Politics

Can democracy survive?

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IMG_3928by Tessa Coombes, PhD Researcher at Bristol University

For the final plenary session of the conference Prof. Andrew Gamble, from Cambridge University, took us back to the issue of democracy and its ability to survive and even thrive. We were reminded that for the first time in the modern state system authoritarian regimes are in retreat and representative democracy, in some form or other, is on the rise.

Representative liberal democracies have been described as the least admirable form of governance not least because of their inability to take difficult decisions and their short term thinking. Despite this, in the 20th century, representative democracy came to be seen as an ideal state. But it now seems we are in a time of transition, where there is a real disengagement and disillusionment with mainstream politics, where the choice is narrowing and where people are indifferent to their right to vote. This crisis of representative politics reflects a crisis of trust in our politics and politicians. Once more, despite this process, representative democracy Continue reading →

Summer budget 2015: Lower income families hit by housing policy changes

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Chair of the Policy & Politics Board Alex Marsh reviews the implications of the proposal to cut housing association rents by 1% each year for the next four years, announced as part of the recent government summer budget. This post was originally published on the Policy Press blog.

Alex Marsh
Alex Marsh

George Osborne’s recent “emergency” budget proposed many changes to state support to lower income households in a bid to fulfil the Conservatives’ manifesto pledge to cut £12bn from welfare spending.

One unexpected aspect of this package was the proposal to cut housing association rents by 1% each year for the next four years.

This proposal was justified with reference to social housing rent rises over the last few years. These have pushed up the already substantial housing benefit bill. Households have needed greater state assistance in order to afford the rents being set. Bearing down on rents over the next few years will, it is claimed, both reduce the housing benefit bill and force social landlords to deliver efficiency gains. Continue reading →

DIY Democracy: Festivals, Parks and Fun

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Matthew Flinders
Matthew Flinders

by Matthew Flinders, Co-Editor of Policy & Politics

Wimbledon has been and gone, the barbeques have been dusted off, the sun is shining and all our newly elected MPs have just left Westminster for the summer recess. Domestic politics, to some extent, winds down for July and August but the nation never seems to collapse. Indeed, the summer months offer a quite different focus on, for example, a frenzy of festivals, picnics in the park and generally having fun. But could this more relaxed and self-organising approach to life teach is something about how we ‘do’ politics? Is politics really taking place at festivals and in the parks? Can politics really be fun?

The recent suggestion that the Glastonbury Festival provides a model for policy reform took many academics and commentators by surprise. ‘If you want to know how to achieve those things the politicians promise but never quite deliver — a ‘dynamic economy’, a ‘strong society’, ‘better quality of life’ — stop looking at those worthy think-tank reports about the latest childcare scheme from Denmark or pro-enterprise initiative from Texas’ Steve Hilton, the former Director of Strategy for David Cameron argues in The Spectator (20 June 2015) ‘just head down to Worthy Farm in Somerset… it’s got so much to teach us’. I’ve never personally been ‘a festival person’ (and yes, there is such a type) and the only thing the images of Glastonbury in the past have taught me is never to go there. Continue reading →

A redesign of representative democracy can enhance policy innovation

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Eva Sorensen
Eva Sørensen

by Eva Sørensen, Professor in Public Administration and Democracy, Roskilde University, Denmark

A key task of elected politicians is to develop new innovative policies that address old unsolved as well as emerging policy problems. One of the causes of the current disenchantment of representative democracy is that mainstream forms of representative government favour hierarchy and competition, but provide poor conditions for collaboration between actors with relevant innovation assets. Hierarchy and competition are important innovation drivers because they put innovation on the political agenda and give politicians the incentive to innovate. However, as pointed out in recent strands of governance research and innovation theory, collaboration plays an essential role in creating the innovations. Dialogue between actors with different backgrounds and perspectives on a policy problem is valuable because it can promote creative destructions of existing policy positions, qualify the search for new ideas, inform prototyping and create joint ownership between policy makers and those who implement and diffuse new policies.

I recently published the article ‘Enhancing policy innovation by redesigning representative democracy’ in Policy & Politics. It argues that a redesign of the institutional set up of representative democracy that enhances Continue reading →

Conceptualising European Integration

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Claudia Wiesner
Claudia Wiesner

by Claudia Wiesner,  Acting professor for Comparative Politics and International Development Studies at the University of Marburg in Germany and Associate Professor (dosentti) at Jyväskylä University in Finland.

In my research I currently concentrate on studying political concepts in European integration. During a Marie Curie fellowship at Jyväskylä University´s Finnish centre for Political Thought and Conceptual Change 2012-2014 I developed a research agenda for applying the approaches and practices of conceptual history (or Begriffsgeschichte in German) to the analysis of European integration from a political science perspective.

Political concepts have two dimensions that are particularly important for political science: They first serve as tools for describing, analysing, explaining, and understanding its research objects ‒ concepts serve as analytical and theoretical categories. But, this is a key insight of conceptual history or Begriffsgeschichte, political concepts are not static and immutable, they are themselves contested and controversial and an object of politics. Concepts, second, are factors and indicators of social, institutional and political changes, conflicts or debates. Continue reading →

Why voting cannot be a duty

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Dan Degerman
Dan Degerman

by Dan Degerman, Graduate Research Scholar, Department of Political Science and International Studies, Long Island University,USA

The electoral race has reached its climax. The party war machines are running at full capacity, saturating the airwaves with political vitriol. Yet, even in this state of war, the combatants unanimously agree on one thing. As democratic citizens, each and every one of us has a duty to vote.

Most of us concur, which is unsurprising given the incessant repetition of this mantra. While few would agree with the letter of phrases, such as “Vote or Die,” many seem to agree with their spirit. That is, people who fail to vote are worthy of derision. We saw this exemplified in the public outcry against Russell Brand’s notorious statement that people shouldn’t vote. Such calls may be misguided, but the idea that people are morally obligated to vote is equally misconceived.

At its core, the purpose of voting is to legitimize the government. As Continue reading →

It’s all in the timing: Chairing a Bristol West hustings

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Sarah Childs
Sarah Childs

by Sarah Childs, Professor of Politics and Gender at University of Bristol.
This blog was originally posted on PolicyBristol. Reposting with kind permission.

The last time I’d been here it had been for ‘What the Frock’.  I half expected Bristol’s very own platinum-blonde award winning comedian Jayde Adams to start serenading from behind a velvet curtain. However, on this sultry spring evening at the Square Club in Clifton, Bristol, my job was to chair the Institute for Arts and Ideas’ Bristol West Hustings.

Seven parliamentary candidates were present. Sitting to my left: the incumbent Stephen Williams (Lib Dem); Thangham Debbonaire (Labour), Darren Hall (Greens) and Paul Turner (UKIP). Sitting to my right: Claire Hiscott (Conservative); Dawn Parry (Independent) and Stewart Weston (Left Unity).

The candidates’ backgrounds, ages, marital status, and occupation, are already in the public domain. Their personal manifestos were recently summarised in a Bristol Post review. Collectively, there is much agreement Continue reading →

The Diminishing Returns of Leadership Capital

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Mark Bennister
Mark Bennister

How can we measure leadership? What makes a leader succeed or fail? Dr Mark Bennister at Canterbury Christ Church University has been gathering scholars together to investigate the idea of ‘leadership capital’ and offer a way to understand why some leaders ‘spend’ their ‘capital’ successfully and others squander or waste it. Dr Bennister is co-convenor of the PSA Political Leadership Specialist Group and is leading a section on political leadership at the 2015 ECPR general Conference in Montreal in August.

2014 was the year of ‘Capital’ thanks to Thomas Piketty. Piketty’s weighty tome breathed new life into economic analysis of economic inequality.  Capital, for Piketty is a stock – its wealth comes from what has been accumulated in all prior years combined. So what happens if we take a concept of accumulated capital and apply it to political leadership? This presents us with alternative method of understanding why political leaders succeed or fail, how they remain in office, and how they win elections.

If we take the definitions of capital by Piketty and others and apply them to leadership we can think of political capital as a stock of ‘credit’ accumulated Continue reading →

Mayors at a gallop: the national influence of local leaders

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Tom Gash
Tom Gash

by Tom Gash, Institute for Government, UK

This was originally posted at http://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/10708/mayors-at-a-gallop-the-national-influence-of-local-leaders/.

Elected in 2011 and 2012 respectively, George Ferguson (Bristol) and Sir Peter Soulsby (Leicester) have been working hard to show what mayors can do for our cities. At a recent event hosted at the Institute for Government, Tom Gash heard them raise two questions that any government after May 2015 will have to answer. Should we have more mayors? And should they have more powers?

Elected mayors were first established in England following the election of the Mayor of London in 2000. Later that year the Local Government Act paved the way for votes to set up mayors in a number of other local authorities. Eleven more mayors had been introduced by 2002.

The Coalition gave the model another push in  Continue reading →

Time for a radical new paradigm to help us address climate change

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Tessa Coombes
Tessa Coombes

by Tessa Coombes

Lord Anthony Giddens presented the Policy and Politics Annual Lecture, in Bristol, on Tuesday 17th March. The theme of the lecture was to consider what recent progress has been made on climate change and what stops us doing more. Lord Giddens concluded his lecture with a proposal for the need for a new paradigm to provide the change needed to generate the radical solutions that are now necessary.

Lord Anthony Giddens first wrote “The Politics of Climate Change” in 2007/08, a time of optimism and hope, when change to reduce carbon emissions seemed top of the agenda both nationally and globally. It was a time of opportunity, seized by politicians like Al Gore who published his book and produced the film “An Inconvenient Truth” to great acclaim. It was also the time of the biggest United Nations meeting on climate change in Copenhagen where over 100 nations met to discuss measures to address the problems of climate change and reducing carbon emissions.

Lord Giddens moved us through this period of optimism to one of dashed hopes and increasing fears following the lack of agreement in Copenhagen. He talked about the difficulties of measuring climate change and the range of indicators needed to assess impacts. He argued that despite the advancements in science and knowledge, there are still many sceptics who refuse to acknowledge the very real changes we are experiencing. Indeed, one of the problems with climate change, he explained, lies in its irreversible nature, the fact that once greenhouse gases are in Continue reading →