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We summarize long-run trends in partisan polarization of voters’ climate policy-relevant attitudes across 36 countries and multiple decades (1993–2020). We find substantial growth in partisan polarization of these attitudes in the US, other Anglophone countries and much of Western Europe, but not elsewhere. Comparing Western European to Anglophone countries, partisan polarization is more prominent on different climate policy-relevant attitudes, and primarily involves supporters of different party types. Observed partisan polarization patterns are not well explained by changes in either linkage to economic ideology or levels of general societal disagreement on climate policy-relevant questions. Growing partisan polarization does not generally reflect all partisan groups becoming more accepting of climate reform yet diverging because of differing rates of change. Instead, what disagreements there are on these matters have become increasingly tied to party support. Our findings highlight the increasing difficulty of achieving sustained political consensus for effective climate reform across many countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Audit experiments examining the responsiveness of public officials have become an increasingly popular tool used by political scientists. While these studies have brought significant insight into how public officials respond to different types of constituents, particularly those from minority and disadvantaged backgrounds, audit studies have also been controversial due to their frequent use of deception. Scholars have justified the use of deception by arguing that the benefits of audit studies ultimately outweigh the costs of deceptive practices. Do all audit experiments require the use of deception? This article reviews audit study designs differing in their amount of deception. It then discusses the organizational and logistical challenges of a UK study design where all letters were solicited from MPs' actual constituents (so-called confederates) and reflected those constituents' genuine opinions. We call on researchers to avoid deception, unless necessary, and engage in ethical design innovation of their audit experiments, on ethics review boards to raise the level of justification of needed studies involving fake identities and misrepresentation, and on journal editors and reviewers to require researchers to justify in detail which forms of deception were unavoidable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines party sorting, elite cue and ideological polarization accounts of polarization dynamics. The study tests their differing expectations about trends in redistributive ideological polarization and partisan polarization in the British case using repeated cross-section and panel data. The authors reject party sorting accounts, which require ideology to be stable and changes in party support to drive partisan polarization, because they find that ideology trends with elite polarization and that ideological change causes partisan polarization. The authors reject elite cue accounts, which maintain that it is mainly partisans' ideology that follows elite polarization, because they find virtually identical trends for initially ideologically similar non-partisans too. The study thus finds support for an ideological polarization account in which changes in elite polarization are associated with general changes in citizen redistributive ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

R. A. W. Rhodes is to be applauded for restating the case for life history methods within the field of political studies, and many of his arguments will be found unexceptionable by those actively working with such methods. Ironically, in his recent contribution to Political Studies Review Rhodes nevertheless eschews biographical and other forms of complexity in favour of essentialising comparison. A ' British tradition of political biography' is constructed according to inert criteria lacking explicit periodisation and excluding much current work. An overstated contrast is drawn between this tradition and an Australian one defined according to quite different disciplinary and chronological parameters. This article offers alternative reflections drawing on work on labour movement biographies developed through practices of transnational scholarly exchange and the rejection of methodological nationalism. Addressing the examples provided by Rhodes, and the use of life histories in his other recent work, we propose a life history method that goes beyond Governing Men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the concept of the British communism as a political religion. It examines several books in which communism in Great Britain is considered as a religion including "The God That Failed," "The Lost World of Communism," by Raphael Samuel, and "Communism in Great Britain 1920-1939: From the Cradle to the Grave," by Thomas Linehan. It mentions that concept could be perceived as a part of the wider totalitarian approaches towards communism, which emphasized the value of ideological regulation in every aspect of society. Moreover, it relates that opponents of the concept suggest that it was a confused generalization without substance as its framework did not took communism or religion seriously.

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the editor discusses an article on women's activism from 1880-1920 by Karen Hunt, an article on membership in Great Britain's Conservative Party during the Second World War, and an article on ex-members of political parties in Great Britain by Paul Whiteley.

Between 1926 and 1937 at least 160 British communists attended the Communist International's International Lenin School (ILS) in Moscow. The aims of the school were to produce a new stratum of leading communist party cadres, young, proletarian, disciplined, and free of the taint of reformism. Using materials from the Comintem archives in Moscow, this article assesses the degree to which the school was successful in meeting these objectives. It shows that among the difficulties it encountered were the reluctance of the British Communist Party (CPGB) to lose the services of large numbers of its best activists and the uncertain application of the lessons inculcated by the school when students returned to Britain. In the short term, ILS alumni played a crucial role in the leadership of the CPGB at both national and district levels, and some were also drawn into work for the Comintern or Soviet state organs. However, by the late 1930s attendance at the school played a reduced role in appointments to key party positions, and as early as 1943 there was only one former student on the CPGB's executive committee. Set in a comparative context, it is argued that the school's significance in Britain was largely confined to the ‘long’ Third Period of 1927–35 and rapidly diminished thereafter. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]