British Journal of Politics & International Relations最新文献

This article:

• Covers new empirical terrain in the study of depoliticisation, with an in-depth case study of health technology regulation;
• Analyses depoliticisation from a novel analytical perspective, examining how depoliticised institutions are resilient to external pressure for politicisation;
• Posits a distinctive framework for analysing resilience, drawing on cognate literatures on policy networks and agencification;
• Raises interesting and distinctive questions about the nature of depoliticisation in advanced liberal democracies, arguing it is more contested than commonly acknowledged.

Depoliticisation as a concept offers distinctive insights into how governments attempt to relieve political pressures in liberal democracies. Analysis has examined the effects of depoliticisation tactics on the public, but not how those tactics are sustained during moments of political tension. Drawing on policy networks and agencification literatures, this article examines how these tactics are resilient against pressure for politicisation. Using an in-depth case study of the controversial appraisal of cancer drug Herceptin in 2005/6 by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), the article examines how ‘resilient’ NICE was to external politicisation. It is argued that NICE was resilient because it was effectively ‘insulated’ by formal procedures and informal norms of deference to scientific expertise. This mechanism is termed ‘institutional double glazing’. The conclusion suggests developments to the conceptual and methodological framework of depoliticisation, and highlights theoretical insights into the nature of ‘anti-politics’ in contemporary democracies.

This article:

• Provides a necessary critical reflection on the changes to the UK family migration visa 2012;
• Responds to the recent call made by Nick Vaughan-Williams and Victoria M. Basham in BJPIR for Critical Border Studies to better appreciate the interlocking elements of race, gender, class in border practices. It does this by also paying attention to sex;
• Challenges the presentism in the recent literature on border practices/immigration by situating the family migration visa in a broader history;
• Makes a strong contribution to the cross-over debates which are taking place in International Relations and governmentality literature regarding the postcolonial. It offers a Foucauldian analysis of government which takes colonial and postcolonial relations seriously.

This article explores the changes to the family migration visa (2012) through a history of postcolonial government. It explores how the visa shares a familiar function to previous forms of rule which targeted the household and family as a site of regulation. Under Empire, ‘marriage restrictions’ were used to manage the ‘intimate’ connections between coloniser and colonised. Over the course of the 20th century UK border regimes also targeted the intimate and the familial to regulate racial proximity. In tracing this history, I argue that the family migration visa works as a similar technique. The visa manages the intimate space of the couple, family and household through an ideal domesticity; in line with certain raced, gendered and class norms. It highlights how government techniques make claims over whom can live with, raise a family with, be intimate with whom in Britain.

This article

• Contributes to theoretical debates on minority political participation in the UK, with specific reference to inter-generational variations within the South Asian Muslim community;
• Contributes to the scholarly literature on the impact and effectiveness of new political parties within the British political system, through a case study of the Respect Party;
• Adds to empirical primary data on strategies adopted by political parties in courting specific sections of the ethnic minority vote in the UK;
• Offers an empirically-led demonstration of the changes taking place within the political sphere of South Asian Muslim diasporas in Britain.

In March 2012, the Respect Party won an unexpected by-election in the British city of Bradford, previously regarded as a safe Labour seat. This article examines the party's campaign strategy and in particular how it courted South Asian Muslim voters. A dominant feature of South Asian Muslim politics in the UK has been community bloc voting along lines of kinship (biraderi). The use of kinship networks for political gain effectively disenfranchised many young people and women. We demonstrate how Respect used their experience of campaigning in constituencies with significant numbers of South Asian Muslim voters to achieve an unlikely victory in Bradford. A key strategy was to mobilise otherwise politically marginalised sections of the South Asian Muslim community by offering an alternative to the culture of patronage in Bradford whilst at the same time utilising certain community structures in order to gain their own bloc votes.

This article

• Contributes to the debate on policy change and economic ideas after the crisis, finding ideas and material interests to be closely aligned and introducing the notion of ‘ideational adverse selection’.
• Establishes that pre-crisis financial governance failed to provide financial stability yet provided benefits to precisely those whose advocacy underpinned its emergence.
• Argues that despite the adoption of a ‘macroprudential approach’, the post-crisis reform of financial governance promulgated by the Basel Commitee and IOSCO does not (yet) admit of a ‘paradigm shift’.
• Concludes that if ideational change and a shift in policy approach is to take place, the nature of the policy community as ‘input’ must also change.

This article focuses on two cases of transnational financial governance that confirm that ideas and material interests are closely aligned in the construction of regulatory institutions at the international level: the Basel-II/III international capital adequacy standards and the IOSCO-based regulatory processes that underpin cross-border securities markets. The article first establishes that the pre-crisis system of financial regulation and supervision left public authorities dependent on private sector expertise and information provision such that policy idea-sets became increasingly aligned with private sector preferences. Secondly, this market-based system of financial governance provided benefits to precisely those whose advocacy underpinned its emergence while facilitating neither financial stability nor resolving the weaknesses of national-level governance in a context of cross-border integration. Lastly, it remains unclear if either pre-crisis alternatives or the lessons of the crisis itself have been applied properly to the reforms. The reform debate continues to pursue an essentially market-based approach to the problem of financial governance at the national, regional and global levels. Policy failure endogenous to a pre-crisis regulatory coalition has so far failed to disturb the tenacity of material interests and inertia of institutional path dependency.

This article

• Provides an exploration of why security politics might change the behaviour of parliaments or legislatures, bringing together theory from diverse fields;
• Illustrates a series of potential ways of measuring legislative behaviour;
• Is a systematic quantitative test for the existence of security politics in a field which relies almost exclusively on qualitative methodology;
• Contributes to the current debate in the field of critical security studies over the definition of the politics of security.

This article takes up the recent challenge to critical security studies posed by Browning and McDonald to define the effects of ‘the politics of security’. It focuses in particular on the behaviour of legislatures during the passage of legislation relating to crime and security. Effective scrutiny of this type of policy is crucial, but legislatures are often accused of failing to provide it. However, empirical work in the area remains limited: we know little about exactly how legislatures change their behaviour at such critical junctures. This article seeks to fill this gap. It offers firstly an exploration of diverse strands of work on the notion of ‘security politics’. Secondly, it offers an empirical test based on a dataset covering UK legislation from the period 2007–2012. The results suggest the appearance of security legislation causes parliament to heighten scrutiny, raising questions about the real nature of ‘security politics’.

This article

• Explains how a historical account may be usefully combined with an analysis of the constitutive representation of gender in order to provide insights into the substantive representation of women;
• Provides an empirical account of how MPs favouring restrictions on legal abortion have historically constructed women as victims of unethical doctors in order to undermine the foundations of the 1967 Abortion Act;
• Helps explain recent attempts to strip abortion providers of the ability to provide counselling;
• Demonstrates that when set against the medicalised regulatory regime established by the 1967 Act, the contributions of pro-choice MPs may be criticised as problematic attempts to reconcile a feminist abortion politics with the status quo.

In 2011, Parliament debated an amendment to the government's Health and Social Care Bill which would have mandated that abortion counselling be provided by independent organisations. While many attacked the amendment as anti-feminist, its principal sponsor, Nadine Dorries, claimed to be acting on behalf of women. This article argues that a historical approach may be fruitfully utilised in order to make sense of such conflicting ‘feminist’ claims. Through analysis of parliamentary debates, it demonstrates that when historical and discursive context is taken into account, the Dorries amendment can be viewed as part of a broader attack on the foundations of the 1967 Abortion Act. This historical approach also allows the contributions of pro-choice women representatives to be criticised as problematic attempts to reconcile a feminist abortion politics with the status quo.

This article

• Contributes to the literature on ideational change by bringing to the surface an incremental ideational dynamic after major crises that differs from the well-known punctuated dynamic;
• Explains the incremental dynamic of ideational change after a major crisis based on the flexibility of the institutional environment in which actors operate. Specifically, rather than preventing change until an explosion of radical change occurs, institutional frictions may also allow for successive adjustments over time;
• Illustrates the theoretical arguments by examining the changes that have taken place in the IMF's thinking on capital controls since the start of the 2008 crisis;
• Traces one of the most debated developments in the post-crisis international political economy, namely the rehabilitation of capital controls.

Although much scholarly attention has been devoted to examining the punctuated dynamics of ideational change, other dynamics exist. Ideational change may well occur incrementally in ordinary times or, as this study shows, can also materialise after a major shock, such as a financial and economic crisis. By examining the IMF's new approach to capital controls in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, the article demonstrates that the non-punctuated nature of ideational change can be explained in light of the enabling (and not solely constraining) features of the institutional context in which actors operate. Rather than preventing change until an explosion of radical change occurs, institutional frictions may also allow for successive adjustments over time. They may in fact allow for a gradual release of pressure, thereby preventing the impending explosion.

This article

• Contributes to theoretical debates about the significance of group identity and political representation;
• Contributes to academic research into the shift from formal and hierarchical to more informal and network-based styles of governance;
• Contributes to research on the integration of Muslims in Britain by elucidating the emergence and diversification of Muslim representative organisations in Britain since 1970;
• Demonstrates the multifaceted and dynamic nature of Muslim representative claims-making in contemporary UK governance by identifying and analysing a range of modes of Muslim representation.

Since the turn of the century Britain has seen a proliferation of Muslim civil society organisations and an increase in the number of points of contact between Muslim spokespersons and government. Yet, this increased participation in UK governance has been a source of fierce controversies centring on the role of conservative male leaderships and the influence of radical Islamic groups. Drawing on interviews with 42 national elites who have engaged in UK Muslim–government relations in the past decade, this article charts the emergence of national-level Muslim representation and assesses its relationship to democratic participation and accountability. Building on the work of Michael Saward, we argue that unelected civil society representatives can act as an important supplement to elected representatives. We show how four modes of Muslim representation have emerged in the last decade—‘delegation’, ‘authority’, ‘expertise’ and ‘standing'—creating dynamic competition among representative claims.

• Precedents set in debates over Iraq, Libya and Syria established a new parliamentary prerogative, that MPs must vote before military action can legitimately be launched.
• Tony Blair conceded the Iraq vote to shore up Labour back-bench support, because he was convinced he would win, and because he was unwilling to change course regardless.
• David Cameron allowed a vote on Libya because he believed parliament should have a say, because UN support meant he was certain to win, and to gain plaudits for not being Blair.
• Cameron then had to allow a vote on Syria despite its greater political sensitivity. He mishandled the vote, and lost, and felt constrained to pull out of mooted military action.
• Collectively these three precedents comprise a new constitutional convention, which will constrain the executive in future whether the law is formally changed or not.

Parliament now decides when Britain goes to war. The vote against military intervention in Syria on 29 August 2013 upheld a new parliamentary prerogative that gradually developed through debates over earlier actions in Iraq and Libya. While the academic community and much of the British political elite continue to focus on the free rein granted to prime ministers by the historic royal prerogative, this article argues it is critically constrained by its parliamentary counterpart. It traces the way political conditions, individual policymaker preferences, and the conventional nature of the unwritten British constitution allowed parliament to insert itself into the policymaking process without the consent of successive governments. It concludes that MPs will in future expect the right to vote on proposals to deploy the armed forces overseas, and that the legitimacy of military action will depend on the government winning such a vote.