British Party Research Articles

In this issue: Proteomics - Clinical Applications 3/2009.

In this issue of Proteomics - Clinical Applications you will find the following highlighted articles: http://doi.wiley.com/10.1002/prca.200800050Labour isn't just a British party If you ask a woman who's had labor induced at the end of a normal pregnancy about the experience, she will probably flinch at the memory, which is not to say that spontaneous labor is a picnic. MacIntyre et al. report here on the proteomic analysis of the differences between spontaneous (SL) and induced (IL) labor in the myometrium. Applying 2-D DIGE to the question, they found 23 significant differences between SL and NL (non-laboring) myometria, and 59 differences between IL and NL samples. Comparison of SL to IL revealed 69 differences. Only two proteins showed the same changes for SL and IL vs, NL, suggesting that there might be more than one route to the same end. MacIntyre, D. A. et al., Proteomics Clin. Appl. 2009, 3, 288-298. Fresh mud for prostate info, not for spa facial Prostate cancer is one of the more challenging cancers to treat. It is not susceptible to any conventional chemotherapeutics, one of the most common approaches is implantation of radioactive "seeds" in the tumor. One chemotherapeutic agent that shows some promise when administered in combination with other therapies is mitoxantrone (MTXT). Symes et al. looked at proteomic changes in primary prostate cancer biopsy cultures with or without 100 nM MTXT, using MudPIT technology. Approximately 110 of 1500 proteins changed levels significantly. Among the up-regulated proteins were a number of membrane proteins - fatty acid synthase, caveolin-1 et al. - interesting targets for the combination therapy. Symes, J. et al., Proteomics Clin. Appl. 2009, 3, 347-358. Alien morph virus invasion We'll leave the royalty rights issue to the lawyers but if I were a wagering man, I'd put my money on the virus. We're talking about the battle between Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) and B-lymphocytes, the antibody boys. Once EBV gets into a lymphocyte it is immortalized, its cytoskeleton reshaped, its transcription control rewired and a variety of other changes implemented. Brennan et al. tackle this morass with all the proteomic tools at their call - MALDI-TOF/TOF, iTRAQ, 1- and 2-DE, Western blotting. In this paper they found 59 proteins with shifted expression in EBV-immortalized lymphoblastoid cells when compared to control Burkitt's lymphoma cells. Brennan, P. et al., Proteomics Clin. Appl. 2009, 3, 359-369.

The Comparative Dynamics of Party Support in Great Britain: Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats

Political leadership has long been established as a key determinant of party support. Yet the extent to which this may vary across parties in and out of government is less well understood. In fact, there are good reasons to expect leadership to matter less for “protest” parties. We demonstrate that the relationship between satisfaction with the Liberal Democratic leader and support for the British Liberal Democratic Party is fundamentally different from the relationships between the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition and their respective parties. Using 28 years of monthly public opinion data, we develop models of the political and economic factors that determine support for each of the three major parties in Britain in each of the 1979–1997 and 1997–2006 periods. We find that vote intentions for the two major parties are closely related to the satisfaction levels of their respective leaders but that this relationship is substantially weaker for the Liberal Democrats. These findings are in contrast to individual‐level studies that have shown the importance of leadership approval to vote choice for all British parties. More generally, we show the need to refine theories about the relationships between parties and their leaders.

Adjustment and Integration: The Scottish Representation in the British House of Commons, 1707–14*

The small minority of Scots who entered the house of commons in 1707 were slow to make their mark. Besides lack of numbers, they suffered several significant disadvantages. The Westminster scene was strange, and the style and tone of debate more vigorous and informal. Moreover, the aristocracy had dominated the unicameral Scottish parliament, and commoners found it difficult to emancipate themselves from noble tutelage. Most importantly, Scottish politics did not yet reflect the two‐party system dominant in England. Thus in the first sessions the Scots were unable to make headway in the essential business of parliament, legislation. Scotland suffered in comparison with the English provinces, and even the Irish, who were able to muster a more effective lobby. Soon, however, a new generation of debaters appeared, able to use their wit to discomfit English antagonists, and a new class of ‘men of business’ who grasped the rules of the legislative game. The fortuitous deaths of leading magnates and the polarisation of sectarian antagonisms in Scotland permitted the coalescence of the Scottish representation into two broad factions allied with the English parties. It was with English tory support that bills were passed to benefit the sectional concerns of Scottish episcopalians, accompanied by other measures of a more general nature. The combined attempt by Scottish peers and MPs in 1713 to secure the repeal of the union does not point to a lasting breakdown in Anglo‐Scottish relations, since it was also a manifestation of political opportunism by English whigs and discontented tories, and their Scottish allies. But the dawn of a party system in Scotland was dispelled by the death of Queen Anne and the ensuing jacobite rebellion. The complicity of tories in the Fifteen resulted in the destruction of the party in Scotland, and the construction of a whig hegemony.

The Role of the English Party in Scotland, 1513 - 44

The Role of the English Party in Scotland, 1513 - 44

Who Sets the Agenda? Parties and Media Competing for the Electorate's Main Topic of Political Discussion

ABSTRACT According to the thesis of the agenda setting function, both the media and the political parties influence what people think about, if not what they think. Newspaper and television editors make judgements of news priorities, the judgements of one editor influence the views of another, and the result is a media consensus that affects the public's sense of the importance of various issues. Parties' formulation of preferences and priorities through their manifestos aims at promoting each party's proprietary issues and downgrading other issues; this clearly turns the electorate's attention to specific topics. This paper explores the extent to which voters, political parties, and media in Britain share the same issue concerns and reveals which of the two—parties or media—is better at influencing what the public is talking about. Content analyses of party manifestos and press coverage of the 2001 election campaign identify the issues most strongly emphasized by the parties and the press, respectively. Analysis of survey data from the British Election Study 2001/2002 identifies the issues voters are mostly concerned with and enables public opinion's issue concerns to be related to both party manifestos and the press coverage of the campaign. The paper also tests whether the political priorities of British parties are adopted by their own supporters, it explores the extent to which voters are concerned with issues that are not emphasized by the party they vote for, and finally, it explores which party's issues dominated the public agenda in 2001.

Towards a Comparative History of Communism: The British and German Communist Parties to 1933

The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 inspired the formation of communist parties across the world. These, in turn, affiliated to the Communist International founded by the Bolsheviks in 1919, through which the national parties adopted a uniform organization, policy and theory. This article seeks to survey the development of the German and British communist parties between 1918 and 1933, examining the extent to which their experiences can be compared and contrasted within the increasingly uniform paradigm established by the Communist International under pressure from Stalin's Soviet Union. By so doing, it rejects traditional monocausal arguments based exclusively on the machinations of Soviet power politics, suggesting instead that to understand the history of communism both nationally and internationally, it is necessary to consider a complex interaction of indigenous and external factors.

The Blair Government and Europe: The Policy of Containing the Salience of European Integration

One of the most conspicuous European policy legacies of the Blair premiership pertains to its public salience: whereas European integration featured as a high-salience issue at the beginning of New Labour's tenure, it was transformed into a low-salience issue at the end of Tony Blair's period in office. Given the British public's euroscepticism and New Labour's relatively pro-European outlook, the decline in the salience of European policy accorded to the Blair government's electoral interests. As European policy could be expected to figure as an electoral liability for New Labour insofar as it was salient enough to become a significant dimension of issue voting, the Blair government faced strong electoral incentives to contain the public salience of European integration. New Labour responded to this incentive by pursuing a mix of different governing strategies that were suited to contribute to the pronounced downward trend in the salience of European integration. Specifically, the Blair government sought (1) to defuse the European policy cleavage between the two main British parties, (2) to depoliticise European policy decisions, (3) to delegate veto power to the general public, and (4) to defer the making of conclusive decisions on contentious European issues.

Does Political Information Matter? An Experimental Test Relating to Party Positions on Europe

This article focuses on whether the provision of ‘objectively’ correct information to voters about where parties stand on an issue affects their placement of the parties, and ultimately their own position, on that issue. Classic theories of how mass publics make voting decisions assume that voters are able relatively accurately to place themselves and the parties on various issue dimensions. While these assumptions have been challenged, it is generally assumed that the provision of new information makes voters' placements more informed. We explicitly test this idea using a survey experiment focusing on one political issue – European integration. In the experiment, all respondents were twice asked to place the three main British parties and themselves on a bipolar scale of European integration. This was done towards the beginning, and then at the end of the survey. Most respondents were also given information on the ‘informed’ positions of the parties, derived from expert survey placement. Our analyses indicate that individuals’ placements did change, and the tendency was related to both political sophistication and the inherent difficulty of placing the party. Only less sophisticated voters updated their placements, and these changes are concentrated on the placement of the Labour party, where the elite stance on Europe has been more conflicted. For all respondents we do not detect any corresponding changes in self-placement that would be congruent with ‘cueing’ effects.

How British Parties Lost Our Favour

How British Parties Lost Our Favour

'For the Good of the Party': an Analysis of the Fall of British Conservative Party Leaders From Chamberlain To Thatcher

This article examines the fall of British Conservative party leaders from Neville Chamberlain to Margaret Thatcher. Though the leadership is vested with considerable power and resources, holding on to it is conditional on the ability to deliver electoral success for the party. Previous studies concentrated on one or other of the party’s component parts, but neglected the importance of others. Although this article concentrates on Cabinet and especially the parliamentary party, it tries to take a more historic and holistic view. Political crisis management and the leader’s style are analysed from a Conservative perspective to create a comprehensive picture of how and why leaders have been explicitly or implicitly forced aside by their own party. The motives and mechanisms that have proved most important in the exercise of the party’s will to power are as follows: the leader’s electoral image, the leader’s handling of crises, the leader’s use of patronage, the leader’s dependence on party bodies, and most decisively the leader’s ability to recognise and defuse discontent within 'their’ party by using the significant resources available to a Conservative leader.

Party Politicization Of The Environment In Britain

The impact of the environment on established political parties, especially in polities without an electorally successful green party, is surprisingly under-researched. This article provides a theoretically informed and empirically comprehensive analysis of the party politicization of the environment in Britain. Four hypotheses are developed, drawn from the party competition and ‘new politics’ perspectives, which predict the response of the three major British parties to environ-mental issues. These hypotheses are tested against a range of quantitative and qualitative sources, notably the Manifesto Research Group and expert survey data. Party politicization of the environment is found to be limited, but there are important variations in party responses. Party competition is critical in explaining these responses. However, the ‘new politics’ insight that the environmental issue dimension cuts across the traditional left–right cleavage identifies ideology as a further signifi-cant constraint on the willingness of established parties to embrace this issue.

Do they work? Validating computerised word frequency estimates against policy series

Policy scorings of political actors are crucially important in operationalising rational choice models and other important theories in political science. Doing them more cheaply and quickly by computer is important for the advancement of the discipline. But we can hardly substitute these for hand-coding or even use them in new fields without being sure of their validity and reliability. We check this by comparing the mappings produced by word frequency methods with the policy series available from the work of the Manifesto Research Group/Comparative Manifesto Project (MRG/CMP). Using an aggregate calibrating/reference ‘document set’ for the time period in question evades reliability problems with pairwise comparisons and provides an authoritative text which enables individual party platforms to be scored and mapped over long time periods. Comparisons of the techniques for two countries (US and UK) are not encouraging. Wordscores in their current operationalisation flatten out party movement just as previous computerised approaches have done. Sensitivity testing with British party manifestos 1979–1997, using an expert scoring, does not reveal any improvement in performance. The reliability problems which arise with policy series are also likely to recur with cross-sectional applications of the word frequency approach.

The rise of post‐imperial populism: The case of right‐wing Euroscepticism in Britain

Abstract. Recent approaches to contemporary Euroscepticism have explained it in terms of the politics of opposition and peripherality characteristic of competitive party systems. Euroscepticism becomes a central strategy by which non‐mainstream parties or factions within mainstream parties attempt to gain political advantage. In the British case, there has been a focus on the influence Eurosceptic factionalism can have within a first‐past‐the‐post parliamentary system. This article challenges explanations of British Euroscepticism in terms of the politics of opposition and the workings of the party system. Instead, it is proposed that a structural crisis of British party politics has allowed Euroscepticism to enter the political mainstream. The author conceives of Euroscepticism as a distinct and powerful national movement asserting conceptions of Britain's exceptional national identity. This is viewed as part of a post‐imperial crisis that shifts parties, and factions within parties, towards populist forms of legitimation that have weakened possibilities for stable and coherent political leadership over European integration. Consequently, mainstream parties have struggled to protect themselves against the ideological influence of this populist Euroscepticism. This is particularly evident during periods of Eurosceptic mobilization, and is demonstrated in this article through the examination of the extensive role played by right‐wing Eurosceptic forces during the attempt by the Major Government to ratify the Maastricht Treaty.

Party Membership and Campaign Activity in Britain

The article examines the impact of electoral results on party membership and activity. Previous studies have focused on the long-term effects of electoral success or failure, suggesting that they may produce a spiral of demobilization or mobilization. The article shows that the dramatic change of electoral fortunes experienced by British parties at the 1997 general election broke this spiral, with the outcome leading to significant changes in the health and activity of local parties. It is concluded that dramatic election results can have significant implications for party organization.

A Conservative Reformer in Upper Canada: Charles Fothergill, Responsible Government and the “British Party”, 1824‑1840

Whig treatments of the politics of early 19th century Upper Canada have tended to treat the reformers as a group unified behind the concept of "responsible government". As Graeme Patterson has pointed out, though, the concept of responsible government, which lay at the heart of much debate during the 1830s and 1840s, had a variety of meanings, ranging from the traditional Baldwinite view of ministerial responsibility for policy to an elected chamber of a sovereign legislature to the much simpler concept cf effective accountability of the colonial administration to imperial authorities. The author explores a distinctive variant upon the theme cf "responsible government" - that posited by the English-born reformer, Charles Fothergill. After a short, and not par- ticularly distinguished, career as a placeman, Fothergill was dismissed in 1826 for his activities in the House of Assembly. After three years in the mainstream cf reform politics, he broke with W.W. Baldwin, John Rolph and their adherents over the meaning cf responsible government, and proclaimed himself a "conservative reformer." Afterthe Rebellion, he became a tribune of the so-called "British Party" - a group of loyal, conservative, middle-class British immigrants who resented the dominance of the Family Compact. Though Fothergill shared the social conservatism which underlay the Bald- winite view of responsible government, he posited a less radical, more legalistic - and, to the author, more logical - alternative to ministerial responsibility.

Forgotten Comrade? Desmond Buckle: An African Communist in Britain

Recognized at the end of his life as a “lifelong fighter for colonial freedom” and “one of the first African Marxists,” the Ghanaian James Desmond Buckle's life and work is rarely mentioned in historical accounts of the British or international communist movements. The role of Buckle, a longtime member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) is recovered by documenting his work as organizer, writer, and propagandist for the CPGB on international issues. Buckle's understanding of the British Party's engagement with the complexities of communist internationalism is of continuing interest. The details and variety of his contributions to the Communist movement, both in Britain and internationally, highlight the extent to which the absence of political activists of Buckle's calibre from the historical literature on the CPGB not only distorts our understanding of the British Party; it also impoverishes the history of African and other minorities in Britain.

Political Parties, the Internet and the 2005 General Election: From Web Presence to E-Campaigning?

This article argues that the use of the Internet by the main British political parties during the 2005 general election campaign needs to be understood in terms of the ongoing transformation of e-campaigning in the UK. Since the emergence of the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s the main political parties have been quick to try and exploit the new technology to mobilise their supporters and persuade undecided voters. Over the course of three campaigns – 1997, 2001 and 2005 - clear patterns in the use of this technology have emerged. This article looks at how political parties in a competitive electoral marketplace try to adapt new information and communication technologies, such as the Internet, to help ensure they achieve their electoral goals. It argues that the evolution of the use of the Internet needs to be understood in terms of an ongoing series of responses of a vote maximising reflexive organisation, to the emergence of a new technology in a competitive electoral marketplace.

Promoting Distrust? A Chronicle of the 2005 British General Election Advertising Campaigns

This paper focuses on the advertising created for the 2005 British general election battle - specifically the national advertising campaigns for the Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties. Rich accounts of their advertising campaigns are given and contrasted with their 2001 advertising campaigns. Our analysis indicates that even though the 2005 election was set against a backdrop of low public trust in politicians and political parties, the advertising was not designed to build trust, principally because of the focus – by Labour and the Conservatives particularly – on denigrating the opposition through attack advertising styles. The paper concludes by reflecting on the increasing use of attack advertising by British political parties and the potential consequences of this on the British democratic process. This article forms part of our wider study on the 2005 election advertising, details of which can be obtained from the authors.

Product Attribute-Based Voter Segmentation and Resource Advantage Theory

Political parties have long since targeted the marginal constituency and floating voters using demographic segmentation approaches and the use of market segmentation techniques in general election campaigns is now well-documented (see Johnson 1971; Ahmed and Jackson 1979; Yorke and Meehan 1986; Baines et al. 2003). The actual practice of segmentation as undertaken by political parties and its relation to theory is less well-considered. This paper represents a serious attempt to outline how political parties targeted a priori segments of the electorate including gender, age and lifecycle in the 2005 British General Election when they should have been adopting a product attributed-based approach. Selected MORI surveys from April 2005 were analysed, using logistic regression to indicate the most important factors in determining how Britons vote. Principal components analysis provides an indication of how the three main British political parties are perceived. The paper discusses, using resource-advantage theory (Hunt 1995; Hunt and Arnett 2004) how political parties might use their party and leader image, and policies to build their popularity in an election campaign.

Issue salience in regional and national party manifestos in the UK

The study reveals the salience of particular issues in the manifestos of the main British parties for the 1997 and 2003 UK general elections, as well as the 2003 Scottish and Welsh elections, using the method introduced by the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP) and a modified list of issue categories to reflect the division of government competences between the central and regional governments. Ideological and social base of a party, as well as the delimitation of government competences, are found to be important determinants of issue salience. A more consensual institutional design of the regional government in Scotland and Wales seems to have conditioned larger differences among the issue profiles of parties competing in regional elections, in comparison with general elections. With the institutionalisation of devolution, however, we observe an increase in the similarity of the issue profiles of the same parties in general and in Scottish and Welsh elections, as well as among different parties competing in the same regional elections.