Participation In Britain Research Articles

Book Review: Political Theory: Political Participation in Britain: The Decline and Revival of Civic Culture

Book Review: Political Theory: Political Participation in Britain: The Decline and Revival of Civic Culture

The Complexities of 'Consumerism': Choice, Collectivism and Participation within Britain's National Health Service, c.1961-c.1979.

This article explores the overlapping and conflicting points of contact between ‘consumerism’, collectivism and participation in Britain's National Health Service during a period of relatively well-funded expansion during the economic ‘golden age’ of the 1960s and 1970s. Despite recent neo-liberal attempts to define ‘consumerism’ around the wishes and choices of the individual, and to conceptualise areas such as individual hospital referrals as particularly ‘consumerist’, this article demonstrates that collective provision, the protection of disadvantaged groups and the concept of ‘participatory’ citizen involvement were all alternative meanings of the concept during this period, co-existing uneasily with the competitive concepts that have become more familiar since the late 1980s. This insight is then utilised to show how health care debates today might become better informed, ignoring extreme claims for all three concepts and focusing instead on a theoretically informed but ultimately empirical grasp of constant flux in any health care system.

Leaders, footsoldiers and befrienders: The gendered nature of social capital and political participation in Britain

Feminist political scientists have had a two-track response to Robert Putnam's work on social capital. They have critiqued his original approach for failing to take gender into account, but they have also highlighted the potential of the concept for illuminating mechanisms that reproduce unequal gender relations. In the British case, Peter Hall and Vivien Lowndes have shown how key elements of Putnam's measures are highly gendered. Vivien Lowndes set out a research agenda for assessing the impact of men and women's group memberships upon political participation. This article tests Lowndes’ research questions using British data from the Citizenship Survey 2007. Men and women in Britain do belong to different formal associational networks but these differences do not appear to have a strong impact upon whether they participate in politics. Lowndes’ critique of the social capital literature's failure to incorporate women's informal child-care networks is supported; involvement in child-care networks is positively related to political participation in the form of signing petitions and negatively related to contacting Members of Parliament. Crucially, there are small but statistically significant divergences in the types of activities men and women undertake for organised groups and these roles are associated with variations in political participation.

Testing the Northern Flank

Britain's participation in the March 2012 Exercise Cold Response was a powerful indication of the country's strategic interest in the Arctic. Far from being a mere throwback to the Cold War, it signals the UK's intention to re-affirm its presence and capability in northern Europe as the global geostrategic significance of the Arctic grows. Regardless of whether the coalition government does release an Arctic strategy in 2013, Nordic neighbours, especially Norway, welcome this British commitment to the ‘High North’.

Social Stratification, Gender and Sport Participation

Correlations between social class and sport participation have frequently been observed ( Crook 1997 ; Ceron-Anaya 2010 ; Dollman and Lewis 2010 ; Stalsberg and Pedersen 2010 ). However, discrete associations between occupational class positions and specific sporting activities overlook the complex interrelationships amongst these sports. Until recently understanding the relationality of sport has been constrained by a lack of available and appropriate data. Work by Bourdieu (1984) , and more recently Bennett et al. (2009) , have explored the general field of cultural consumption and sport has been one dimension of these treatments. Using multiple correspondence analysis ( Le Roux and Rouanet 2004 ), this research focuses upon the social space of sport participation in Britain in order to provide a more detailed account of how these activities are organised. From data in the Taking-Part Survey (n = 10,349), which was gathered between July 2005-October 2006, 19 sporting practices are situated along four key dimensions. The first dimension separates gender and corresponds to a division between an embodied or social focus. Dimension two captures the impact of age. Internal and external orientations divide dimension three, where men tend to be internally oriented. Class, education and social status are significant along this dimension. Dimension four differentiates self-employed and manual workers; reinforcing occupational and educational differences. Consequently, the social space of sports participation cannot be neatly contained within the logic of class; other explanations drawing on friendship, education and embodiment are also required.

Planning, housing and participation in Britain, 1968–1976

The history of planning and social housing in post‐war Britain has been dominated by the role of the state, local government, professionals (planners, architects, civil servants) and developers. This is hardly surprising, given that the partnerships created around these groups dominated the slum clearance and building process. The tenants have been absent from the ‘history’ because they were missing from the process. However, in the 1960s and 1970s the concept of participation began to emerge. It grew from broader social and cultural changes brought about through the emergence of welfare, consumerism and an ever greater awareness of ‘rights’. The idea of participation was to increase participatory democracy by involving people in the planning process, by recognizing their rights to be involved in decisions which impacted on their lives. The state promoted the idea through legislation, but in practice the concept proved difficult to implement. Local authorities saw participation, at best, as a means of smoothing the planning process through the dissemination of ideas, thus limiting any scope for meaningful participation schemes. This article will look at the tension between the ideal and practice. It will also consider the reaction of many tenants who, frustrated at the attitude and policies forced on them by local government, became galvanized into action, creating tenant groups that would give their communities a voice.

From the Olympics to the grassroots: What will London 2012 mean for sport funding and participation in Britain?

Georgios Kavetsos and Stefan Szymanski show that while sports facilities managers are mainly optimistic about the benefits of the Olympics for encouraging sports participation generally, there are some concerns about the impacts locally

GOVERNMENT EFFECTIVENESS AND POLITICAL PARTICIPATION IN BRITAIN

This article examines the relationship between government effectiveness and political participation in Britain. It shows that the effectiveness of British government has been declining over time and while acknowledging that many factors may explain this, focuses on the role of declining political participation as a contributory cause. Two key forms of political participation are central to the health of civil society, electoral turnout and party support. Both have been declining rather rapidly in Britain over the last forty years. The paper discusses some of the theoretical reasons why this can directly influence the effectiveness of government. In the final section it argues that the most important reform for turning around this state of affairs would be a radical programme of devolution of power to local government and a restoration of the democratic accountability of the Quango state.

The British warfare state and the challenge of Americanisation of Western defence1

This article examines the response of British policy-makers to American thinking on how to organise Western defence following the formation of the Western military alliance in 1949. As part of their vision, American policy-makers argued for the integration of Western European armed forces and defence production. As the British defence production base had largely survived the war unscathed, the British warfare state was better placed than other Western European governments to resist this American vision for Western defence. Seeing Britain as a major power, British policy-makers remained committed to an independent defence posture within the alliance, ignoring the disapproval of American military leaders. Convinced that its defence industry could produce technologically advanced military weapons equal to those developed in the United States, the British Government continued to maintain an independent armaments production capability rather than participate in the Western European armaments cooperation in the 1950s. When serious problems affected several military aircraft projects in the mid-1950s, the British Government nevertheless looked to the United States for models of how to improve the efficiency of its weapons acquisition process. This article argues that while never Americanised, Britain's participation in Western defence cooperation undermined the British warfare state as a techno-nationalist project from the late 1940s.

PARTIES, VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATIONS, AND DEMOCRATIC POLITICS IN INTERWAR BRITAIN

ABSTRACTThe achievement of universal suffrage after 1918 stimulated new forms of democratic participation in Britain. These decades witnessed not only renewed efforts by political parties to mobilize the mass electorate, but also the establishment of new kinds of civic association, often secular in character, strongly invested in a discourse of active citizenship, and committed to creating and defending a space within associational life which was free of partisan or sectarian conflict. This article presents a fresh perspective on the political culture of interwar Britain by comparing and contrasting the experiences of four voluntary associations active during this period: the National Federation of Women's Institutes, Rotary International, the British Legion, and the League of Nations Union. It analyses their relationship with conventional party politics, rejecting the argument that these associations served as vehicles for middle-class anti-socialism, and concludes, instead, that their pluralist values and political centrism formed part of a wider response by political, religious, and educational elites to the challenge of class conflict, economic instability, and political extremism in the post-war decades.

Britain and Europe: Class, state and the politics of integration

This paper explores the way socialists have deployed Marxist theories in analysing European integration and Britain's participation in it. The first section shows how theories of the relationship between nation states and global capitalism opened up new perspectives on regional integration in Europe. The second section looks at later debates about ‘varieties of capitalism’, and argues that these debates have ignored the global constitution of capitalism and exaggerated the range of variation within it. The third section develops this point in relation to the possibility of challenging neoliberalism within the EU.

Leisure and participation in Britain

This article presents an in-depth description of patterns of consumption of out-of-the-home leisure activities. The focus is on participation in different sorts of leisure activities. It is assumed that leisure has to be related to some sort of activity, and is not equivalent to free time. Bourdieu's ideas about social class as the main factor structuring cultural practices are engaged with. In order to do this, the Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion (CCSE) survey data are analysed, following three steps. First, frequency of participation in different leisure activities is described and these results are compared with those produced by the Arts Council of England's 2001 attendance, participation and attitudes survey. Second, the relationship among the different leisure items is studied using a three-factor solution, as a result of a principal component analysis. Third, regressions are run on the factor scores in order to provide an explanation of the identified dimensions. Attention is paid to occupational class, gender, ethnic origin, education, and age as explanatory variables. The results show that all of these have some effects, though to a different extent and for different factors, the most important being level of education, age and gender.

Political Parties as Vehicles of Political Engagement

Concern over the state of democratic participation in Britain has led to a re-evaluation of the whole process of political engagement. Due to life-cycle or cohort effects young people are the most likely of all groups of society to be disengaged from political life—largely because they tend to lack social capital. Appealing to Britain’s youth is a challenge for all forms of representative democracy. Apart from appealing to voters at election times, political parties attempt to recruit supporters into membership of the party, and pay particular attention to recruiting young people into their fold. The role of political parties in promoting political engagement with particular reference to their treatment of their youth sections is explored here. The access routes to political influence for young people are investigated with reference to the Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats in Britain. Methods of incorporating the voice of youth vary from party to party but they share a desire to be seen to be taking youth concerns seriously. Youth sections may provide a useful method of promoting bonding social capital within a political party but the parties may be less fully equipped to reach outside the confines of their own organisations to provide bridging social capital.

A change in the earnings penalty for British men with working wives: Evidence from the 1980's and 1990's

Using pooled cross-sectional data from 1984–1989 and 1990–1995, two-stage (Tobit/OLS) regressions show that the penalty on male earnings for working wives, found in earlier research for British males in the early 1980's in managerial and other occupations, is not present in the second half of the 1980's and is largely reversed by the 1990's; in most occupational clusters, managers most notably, it is replaced by an earnings premium. The results are consistent with a view that increases in married women's labor force participation in Britain, coupled with positive assortative mating, have overwhelmed any forces tending to reduce male salaries when their wives work.

"A cloak of apathy": political disengagement, popular politics and the Daily Mirror 1940-1945

This article re-examines the relationship between the Daily Mirror and popular politics in Britain during the Second World War. It outlines how traditional journalistic and academic analyses have located the period as a high-point of 20th-century radical journalism and political participation in Britain, usually in opposition to a depoliticised and disengaged contemporary news environment. It then re-assesses the Mirror's place in popular culture during this period to suggest an alternative and more complex interpretation of a paper's relationship with popular politics, political disengagement and participation. This differs from both traditional, largely positive accounts of the Mirror's relationship with political engagement and revisionist histories that emphasise its negative relationship with wartime "apathy". It explores firstly the predominantly negative role the paper played in the political mobilisation of a disengaged electorate, both in terms of its continued prioritisation of entertainment over "hard news" and its pioneering of new styles of negative and mediated political coverage. Yet it also examines how the paper's coverage advanced a new, more youth-based, consensual and cross-party alternative for an electorate that was politically disengaged but far from apathetic. This more complex interpretation of the paper's relationship with popular politics and political disengagement parallels current developments and debates around these areas.

The truth about youth? Media portrayals of young people and politics in Britain

AbstractSome forms of political participation in Britain appear to be in crisis. Official rates of turnout are alarmingly poor and the sub‐population least likely to participate in general—and vote in particular—is the youngest section of society. Moreover, the way that the media and and politicians have responded to the apparent crisis of youth participation has become a self‐fulfilling prophecy. A full review of young people's place in the political environment is needed. This requires the application of different criteria for evaluating youth interests, and the avoidance of some of the most routinely used phrases to describe young people's attitudes to politics. Copyright © 2004 Henry Stewart Publications

Local Electoral Participation in Britain

Local Electoral Participation in Britain

The State of Participation in Britain

The State of Participation in Britain

Parametric estimation of different interest rate processes

The paper examines the estimation of alternative interest rate processes describing the dynamics of UK interest rates. The methodology concentrates on selecting non-parametrically the number of autocovariances to use in calculating a heteroscedasticity and autocorrelation consistent covariance matrix. This is important for drawing correct statistical inferences. It is found that the dependence of volatility on the level of interest rates is not as high in the UK market as has been documented in earlier studies of the US market. Further results reveal that there was a structural change in the parameters of the interest rate process during the period of the participation of Britain in the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) of the European Monetary System. However, by utilizing the proposed non-parametric schemes, it is shown that statistical inference is sensitive to the correct choice of the number of autocovariances.

‘inebriates’, ‘heathens’, templars and suffragists: Scotland and imperial feminism c. 1870-1914

This article examines the extent to which the British Empire was central to the women's suffrage debate within the Scottish Christian Union. This analysis follows two trends in the historiography of Britain and of women's suffrage: an integration of the ‘domestic’ and the ‘imperial’ in the historiography of Britain; and a recognition of internationalism within women's suffrage. This discussion points to regional diversity within Great Britain and to the influence of imperialism and evangelicalism on women's activism in the so-called Celtic fringe. In so doing, this article aims to contribute to a more complex representation of middle-class women's participation in Britain's temperance and women's suffrage movements.