British Journal of Politics & International Relations最新文献

The article seeks to make a contribution in the following areas:

• Departments that submitted a large proportion of books published with a top university press tended to do much better in the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), especially in respect of their 4* rating.
• Departments that submitted large numbers of top-10 journal articles as a proportion of their outputs tended to get higher 4* ratings than departments that submitted only a few.
• Departments that had a member of staff on the RAE sub-panel saw their 4* rating jump considerably, all other things being equal, suggesting inadequate communication by the sub-panel of its working methods and criteria.
• The RAE sub-panel's judgements about research quality broadly reflected the judgements of the profession.

This article analyses the results of the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). It demonstrates that the reputations of political science journals and scholarly publishers can explain the performance of institutions submitted to the RAE‘s Politics and International Studies sub-panel, and that there were also clear relationships between types of output and research quality. Outputs in top journals and with top presses were strongly associated with 4* quality and research excellence. Moreover, press and journal reputations appeared to have a greater impact than the type of publication. These findings should encourage policy makers to consider more cost-effective and efficient ways of evaluating research.

This article:

• Contributes to the development of academic research on the internal dynamics of the Conservative Party under the leadership of David Cameron.
• Contributes to the development of academic research on the processes of ministerial selection within British Government.
• Contributes to the development of academic research on cohort effects within parties, and the analysis of comparisons and differences between different parliamentary cohorts.
• Contributes to the development of academic research on the constraints upon Prime Ministerial power when in coalition.

This article identifies the ideological composition of the parliamentary Conservative party (PCP) in order to determine the location and numeric strength of the critics of Cameron. By constructing a data set of attitudes across two ideological divides—the social, sexual and morality divide and the European divide—the article identifies the following. First, despite Cameron's social liberal emphasis both the PCP and his ministerial team is predominantly Thatcherite—i.e. socially conservative. Second, despite numerically having a Eurosceptic PCP and ministerial team, with Europhilia now an inconsequential rump, Cameron faces a minority ‘hard’ Eurosceptic faction of rebels who oppose his ‘soft’ Euroscepticism. Third, the influx of new parliamentarians elected in 2010 may increase social liberal strength, but they are overwhelmingly Eurosceptic, with a significant tranche of hard Eurosceptics amongst them. Finally, through a process of ideological mapping of these two ideological divides the research identifies a core of 50 socially conservative and hard Eurosceptics who are the critics of Cameron.

The article seeks to make a contribution in the following areas:

• Demonstrate that the ‘Big Society’ agenda, while based on a dichotomy with ‘Big Government’, in fact produces a diffusion of bigger, better government throughout British society.
• Illustrate that despite claims of the Big Society being a matter of empowerment, its diverse tactics and techniques of what Foucault calls ‘governmentality’, or the ‘conduct of conduct’, shows the opposite: management and control.
• Outline the logic of the Big Society and how it has played out in two important policies of the Coalition Government: National Citizen Service and Community Resilience.
• Suggest that while the ‘Big Society’ targets widespread behavioural change, the ultimate aim is to produce a population of efficient, responsible, productive and self-governing individuals and communities.

Cameron's flagship policy of the ‘Big Society’ rests on a society/government dichotomy, diagnosing a ‘broken society’ caused by ‘big government’ having assumed the role communities once played. The remedy is greater social responsibility and the ‘Big Society’. This article argues that the dichotomy is deceptive. We aim to show that the Big Society is big government, as it employs techniques for managing the conduct of individuals and communities such that the mentality of government, far from being removed or reduced, is bettered and made more efficient. To illustrate this, we explore two major initiatives: the National Citizen Service and the Community Resilience programme. These projects demonstrate how practices of informing and guiding the conduct of individuals both produce agents and normalise certain values, resulting in the population being better known and controlled. Thus, far from lessening government and empowering people, the Big Society extends governmentality throughout the social body.

• provides one of the first assessments of how British multi-national and English political parties have responded to existing and emergent identity tensions in England whilst continuing to defend the concept of the post-devolution British union-state.
• extends debates about multi-level party political systems in multi-national states which have typically focused on Scotland, Wales and, to a lesser extent, Northern Ireland.
• considers the potential that debates about English national identity could morph into a party politics of Englishness.
• assesses the potential for nascent English nationalism to encourage divergent party political responses to questions of English governance, citizenship and nation identity.

This article assesses how the main British multi-national parties, whilst retaining an attachment of one form or another to the concept of the Union-state, have responded to existing and emergent identity tensions. Through examination of Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, with brief discussion of the BNP, UKIP and the English Democrats, it will consider the impact of devolution and the threat of separatist nationalism on party approaches and policy choices concerning English identity construction and governance. It will also explore the extent to which devolution has compromised the ability of UK politicians to ‘speak of Britain’ (they rarely use the term UK) and the four composite nations. By comparing and contrasting the narratives articulated by parties at different levels of governance it will ask whether a nascent ‘party politics of Englishness’ has emerged which can accommodate these challenges.