A Natural Centre-Left Majority?

Politics ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-30
Author(s):  
Robin Gray

This article concerns the relationship between policy and voter elasticity on either side of the political spectrum as an explanation of the left's post-war political failure. The core contention is that left-oriented voters are more responsive to slight deviations in policy. This is used to explain partially Labour's post-war failure to dominate power even when the ‘left's vote’ was over 50 per cent.

Author(s):  
Aled Davies

This book is a study of the political economy of Britain’s chief financial centre, the City of London, in the two decades prior to the election of Margaret Thatcher’s first Conservative government in 1979. The primary purpose of the book is to evaluate the relationship between the financial sector based in the City, and the economic strategy of social democracy in post-war Britain. In particular, it focuses on how the financial system related to the social democratic pursuit of national industrial development and modernization, and on how the norms of social democratic economic policy were challenged by a variety of fundamental changes to the City that took place during the period....


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Pyszczynski ◽  
Pelin Kesebir ◽  
Matt Motyl ◽  
Andrea Yetzer ◽  
Jacqueline M. Anson

We conceptualized ideological consistency as the extent to which an individual’s attitudes toward diverse political issues are coherent among themselves from an ideological standpoint. Four studies compared the ideological consistency of self-identified liberals and conservatives. Across diverse samples, attitudes, and consistency measures, liberals were more ideologically consistent than conservatives. In other words, conservatives’ individual-level attitudes toward diverse political issues (e.g., abortion, gun control, welfare) were more dispersed across the political spectrum than were liberals’ attitudes. Study 4 demonstrated that variability across commitments to different moral foundations predicted ideological consistency and mediated the relationship between political orientation and ideological consistency.


2021 ◽  
pp. 095269512110344
Author(s):  
David Garland

This article traces the emergence of the term welfare state in British political discourse and describes competing efforts to define its meaning. It presents a genealogy of the concept's emergence and its subsequent integration into various political scripts, tracing the struggles that sought to name, define, and narrate what welfare state would be taken to mean. It shows that the concept emerged only after the core programmes to which it referred had already been enacted into law and that the referents and meaning of the concept were never generally agreed upon – not even at the moment of its formation in the late 1940s. During the 1950s, the welfare state concept was being framed in three distinct senses: (a) the welfare state as a set of social security programmes; (b) the welfare state as a socio-economic system; and (c) the welfare state as a new kind of state. Each of these usages was deployed by opposing political actors – though with different scope, meaning, value, and implication. The article argues that the welfare state concept did not operate as a representation reflecting a separate, already-constituted reality. Rather, the use of the concept in the political and economic arguments of the period – and in later disputes about the nature of the Labour government's post-war achievements – was always thoroughly rhetorical and constitutive, its users aiming to shape the transformations and outcomes that they claimed merely to describe.


Author(s):  
Emad Abu-Shanab ◽  
Raya Al-Dalou'

The relationship between citizens and governments is the core of e-government. E-participation is one of the political dimensions of e-government which focuses on informing, consulting, involving, collaborating, and empowering citizens to take part of the decision making process. This study adopted a framework for the five levels of e-participation and tried to test such model empirically using 400 responses from Jordanians. The study tried to measure Jordanian perceptions towards e-participation initiatives and practices in Jordan, and to measure the achievements on each level as perceived and reported by subjects. Results indicated that the highest perceived level was e-involving, and the lowest was e-consulting. Also, the CFA results indicated a distorted distribution of items between the major levels. Results of other issues explored are discussed further in this study.


Author(s):  
Sally M. Horrocks

Commentators and politicians have frequently argued that the performance of the British economy could be significantly improved by paying more attention to the translation of the results of scientific research into new products and processes. They have frequently suggested that deficiencies in achieving this are part of a long-standing national malaise and regularly point to a few well-worn examples to support their contention. What are conspicuous by their absence from these debates are detailed and contextual studies that actually examine the nature of the interactions between scientists and industry and how these changed over time. This paper provides one such study by examining three aspects of the relationship between the Royal Society, its Fellows and industrial R&D during the mid twentieth century. It looks first at the enthusiasm for industrial research to be found across the political spectrum after World War II before examining the election as Fellows of the Royal Society of men who worked in industry at the time of their election. Finally it considers the extent to which industrial R&D was incorporated into the way in which the Royal Society presented itself to the outside world through its Conversazione. Despite the absence of formal structures to translate the results of the work of scientists employed in other institutional contexts to industry, there is much evidence to indicate that there were plenty of other opportunities for the exchange of information to take place.


1969 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 469-493 ◽  
Author(s):  
Howard Wolpe

To the political scientist concerned with the relationship between social and economic modernisation, on the one hand, and political change and integration, on the other, the Ibo experience has long held particular interest. In his pioneering study of Nigerian nationalism, James Coleman observed that Ibos had played a singular role in the post-war political era: ‘Ibos overwhelmingly predominated in both the leadership and the mass membership of the N.C.N.C., the Zikist Movement, and the National Church. Postwar radical and militant nationalism, which emphasized the national unity of Nigeria as a transcendent imperative, was largely, but not exclusively, an Ibo endeavor’1 But radical and militant pan-Nigerian nationalism was only one part of the Ibo political posture. No less noteworthy was the parallel development of a highly cohesive and organisationally sophisticated pan-Ibo movement, the very success of which ultimately undermined the pan- Nigerian aspirations of the Ibo-led N.C.N.C. and, subsequently, was one of several factors operating to impair the national legitimacy of an Ibo-led military régime. It is this paradoxical blending of ‘civic’ and ‘primordial’ sentiments which, perhaps, best defines the modern Ibo political experience2.


2016 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
PEPIJN CORDUWENER

AbstractThis article studies the political ideology of the Italian political movement Fronte dell'Uomo Qualunque in the light of the problems of party democracy in Italy. The movement existed only for a few years in the aftermath of the Second World War, but the impact of its ideology on post-war Italy was large. The article argues that the party's ideology should be studied beyond the anti-fascist–fascist divide and that it provides a window onto the contestation of party politics in republican Italy. It contextualises the movement in the political transition from fascism to republic and highlights key elements of the Front's ideology. The article then proceeds to demonstrate how the movement distinguished itself from the parties of the Italian resistance and advocated a radical break with the way in which the relationship between the Italian state and citizens had been practiced through subsequent regimes. The way in which the movement aimed to highlight the alleged similarities between the fascist and republican political order, and its own claim to democratic legitimacy, constitute a distinct political tradition which resurfaced in the political crisis of the 1990s.


2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 81
Author(s):  
Eriseld Kalemaj

This paper has in its focus the notion of 'Sovereign'. The discussion will be conducted within the "School of Natural Law", which we will focus on two representatives; Thomas Hobbes and Samuel Pufendorf. Through a comparative philosophical analysis, we are going to stop on the basics, the genesis of sovereign power. Political philosophy in the context of finding the source of sovereign power is a problem in the landmark of the unsolvable. ” Scool of Natural Law” referring to the natural condition has the solution to this problem. Compare lines will start from this premise, to know after, how the reason goas towards two different concepts of “Social Contract”. Contract which generates sovreigen person, it defines the nature and content of the power of this person. At this discourse, social contract as the core hub of transition, conversion to the state of nature in a civil context is rolling between the political and juridical character. Discussion, which essentially make us know the nature of the relationship between the Sovereign and members of society, sovereign and state, the member of society between each other. In other words, we will see how the political - legal forms of organization, the way of governing is determined by the nature of initial social contract


1983 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michel Chossudovsky

This article applies Marx's abstract subdivision of social consumption to the prevailing patterns of capital accumulation in the Third World. Built-in scarcities in the availability of necessary consumer goods, alongside patterns of overconsumption and social waste by the upper-income groups, are conducive to conditions of mass poverty, malnutrition, and disease that coexist with small pockets of social privilege and affluence. Malnutrition and ill health must be understood and analyzed in relation to the dual and divided structure of social consumption: necessities of life as opposed to luxury and semi-luxury goods. The relationship between capital accumulation, the distribution of money income, and patterns of malnutrition and ill health is analyzed. It is shown that patterns of malnutrition and ill health are socially differentiated, and the core disease pattern in Third World social formations is discussed in relation to the material and social conditions of life which generate ill health and which underlie particular patterns of peripheral capital accumulation. The study focuses on empirical procedures for analyzing the relationship between levels of money income and levels of calorie and protein intake. An appendix outlines a methodology for estimating undernourishment in urban areas from household budget surveys.


2018 ◽  
pp. 1255-1272
Author(s):  
Emad Abu-Shanab ◽  
Raya Al-Dalou'

The relationship between citizens and governments is the core of e-government. E-participation is one of the political dimensions of e-government which focuses on informing, consulting, involving, collaborating, and empowering citizens to take part of the decision making process. This study adopted a framework for the five levels of e-participation and tried to test such model empirically using 400 responses from Jordanians. The study tried to measure Jordanian perceptions towards e-participation initiatives and practices in Jordan, and to measure the achievements on each level as perceived and reported by subjects. Results indicated that the highest perceived level was e-involving, and the lowest was e-consulting. Also, the CFA results indicated a distorted distribution of items between the major levels. Results of other issues explored are discussed further in this study.


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