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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 ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Until recently, Britain seemed impervious to the trend in many West European countries of growing electoral support for extreme right parties. However, the British National Party (BNP) has emerged as an increasingly viable force in local elections in many parts of England in the past few years, even winning seats on a few local councils. This paper investigates the contextual determinants of support for the BNP in the 2002 and 2003 local elections in England. Aggregate electoral data at the ward level for each district council that held elections in these years are matched to Census statistics and other contextual data. These data are used to estimate multivariate models for two dependent variables: whether or not the BNP contested an election and the BNP's percentage of the white vote in a ward. The findings of this paper suggest that support for the BNP is greatest in districts with large populations of ethnic minorities, especially Pakistanis and Bangladeshis. However, within these districts, it is not necessarily those whites who live in the most ethnically diverse wards who are most supportive of the extreme right. The socio-economic composition of a ward appears to be more important for the BNP's electoral prospects than its ethnic composition. It is in the most economically deprived urban areas that the BNP seems to have its strongest foothold. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of these findings for the future electoral viability of the extreme right in England. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since September 2001, there has been a renewed interest in imperialism as a perhaps necessary force for a functioning and secure global economy. In particular, one conservative revisionist, and recent promoter of American imperialism, argues that the British Empire was a necessary force for the humane development of modernity. Ferguson suggests that especially after the abolition of the slave trade in the first half of the nineteenth century, imperial democracy exported individual liberty, the rule of law, and free trade, if not actual democracy, worldwide (2003). While relative benignity may account for the duration of British rule in India, in many places in the world British rule was neither stable nor did it guarantee equality before the law for all of its subjects, including in the cases of Ireland, South Africa, and Palestine. In each of these cases of early, middle, and late imperialism, Britain was unable to conciliate rival peoples to its rule and to provide impartial order, instead bequeathing the modern world with three of its most enduring and best known ethno-national conflicts. The most obvious commonality between these cases is that they were all sites of colonial settlement. But simply calling these countries settler societies, does not explain why Britain was unable to conciliate native peoples and impose social order in each case. This paper seeks trace the sources of settler power both in metropolitan imperial politics and on the local colonial ground, to the interests and organization of the settler blocs on the one hand, and to the inattention and multiple priorities of the central imperial state on the other. Departing from Ian Lustick's insight that settlers represent an entrenched single-issue group in metropolitan politics (1985), this paper goes to show that sources of settler leverage over imperial policy extended to European settlers (Afrikaners and Jews) who did not directly influence metropolitan politics through veto power. The paper argues instead following the state-in-society tradition (Migdal, Kohli, & Shue 1994) that the local state apparatus was subject to capture by settler interests. The limits of metropolitan reach and attention to imperial territories allowed settler interests to wrest control of the local state apparatus and thereby intensify the alienation of native peoples in each case. At a moment of imperialism reborn, the dangers of America becoming captive to its erstwhile allies interests may already be in motion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A conference paper on the review process of the Institutional Review Board (IRB) for human subject research in the social sciences is presented at the Western Political Science Association annual conferences on March 24, 2012. It discusses the role of social science research in Great Britain. It addresses the need of qualitative research, for social science research.

Although the British Labour Party was influenced by decades of Continental radicalisms and the established Trades Union movement, two of the groups that most contributed to its swift rise--from a gleam in the eye of the intelligentsia in 1889 to major Parliamentary representation in 1906--were distinctively (one might say eccentrically) British. The Fabian Society, a bureaucratic pressure group dominated by Sidney and Beatrice Webb and George Bernard Shaw, was influenced by the utilitarians and the late Mill, while William Morris's aesthetic and radical Socialist League descended roughly from Carlyle and Ruskin. In this paper, I'll focus on the relation between three literary authors associated with the Fabians: William Morris, whose 1890 anarcho-socialist utopia News from Nowhere posited itself against Fabian palliatives; George Bernard Shaw, who attacked Morris's romantic politics in the immensely influential 1889 Fabian Essays in Socialism; and H.G. Wells, who in turn attacked the Fabians in his 1911 novel The New Machiavelli. [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]

Islamic terrorism may only be abated through political reconciliation and a "proper" amount of political representation. This research paper focuses on whether and to what extent Muslim citizens serve on various federal legislative bodies throughout the western world. Is it fair to say, for example, that Muslim communities are well assimilated in the U.S. when there is only one Congressman currently serving out of 435 who holds that particular faith? While, conversely, there are four Muslim members of the British House of Commons? In this multicase comparative analysis, I have counted all Muslim politicians serving at the federal legislative level in 2007, in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Germany, and Israel. My initial findings point to a nation's acculturation/immigration policies, as well as its electoral procedures, as being major factors in determining the proportion of Muslim federal legislators. Are Muslims in these countries actively involved in nonviolent political exploration as advocated by theorist Hannah Arendt, or is the anti-democratic impulse currently present in many Islamic countries too culturally imbedded, as hinted by Seymour M. Lipset? Political scientists need to answer questions like these and conduct this type of research if we ever hope to solve religious conflict through the channel of representative democracy, at home and abroad. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

European legal institutions have recognized legal protections for minority groups across Europe. These legal protections and other transnational legal norms increasingly define and shape domestic legal systems. Equally important to this dynamic, is the growing number and strength of civil society organizations that utilize international courts and law to bring domestic policy reforms. This process of internalization, by which international law becomes integrated, enforceable and meaningful within the domestic legal order, is increasingly determined by a dynamic interaction between international courts and civil society organizations. While many scholars have focused on the growing legalization of world politics, few have focused on the domestic effects of this process. Further, the role of civil society in the domestic internalization of international law remains virtually ignored. In this paper, I examine the conditions under which international law becomes institutionalized in domestic politics. In particular, if, how and why domestic politics and civil society shape the degree to which international law becomes integrated, enforceable and meaningful within domestic legal and political systems. To carry out this analysis, I explore the linkages between civil society, transnational law and its integration into domestic politics, focusing on anti-discrimination law of the European Union and the Council of Europe. I examine the process of internalization in the context of Roma housing rights in France and the UK. The three conditions that I explore are institutional fit, activism of state actors and civil society. I argue that the degree to which European law becomes internal to domestic law is driven by European-minded social actors who mobilize European legal norms and lead state actors to provide "surveillance" over the application of European law. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How should we seek to understand the political actions of individuals? Is political behavior best understood within the scope of a particular nation or should we attempt to explain political behavior as a set of social activities that might be generalized across nations? While students of American political behavior may approach their subject as if it applied principally in the United States, in this paper I argue that there is a good deal of value to thinking about political behavior in an explicitly comparative manner. To support this argument, I draw on research seeking to understanding the working of social context as an influence on individual political behavior. Specifically, I use data from the United States and Britain to examine the role of social interaction and individual cognition as explanations for how the class context of a community may influence individual vote choice. This example illustrates the value of using comparative data to seek more general explanations of political behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares three instances of racial/ethnic violence from around the world in the aftermath of World War I. Wartime expansion created new opportunities for subordinate racial/ethnic groups, but the post-war contraction increased tensions as dominant groups sought to reassert control local labor markets. As semi-skilled workers from White or Protestant groups used violence to reassert their supremacy they used the mantles of British, Afrikaner, and American nationalism in Belfast, South Africa, and Chicago. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper wants to explore the relationship between international debt and international relations. This research argues that international debt patterns, connected with trade, have an influence not only on economic relations, but on political ones as well. Reversely, political relations have an influence on how countries can use the instrument of debt for their own economic and political goals. The paper utilizes game theory models to explain debt/trade political relationship in two cases: the 1st Opium War between the UK and China, and the current economic relationship between China and the USA. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study that addresses existence of missing manuscripts on British liberalism literature and highlights theoretical attempts to navigate contradiction between liberal self-image of capitalism in Great Britain and the illiberal processes in emergence of capitalist relations in societies. It examines three momentous historical conjunctures in the British Empire history including seventeenth-century America, eighteenth-century India, and nineteenth century Australia.

The article evaluates the administration of the U.S. rail system in the 19th century by the federal government. It compares the antebellum U.S. railroads with 19th century rail systems in Great Britain and France. It also analyzes the limitations in early American rail development system which included dividing the policy responsibility for infrastructure between local governments and private companies.

Previous studies of the legislative behavior of British Members of Parliament (MPs) during free votes have failed to produce consistent findings regarding the effects of gender on free voting behavior. Using an original dataset of twenty-seven free votes taken in the 2005 British House of Commons on the topics of House of Lords reform, the disclosure of MP candidate addresses, MP allowances, smoking, abortion, fertility treatment, and the use of sibling stem cells, we use logistic regression and predicted probabilities to account for the role of gender in free vote choice. After controlling for partisan, personal and constituency factors, we find that gender is a significant predictor of voting behavior for issues involving women's rights and, to some extent, the needs of children and families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author reflects on devolution in Great Britain and how it has been regarded as a victory for representation of women in regions such as Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. She analyzes the competencies of the devolved legislature of the three regions. She presents insights on original data set that tracks membership and activity in the National Executive Committees of political parties in the regions. She believes that even though women have made an increase in descriptive representation in the regions, their access to power has been limited.

The article discusses the impact of mass media in Great Britain and the U.S. to the otherization of welfare. The author defined otherization of others as a theory that states that the negative attitudes portrayed by the media can greatly influence the view of outsiders in supporting social assistance. She concludes after a content analysis of welfare article that the otherization of welfare has increased in the past years in the U.S. and that some of the groups linked to welfare do not match the actual groups who collect the most welfare.

The article examines examples of both sub-national devolution and local democracy referendums in Great Britain. It cites the lessons that can be learned from these examples about the theory and practice of direct democracy in the country. It describes the types of referendums that have become more common place on the sub-national level of government. The scope for local referendums, the levels of turnout, the salience of an issue, and the role of media are also discussed.

The South African War was a curious event in the history of the British Emprie. Though British power had forged several complicated relationships with its other colonies and territories relying on rule via consensus and local intermediaries, it engaged in a costly exercise of coercive power when it declared war on Dutch settlers in the interior of the contintent. Why did the British Empire pursue its interests in the colony in this manner and what are the lessons from the unfortanate experience there? More improtantly, how might these lesson be applied to the status of American power in the present day? ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the issue regarding the question if G. Esping-Anderson's liberal regime is adequate in terms of health care in the U.S., Great Britain, and in Canada. This liberal regime cluster is inaccurate when applied to the delivery and coverage of health care. Both Canada and Great Britain provide its citizens with a highly decommodified Public Health Program. While in the U.S., citizens are its commodities.

This paper examines correct voting as a criteria for comparing democratic performance across electoral systems. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The subject of empire was a prominent theme in British writing on the theory of international politics during the inter-war years, from Alfred Zimmern's The Third British Empire (1926) to Lionel Curtis' Civitas Dei (1938). In these works and many others, the British Empire and Commonwealth was conceived as a model for a new diplomacy, as a template for a new world order. Even as late as 1943 the veteran General Smuts spoke to the Empire Parliamentary Association of the Commonwealth as a unique example of how sovereign states might transcend the pressure of international anarchy and co-operate in peace, a mode of association he thought should be extended to Western Europe. In the post-war years, this enthusiasm for the imperial project diminished with marked speed. By the 1960s, British 'indifference' to Empire and Commonwealth was the subject of much comment; indeed, some, like Lord Franks, went so far as to argue that decolonisation and the troubles of the Commonwealth project were as much the result of 'weariness of the flesh, with no adventure, no inspiration in it, nothing positive, only an endless negative' as any other external pressure ('The Great Retreat is Nearly Over', Sunday Times, 26 April 1964, quoted in W. M. Medlicott's British Foreign Policy since Versailles, 1919-1963, p. 345). The failure of will, rather than the 'wind of change', was to blame. This paper, a contribution to the intellectual history of International Relations, re-examines this politics of 'indifference' to Empire and its wider effect upon British writing on international politics from the end of the Second World War to the mid-1970s. It explores the work of a range of British thinkers, from Martin Wight to Hugh Seton-Watson and F. S. Northedge, who sought to re-shape the study of international relations in the aftermath of the failure of inter-war internationalism and the war. It contends that the demise of the tradition of liberal imperialism, exemplified by the work of Margery Perham, and its legacies, notably a lingering antipathy to nationalism - 'a political concept without a logical basis', as C. E. Carrington called it in his inaugural lecture as Abe Bailey Professor of British Commonwealth Relations in 1955 - and to the principles of national self-determination and state-sovereignty. These legacies, it is argued, helped to inoculate British international theorists to the statist power-politics of 'realism'. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers a range of policies championed by New Labour which have made an impact on the lives of lesbian and gay citizens. It bares witness to the contested terrain of gender, sexuality and hetero-normativity and the impact of policies based upon stereotype and binary understandings of gender and sexual orientation. The level of cultural and political hostility toward lesbians and gay men prior to the election of New Labour and the overwhelming changes in policy since 1997 begs the question 'Why is New Labour 'lesbian and gay friendly'?' The account below considers each policy in turn exploring the larger context of political culture, economic focus that underpinned the whirlwind 'triumph' of social justice. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the politics of migration and security in Britain since 9/11. It first argues that Britain has become more open to immigration over the last decade. In particular, two expansionist logics which are found across many liberal democratic states -- clientelism in the labour migration policy field and judicial activism with regard to asylum and migrants rights -- have become more prevalent in Britain. However, at the same time, framings of migration as a security threat by parts of the political elite have been used to legitimise more restrictive politics. Discursive linkages between migration and terrorism have undermined some of the liberal ideas and institutions that constrain the executive's ability to pursue restrictionist policies. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study asks under what domestic conditions environmental groups in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany will overcome the collective action, resource, and ideological impediments to cooperative activity. A political opportunity approach is employed which looks at the relationship between elite alliances and domestic cleavages and the choice to engage in domestic as well as transnational cooperation. Using data gathered through content analysis over a nearly twenty-five year period, I find that changes in domestic opportunities influence the choice of environmental groups to engage in cooperative activities. An open POS is found to depress both domestic and transnational cooperation; while a closed POS increases cooperative activities. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electoral competition has long been held as a required and essential component of a smoothly functioning democracy. This common wisdom suggests that representative responsiveness is likely to decrease as the level of general election competitiveness falls off. The closer the election the more uncertain the incumbent member of the legislature is about her ability to get reelected, which motivates her to work harder to win votes (i.e. campaign harder, spend more time in the district, secure more pork projects, modify voting behavior in the legislature, etc.). In turn these activities should increase voter satisfaction and efficacy. This final linkage is what we take up here. Namely, do voters in districts that have competitive elections demonstrate higher levels of efficacy and higher levels of satisfaction with the representative and with the legislature itself? Using survey data from the most recent elections in three western democracies with single member district systems (UK, Canada, and the U.S.) we find no such connection. Rather, the winner/loser dichotomy is primal. Electoral competitiveness has no measurable effect on voters (be they winners or losers). This finding has important implications for democratic theory and for redistricting. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Variations in the degree of public support for war in Iraq can be traced to differences in the way news media in different countries represented the crisis to their publics. We present related studies of news coverage of the Iraq war in news magazines of five nations over a one-year period leading up to and including the war and its aftermath. We draw on a sample of stories about Iraq in major news magazines from France, Canada, the US, the UK, and Germany. We find support for the hypothesis that international (non-American) media framed the issues of war and foreign policy objectives by advocating a less aggressive, more internationalist, and more diplomatic foreign policy approach than US media, and that these distinctions reflect the widening gap between the United States and Europe on issues of geopolitics and global cooperation. Such differences not only reflect critically important distinctions in national policy positions towards Iraq, they also have likely contributed to differences in public perceptions of the need for war at all. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]