British Politics最新文献

In 2021, the UK and devolved governments tried to avoid the school exams fiasco of 2020. Their immediate marker of success was to prevent a similar U-turn on their COVID-19 school exams replacement policies. They still cancelled the traditional exam format, and sought teacher assessments to determine their grades, but this time without using an algorithm to standardise the results. The outcomes produced some concerns about inequity, since the unequal exam results are similar to those experienced in 2020. However, we did not witness the same sense of acute political crisis. We explain these developments by explaining this year's 'windows of opportunity' overseen by four separate governments, in which the definition of the problem, feasibility of each solution, and motive of policymakers to select one, connects strongly to the previous U-turn. A policy solution that had been rejected during the first window became a lifeline during the second and a likely choice during the third. This action solved an immediate crisis despite exacerbating the problem that ministers had previously sought to avoid ('grade inflation'). It produced another year of stark education inequity, but also ensured that inequity went from part of an acute political crisis to its usual status as a chronic low-attention policy problem.

Popular dissatisfaction with representative democracy has encouraged governments and legislatures worldwide to experiment with democratic innovations. However, despite calls for a 'systemic' approach to the study of democratic engagement and participation, empirical knowledge is limited about the diffusion of democratic innovations within civil society, and, in particular, about the connective mechanisms that bring the 'voice' of citizens to the 'ears' of political elites. This article responds to this gap, presenting original empirical research examining the UK House of Commons' e-petitions system. This research maps public engagement with parliamentary e-petitions across a range of expressive spaces, and highlights the facilitative role of non-institutional intermediaries. However, it also underlines the predominant role of institutional actors in structuring public participation, and shows that effective transmission between the informal public and formal political spheres remains contingent on both 'designed-in powers' of institutional coupling and 'developed practices' of public engagement. Through this analysis, the article makes an important contribution to debates concerning democratic innovations, political participation, and institutional design.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1057/s41293-022-00208-9.

Universal Basic Income (UBI) is often presented as desirable in theory, but unsaleable electorally. Policymakers fear intuitive, 'values'-based opposition from socially conservative voters, whom the policy would benefit materially, but who might regard it as 'giving others something for nothing'. We provide evidence from 'red wall' constituencies in Wales and the Midlands and North of England that indicates this presumption of voters is wrong. In Study 1, we find high levels of support for the policy, with different narrative framings more effective for different groups based on their material interests. In Study 2, we used a novel 'adversarial collaboration' method to show that simple narratives can strongly increase support for UBI even among respondents who initially see themselves as fundamentally opposed. The generated narratives stressed positive, material consequences of introducing UBI, rather than conformity with abstract values. This indicates that policymakers should exercise caution over 'values'-based explanations for preferences.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1057/s41293-022-00220-z.

The Scottish National Party (SNP) has emerged as one of the most successful national-regional parties in Europe. Yet the SNP was a fringe group for most of its history, with limited organization and electoral viability. What explains its ascent? Drawing on archival research and interviews with former party officials, this article argues that key developments that positioned the party for its current success took place in the 1970s, decades before its electoral climb. It was during this time the party established its organizational structure, social democratic ideology, and centre-left policy orientation, but without establishing the links to collateral organizations in Scottish society that had been crucial for winning elections. The article argues that it was, paradoxically, the absence of such linkages that served to accelerate the party's rise in the 2000s, as secularization and deindustrialization weakened the socio-economic foundations of the Scottish Conservative Party, with its close ties to the Church of Scotland, and, more significantly, of the Labour Party, which saw its trade union base deteriorate. Under these conditions, the SNP was uniquely positioned to capture unaligned voters, recruit party leaders, and take advantage of the new constitutional environment created by the establishment of the Scottish Parliament in 1999.

This paper examines three aspects of Brexit with regards to the NHS. First, we consider the influence of views regarding one of the most contentious issues in the referendum campaign: Vote Leave's claim that the 'savings' from EU membership could alternatively be used to provide additional funding for the NHS. We find that views about NHS underfunding had a relatively small, but statistically significant, effect on leave voting even after controlling for a range of socio-demographic and economic variables. However, the magnitude of this effect is reduced and becomes insignificant when health-related and cultural controls are added. Second, we examine how NHS workers voted relative to others in employment, and find that a relatively high proportion was actually leave voters. Finally, we analyse whether individuals thought that Brexit would have a positive or negative impact on the NHS, as well as the reason or reasons for their view. We find that supporters of the Conservative party were by far the most likely to think that Brexit would be good for the NHS.

Between 2016 and 2021, in response to calls for a second Scottish independence referendum, two British Prime Ministers-Theresa May and Boris Johnson-adopted a holding position, at the core of which was the "now-is-not-the-time" argumentative scheme. As a particular expression of strategic ambiguity, this delay discourse was intended to fulfil a specific political function: to postpone the second plebiscite sine die. As such, it marked a stark difference to the 2014 Scottish referendum campaign and provided the anti-independence camp with a new rhetorical resource. Having adopted the general orientation of the Discourse-Historical Approach to discourse analysis, and working with a dataset of May's and Johnson's public utterances on the second Scottish referendum, this article investigates how exactly this discourse of referendum delay was constructed in prime ministerial rhetoric. It concludes that some differences notwithstanding, the two PMs managed to create a largely consistent argumentative scheme.