these contributions from a recent five-year period. In Part I, the focus is on elections, voting and information aggregation, followed by treatments of parties, candidates, and coalitions. In Part II, papers on economic performance and redistribution, constitutional design, and incentives, institutions, and the quality of political elites are discussed. Part II concludes with a discussion of the methodological bases common to economics and political science, the way economists have used political science research, and some new themes and arbitrage opportunities. This is the second part of a two-part survey of articles germane to political science found in the leading economics journals in recent years. We undertook this task because it had become apparent in recent years that a considerable body of formal political economy began appearing in the top economics journals. In the five-year period from the point we commenced this project (2000)(2001)(2002)(2003)(2004), we found more than one hundred articles in the five leading journals. 1 From this universe we survey approximately sixty, with references to many others as well. In Part I, the focus was on elections, voting and information aggregation, followed by a treatment of parties, candidates, and coalitions. In this part we examine papers on redistribution, constitutional design, and the incentives and quality of political elites. We conclude with a discussion of the methodological and theoretical foundations of political economy shared by economist and political scientist alike, the resources each political economy type draws from the other's literature, and some available intellectual arbitrage opportunities. James Robinson, three referees, and especially those of the editor, Albert Weale.

Work exploring the relationship between public opinion and public policy over time has largely been restricted to the United States. A wider application of this line of research can provide insights into how representation varies across political systems, however. This article takes a first step in this direction using a new body of data on public opinion and government spending in Britain. The results of analyses reveal that the British public appears to notice and respond (thermostatically) to changes in public spending in particular domains, perhaps even more so than in the United States. They also reveal that British policymakers represent these preferences in spending, though the magnitude and structure of this response is less pronounced and more general. The findings are suggestive about the structuring role of institutions.

When a party or candidate loses the popular vote but still wins the election, do voters view the winner as legitimate? This scenario, known as an electoral inversion, can give power to candidates or parties in democratic systems who lose the popular vote, including the winners of two of the last five presidential elections in the United States. We report results from two experiments testing the effect of inversions on democratic legitimacy in the U.S. context. Our results indicate that inversions significantly decrease the perceived legitimacy of winning candidates. Strikingly, this effect does not vary with the margin by which the winner loses the popular vote nor by whether they are a co-partisan. The effect is driven by Democrats, who punish inversions regardless of candidate partisanship; few effects are observed among Republicans. These results suggest that inversions may increase sensitivity to such outcomes among supporters of the losing party. † We thank Kevin Kromash for excellent administrative support and gratefully acknowledge funding from Democracy Fund, the Hewlett Foundation, and Wilhelm Merck. * p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01, *** p < .005 (two-sided). Means for variable by condition. T-statistic relative to the +1% condition in parentheses.) * p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01, *** p < .005 (two-sided). Means for variable by condition. T-statistics relative to control condition in parentheses.

Why is government corruption more pervasive in some societies than in others? In this article we examine public choice explanations that attribute corruption to a lack of competition in either political or economic arenas or both. The principal part of our analysis draws on recentlypublished data about levels of corruption for a broad cross-section of countries reported for the early 1980s. We supplement this with an additional analysis of a second dataset on corruption measured during the late 1980s. Our analyses confirm that political competition affects level of corruption, but this effect is nonlinear. Corruption is typically lower in dictatorships than in countries that have partially democratized. But once past a threshold, democratic practices inhibit corruption. However, we obtained mixed results with respect to the relationship of economic competition and corruption: government size does not systematically affect corruption, but membership of the Oil Producing and Exporting Countries (OPEC) does. Finally, corruption is more pervasive in low-income countries which tend to underpay public sector employees.

Abstract: The paper conceptualizes a 'humanitarian dimension' of the UK's foreign policy. In doing so it analyzes activities of the Department for International Development, Foreign and Commonwealth Office and other governmental bodies in spheres like providing urgent humanitarian aid and development assistance. Modern British humanitarianism is about intervention in crises in order to help and save human lives. In more broaden perspective paper analyzes British soft power as an example of a value-based and in that sense 'human-centered' foreign policy It concludes by discussing a possible impact of Brexit on the UK's humanitarian role and its soft power in today's world.

The determinants of the welfare state have received a great deal of attention in the comparative political economy literature. An analysis of the role that indirect taxation plays in the politics of advanced industrial societies is, however, missing. This article demonstrates that a full understanding of the links between redistribution, social democracy and corporatism is impossible without a closer look at indirect taxation. Conventional wisdom is questioned and it is shown that social democratic governments in corporatist environments find themselves in a paradoxical situation. They need to support the welfare state by relying upon a fundamentally regressive policy instrument: indirect taxation. It is also shown that social democratic governments can minimize the use of consumption taxes as part of their redistributive strategy only in non-corporatist settings. In exploring these issues, this article illuminates alternative routes for the pursuit of equality in a context of declining corporatist arrangements.

Elections to the Irish Presidency belong to the category of those in which hardly any political power is involved. In elections such as this one, according to second-order election theory, voter behaviour reflects mainly preferences in the first-order political arena, where actual policy is made.

This article analyses how institutional and contextual factors explain the approval of presidential initiatives -presidential legislative success -in highly disciplined and cartelized assemblies. Of particular importance is to test whether public opinion, the electoral cycle and the use of different institutional rules affect the approval of presidential initiatives in Congress. Using a multilevel Bayesian model of legislative success, I model bill approval rates at individual and aggregate levels. This strategy is extremely flexible, allowing us to disentangle the different institutional and contextual factors that determine the approval of presidential initiatives in the Argentine Congress.

Influential studies by Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson claim that colonial legacies explain the origins of development-promoting property rights and thus account for the modern world income distribution. Specifically, they argue that European colonial powers engineered a global &#x27;reversal of fortune&#x27;, bringing property rights and prosperity to relatively uninhabited colonies while imposing inefficient institutions on locales with less potential for settlement. We re-evaluate their theoretical arguments and empirical findings and come to a different ...

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

This paper presents a handful of Greek coins from the private collection of Sir Arthur John Evans (1851-1941), kept in the Heberden Coin Room of the Ashmolean Museum of Oxford. Evans, who was the Keeper of this museum from 1884 to 1908 and had a major role in organizing its Coin Room, collected a large number of coins during his travels and explorations throughout Europe, especially from 1875 to 1881 in the Western Balkans. The coins listed in the catalog were discovered by Evans in Risan, ancient Rhizon/Risinium, situated in modern Montenegro. Considered within the larger pool of published Greek coins from Risan, these coins provide a contribution to our understanding of the ancient town of Rhizon, and to the study of the contacts and exchanges in the Adriatic and Ionian Seas regions in the Hellenistic
period.

Institutional arrangements influence the type of policies that leaders pursue. We examine two institutional variables: the size of the selectorate (S)--the set of people who have an institutional say in choosing leaders--and the size of the winning coalition (W)--the minimal set of people whose support the incumbent needs in order to remain in power. The larger the winning coalition, the greater the emphasis leaders place on effective public policy. When W is small, leaders focus on providing private goods to their small group of supporters at the expense of the provision of public goods. The size of the selectorate influences how hard leaders work on behalf of their supporters. The greater the size of the selectorate, the more current supporters fear exclusion from future coalitions. This induces a norm of loyalty that enables leaders to reduce their effort and still survive. As a first step towards a theory of endogenous selection of institutions, we characterize the institutional preferences of the different segments of society based on the consequences of these institutions for individual welfare. We conclude by examining the implication of the model for the tenure of leaders, public policy, economic growth, corruption, taxation and ethnic politics. *

The later work of W.H. Riker (1921-93) has fervent admirers and fervent detractors. It has led to some extensions and qualifications. This review charts Riker's intellectual odyssey. Concentrating on his late works, it explores whether or not the characteristic methodology of these last two decades has the intrinsic strength necessary to survive and flourish.