David S. Moon

Conceptualising the Multi-Level Party: Two Complementary Approaches

While party research has seen a number of conceptual developments in recent years, it has not kept pace with parties becoming more territorial as a result of the increasing importance of sub-national and supranational governance. This article lays down a framework for conceptualising and analysing multi-level parties (MLPs). We propose a synthesis of the formal and non-formal aspects of power; the former highlighting party rules and procedures, the latter focusing upon the ideational structures – norms and competing ideologies/discourses – within which party members operate. For empirical research on the MLP we propose to focus on autonomy and influence to measure the extent of (formal and non-formal) multi-levelness and to grasp better the strategies of regional branches vis-à-vis the centre.

Rhetoric and policy learning: On Rhodri Morgan's 'Clear Red Water' and 'Made in Wales' health policies

One of the benefits of multi-level systems of governments, according to their supporters, is that their plurality of governmental institutions/levels provides the scope for valuable policy innovation and learning. One vocal supporter of this view has been former Labour First Minister of Wales (2000–2009) Rhodri Morgan, who labelled the United Kingdom’s devolved bodies “laboratories” for the formulation of new ideas to be subsequently shared and learnt from across the Union. An issue which has yet to be discussed, however, is the underappreciated but nevertheless important role played by the rhetoric of key actors such as Morgan in facilitating such a culture of policy learning. This article focuses upon this subject, looking at rhetoric as a factor in policy transfer through an analysis of the governmental language of Morgan himself. Specifically, it analyses the rhetoric through which his administrations’ health policies – which radically diverged from those followed at Westminster – were justified and described. It argues, in so doing, that Morgan’s administrations adopted a non-universal rhetoric of national (Welsh) specificity based around phrases such as “Made in Wales” and “Clear Red Water” politics to justify their policy programme, which may have actually delimited rather than facilitated possibilities for cross-border learning. Policy makers aiming to promote cross-polity institutional learning, it concludes, would do well to learn from the case of Morgan’s Labour administrations and avoid the dangers of nation-bounded rhetoric.

`Tissue on the bones':Towards the development of a post-structuralist institutionalism

The ‘new institutionalist’ approaches have recently been beneficially expanded by the introduction of a body of work which falls under the collective label of discursive-constructivist institutionalism. This article argues that the discursive analytical focus of these approaches would be complemented and extended by the application of the post-structuralist conceptual tool bag offered by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. In so doing it advocates developing a post-structuralist institutionalism (PSI), detailing the approachs key theoretical underpinnings and differences from constructivist-discursive approaches. These are subsequently illustrated via an analysis of the arguments within Rhodri Morgans Welsh Labour party over the use of private finance in health provision.

Rhetoric and Devolution — Time and Space in Welsh Labour Rhetoric

Studying ‘British Politics’ is rhetorically complex. Is it the study of the politics of Britain (or Great Britain), a polity encompassing three nations, England, Wales and Scotland? Or the politics of the United Kingdom, uniting Great Britain and Northern Ireland (the latter often being treated as a ‘place apart’)? Studying ‘British Politics’ has in fact often meant studying English politics; analyses focusing upon the most populous element of the collective Union, where formal political power ultimately resides in the central, Westminster Parliament. For Britain, then, read England (or even just London). Foundationally, the governance of Britain and its study is thus a rhetorical issue. The 1997 Labour government’s devolution of powers away from Westminster to assemblies in Wales, Northern Ireland and London, and a parliament in Scotland pushed this into the spotlight.

‘We’re Internationalists, not Nationalists’: The Political Ramifications of Welsh Labour’s Internal Power Struggle over the ‘One Wales’ Coalition in 2007

Abstract The bitter arguments within the Labour Party in Wales in 2007 preceding its agreement to enter coalition with Plaid Cymru in the National Assembly have faced little substantive analysis, and the specific behind-closed-doors debates at the special conference held to vote on the deal have remained undisclosed. This paper fulfils both tasks, revealing how actors’ arguments tapped into historically resonant traditions in Welsh Labour thought, coalescing around a central ideological conflict over the party’s identity vis-à-vis nationalism. The article thus sheds light upon Welsh Labour’s internal power struggles at an important juncture in its recent history and their continuing ramifications.

Book Review: Hywel Francis, History on Our Side: Wales and the 1984–85 Miners’ StrikeHistory on Our Side: Wales and the 1984–85 Miners’ Strike by FrancisHywel. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2015. 122pp., £9.99 (p/b), ISBN 9781910448151

received scant consideration from scholars and others alike. The book is written in a style that makes it easily accessible to academics, students and anyone with a general interest in Irish history. Mulvenna demonstrates how street gangs had been part of Northern Irish society for a long time and he convincingly argues that the Tartans emerged from ‘normal youth subcultures’ (p. 2) that would have been found across the United Kingdom. He shows how music, fashion and sport were all important for the identity of these gangs. He relates the story of this evolution mostly through the use of oral history interviews with those who were at the forefront of this transition. One of the central arguments of the book is that the Tartans were thrust into the defence of their communities, eventually joining loyalist paramilitary organisations, in response to the ongoing violent campaign of republican paramilitaries. Mulvenna is quite right in this assertion, a theme which he continually repeats throughout the book. However, despite the strengths of the book, it has several notable weaknesses. First, the author fails to identify the other motivations for the violence carried out by loyalist paramilitaries. He ignores the violence that these paramilitaries inflicted on their own communities exercising power and control; almost 20% of all Protestants killed during the conflict were murdered by loyalist paramilitaries. He also fails to highlight the fact that on many occasions, loyalist violence was in direct response to attempts at political progress, such as the 1973–4 Sunningdale Agreement. It should also be noted that loyalist violence preceded and continued after the mainstream Irish Republican Army’s (IRA) campaign. There are also some concerns surrounding the author’s methodology. There is no arguing that oral histories are of great value, especially when they have been triangulated, but the problem here is that virtually no corroboration of the selected interviewees’ narratives in relation to their involvement in the Troubles has been sought. For example, suggestions that there was intelligence on innocent nationalist murder victims being members of the IRA are not seriously questioned. Perhaps, the author should have heeded Eric Hobsbawm’s (1997) warning in On History that ‘memory is not so much a recording as a selective mechanism’ (p. 206).

Red Dragon FM: Carwyn Jones’s ‘Welsh Labour Rhetoric’

Drawing upon a post-structuralist institutionalist approach linked to the concept of the multi-level party, this chapter analyses the rhetoric of Carwyn Jones, First Minister of Wales from 2009 and conterminously ‘Welsh Labour Leader’. Through an analysis of Jones’s Conference speeches in Wales and England between 2009 and 2015, it examines how, through a specific ‘Welsh Labour’ rhetoric, he articulated a clear role for Welsh Labour within both Welsh politics and Labour itself, successfully positioning himself as the recognized voice of the sub-state party at the state-wide party level. The chapter thus offers valuable insights into the manner in which formally unitary institutions can nevertheless operate informally as multi-level institutions.

Book Review: Agon Hamza (ed.), Repeating ŽižekRepeating Žižek by HamzaAgon (ed.). Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. 294pp., £17.99 (p/b), ISBN 9780822358916

This volume is a collection of the early letters of Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), the Italian Marxist political thinker and leader of the Italian Communist Party. Gramsci’s prison diaries, written during his long incarceration under the Fascist regime in Italy, appeared in English translation in 1994 and have since then become a reference point for theorists and historians alike. However, his earlier correspondence, dating from 1908–1926, has not yet been translated. The new collection offers, therefore, a much needed addition to the English bookshelf of Gramsci’s works. During the two decades covered in this volume, Gramsci left his native rural Sardinia, discovered Marxism as a student at the University of Turin, and emerged on the national and international political scene as one of the key political leaders in Italy. As this volume reminds us, it is not sufficient to read the prison diaries to understand Gramsci’s thought. His social and political ideas were shaped while engaging actively in politics in Sardinia, as a student in Turin, as a founding member of the Italian Communist Party and as its representative in Moscow, and finally in Rome. The collection includes twothirds of the known correspondence of Antonio Gramsci from his high-school days up to his arrest, revealing his complex relations with his family, with his wife Julija Schucht, with other revolutionary activists like Palmiro Togliatti and Amedeo Bordiga, and with members of the Comintern in Moscow including Leon Trotsky. As the editor and translator Derek Boothman suggests in his insightful introduction, the selection of letters sheds light on the evolution and continuities in Gramsci’s thought, tracing the early emergence through dialogue of key Gramscian themes like the nature of the superstructures of society, centralism and party politics, popular culture, passive revolution, hegemony and social alliances (pp.49–50). Boothman’s introduction helps situate the letters in historical context, provides biographical details about Gramsci and his main interlocutors, and explains the conceptual meaning of the letters in the wider framework of his thought. The wide-ranging thematic scope of the letters – personal meditations, political commentary, policy plans for the Communist Party and theoretical reflections – offers a wealth of insights for scholars acquainted with Gramsci’s later writings as well as for first-time readers of his work. The English translation from the original Italian is accurately and meticulously executed, paying attention to the different linguistic registers deployed by Gramsci in different periods in his life. Thus, this selection of letters represents a welcome addition to the English-language sources by Gramsci and about his work.

Book Review: Alistair Cole and Ian Stafford, Devolution and Governance: Wales between Capacity and Constraint

In Devolution and Governance, Alistair Cole and Ian Stafford focus upon how conflicting pressures towards both convergence and divergence have affected the continuing development of Wales’ far-from-settled devolution ‘settlement’. Of particular interest is the question of whether the economic crisis has undermined or reinforced this development, offering both constraints and greater opportunities for the further devolution of responsibilities to Wales. The book is divided into five chapters, the first of which sets out the key themes discussed above, placing them within the context of debates over territorial governance and political capacity building. The second chapter draws upon discursive institutionalism to illustrate how, in the first decade of devolution, Welsh policymakers became trapped by a small number of key ideas which underpinned their own legitimising discourse – in particular, the concept of a national vision based upon ‘small country governance’ and ‘national smallness’ linked to communal politics. With the economic crisis, however, as material realities have shifted (in particular, reductions in the Welsh budget) policymakers now find themselves lacking a legitimising discourse for devolution’s continued development, and this absence provides a major challenge for the second decade of devolution. The third chapter examines the policy fields of public finance and secondary education with regard to the endogenous and exogenous forces driving convergence and divergence, paying attention along the way to the particular impact of the economic crisis. Building on this, the fourth chapter draws upon a multi-level governance framework to explore the changing relationships between the Welsh Government and local and regional layers, as well as intergovernmental relations with Westminster, and engagement with the European Union. The concluding chapter addresses the future development of devolution to Wales and the continued utility of multi-level governance as an approach to understanding this subject, while concluding that the Welsh Government needs to take some hard political decisions and accept more political and financial responsibilities for its actions. This is a valuable book for anyone working on the governance of the United Kingdom, especially as the Conservative government at Westminster develops its proposals for a new Wales Bill. The authors valuably provide a clear and detailed overview of the many commissions and reports addressing how Wales should be both governed and funded and provide a wealth of data to illustrate their points, including from their own primary interviews with figures within the Welsh policy community. At a price of £45.00, students are unlikely to purchase copies, but researchers and libraries should.

Book Review: Alexandros Kioupkiolis and Giorgos Katsambekis (eds), Radical Democracy and Collective Movements Today: The Biopolitics of the Multitude versus the Hegemony of the PeopleRadical Democracy and Collective Movements Today: The Biopolitics of the Multitude versus the Hegemony of the People by KioupkiolisAlexandrosKatsambekisGiorgos (eds). Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. 247pp., £65.00 (h/b), ISBN 9781409470526

Conflict and Gender: Embodiments, Discourses, and Symbolic Practices is an edited book of 10 chapters which explores the nexus between conflict and gender. Each chapter is threaded through with manifestations of violence and a concentration on performative discourses (discursive repertoires as lived phenomena), embodiments (the ways the body is infused with analytical significance) and symbolic practices (rituals and signs that carry particular weight in different contexts). Methodologically diverse, many of the chapters draw on ethnography, with each evidencing a broadly social constructivist perspective. In terms of specific focus, there is great variety. Hollander and Malmström explore the building of masculine norms and practices in the Democratic Republic of Congo and within Hamas, respectively, while Simonetti and Frerks navigate the complexities of female combatants in the Israeli military and Tamil Tigers, respectively. Gender, class and ideology fuse in Van Stapele’s examination of the struggle over control of a public toilet in Nairobi, while South Korean nationalism becomes, in Schober’s contribution, symbolically inscribed onto a prostitute murdered by an American soldier. Performing gender is key to both prisonbased theatre classes in Nicaragua (Weegels) and Brazilian Capoeira fighting (Guizardi and Ypeij), while school girls’ graffiti in Malta chronicles a subversive journey of sexual discovery (Cassar), and Palestinian and Israeli women disrupt preconceptions by coming face to face (Violi). This is a fascinating book, as much for the similarities of the chapters as for their divergence. It is notable for its level of nuance, particularly in the careful exploration of gaps throughout: the gap between normative expectations of hegemonic masculinity or femininity and the realities of lived lives, between childhood and adolescence and the sexual exploration leading from one to the other, between historical moments and contemporary collective memories, and between the glory of heroic reputation and the markings of trauma and weakness on the hero’s body. These gaps are where the authors discover conflict and violence, and where human lives are defined by struggle, and often by pain. It is within the elucidation of these violenceinfused gaps that the book offers novelty and insight into the shifting symbiosis between gender and conflict, evidencing how they collapse into and define one another. In places, such as during the discussion of Capoeira fighting, the strength of this overarching analysis slips temporarily, the link to understanding conflict appears slightly tenuous and under-evaluated. Yet fundamentally, this is a must-read for anyone interested in the humanity of violence, and the hybridity of gender.