Graham K. Wilson

Corporate Political Strategies

With one partial exception, political scientists have carried out little empirical research on corporate political activity. That one exception is political action committees, PACs. Perhaps because of the ready availability of apparently reliable data on corporate political contributions, most empirical studies of business political activity have concentrated on PACs. The study of PACs is not, however, synonymous with the study of corporate political behaviour. Indeed, not all corporations have PACs; Sabato estimated that almost half the largest manufacturing corporations did not. At least one politically active corporation, Du Pont, refused for many years to establish a PAC.

The Consequences of the Global Financial Crisis: The Rhetoric of Reform and Regulation

The Global Financial Crisis is the most serious economic crisis since the Great Depression, and although many have explored its causes, relatively few have focused on its consequences. Unlike earlier crises, no new paradigm seems yet to have come forward to challenge existing ways of thinking and neo-liberalism has emerged relatively unscathed. This crisis, characterized by a remarkable policy stability, has lacked a coherent and innovative intellectual response. This book, however, systematically explores the consequences of the crisis, focusing primarily on its impact on policy and politics. It asks how governments responded to the challenges that the crisis has posed, and the policy and political impact of the combination of both the Global Financial Crisis itself and these responses. It brings together leading academics to consider the divergent ways in which particular countries have responded to the crisis, including the US, the UK, China, Europe, and Scandinavia. The book also assesses attempts to develop global economic governance and to reform financial regulation, and looks critically at the role of credit rating agencies.

Social Regulation and Explanations of Regulatory Failure

It used to be commonly accepted that regulatory agencies in the United States were doomed to fall under the control of the industry with which they dealt and thus be captured by it. This article considers the degree to which explanations of such capture were vindicated by the social regulatory agencies created in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s which were designed to withstand the pressures identified by political scientists as leading to the capture of regulatory agencies. The political scientists who identified the factors leading to the capture of regulatory agencies in America are found to have been partly vindicated by the history of the new social regulatory agencies. There are important reasons for the failure of the new social regulatory agencies, however, which were not identified by such writers.

Bureaucrats and Politicians in Britain

The distinctive relationship between bureaucrats and politicians in Britain has been much noted around the world and often used a model by reformers. However, both Conservative and Labour governments have displayed dissatisfaction with the bureaucracy and have made important changes in the “Whitehall model.” Some of these changes have reduced the degree to which British politicians have been unusually dependent on a career bureaucracy that is insulated from partisan politics.

Whitehall's Disobedient Servants? Senior Officials' Potential Resistance to Ministers in British Government Departments

British civil servants have a clear constitutional duty to obey their ministers. Yet civil servants may be confronted with situations in which they believe, on the basis of their knowledge or expertise, that the course of action a minister favours would have sharply damaging consequences for the government or the country. What should higher civil servants do then? We use data gathered in two rounds of interviews with senior civil servants (Grades 1-3) in 1989-90 and 1993-94 to explore how far civil servants feel able to go in challenging either inappropriate ministerial requests for services or policies they believe to be sharply damaging. Senior civil servants are divided on the appropriate course of action in such circumstances.

Brexit, Trump and the special relationship:

The unexpected victories of Donald Trump in the United States 2016 Presidential campaign and of the Leave campaign in the British referendum on membership in the European Union have important similarities in terms of campaign strategy, rhetoric and social bases of support. They are exemplars of a wave of right-wing populism that has swept across advanced democracies. The triumph of Brexit also raises questions about the future relationship between the United Kingdom and United States. While it is too early to be certain about either the impact of Brexit or the future direction of the Trump Administration, and despite ties between the Trump Administration and British politicians who campaigned for or subsequently supported Brexit, the United Kingdom could become much less useful as a diplomatic and economic partner to the United States after leaving the European Union.

In a State

There has been considerable discussion of the decline of the nation-state. It is important, however, to set claims that the nation-state is in decline in historical context and to distinguish processes of state adaptation to crises from changes in the power of the state. The popularity of anti-state rhetoric in the 1980s and 1990s led many to confuse changes in the modes of state activity, of which there is much evidence, with a decline in the significance of the state, for which there is much less evidence.

The end of the Whitehall model

One of the most influential and apparently enduring models of the political‐bureaucratic relations has been the ‘Whitehall model’ derived from British practices. Yet the relationship between bureaucrats and politicians in Britain, often poorly understood in the past, has changed in recent years to such an extent that the continued existence of the ‘Whitehall model’ can be doubted. This article draws on published sources and, for background, interviews conducted since 1989 with higher (Grade III and above) civil servants and current or former ministers to explore how and why the Whitehall model is threatened with extinction. The wider implications of this development for British policy making and for the study of the relations between bureaucrats and politicians are explored.

The elasticity of reality and British support for the war in Afghanistan

Building on recent efforts to bridge the elites/events dichotomy in the wartime opinion literature, we test the explanatory power of, and offer a theoretical extension to, the elasticity of reality hypothesis using the case of British support for the war in Afghanistan from 2001 through 2010. Marshaling an array of aggregate, individual-level and experimental survey data, as well as an original database of 2677 content-coded newspaper articles, we find evidence that the unshaken elite consensus behind the Afghan campaign failed to sustain strong support for war, even among the most politically engaged segments of the British public. However, we do find evidence that elites retained a measure of influence over citizens’ prospective attitudes about the war’s future conduct, even as they were unable to influence more general and retrospective assessments of Britain’s involvement in the conflict. In stark contrast to theories of elite opinion leadership, a cross-partisan elite consensus failed to maintain strong public support among Britons for the war in Afghanistan. We argue that elites are better able to influence the public’s prospective policy preferences for war, even when they cannot shape the public’s retrospective assessments. Analyses of aggregate and individual-level public opinion data are consistent with our argument. An original survey experiment confirms the capacity of British elites to influence public’s willingness to stay the course in Afghanistan.

American Unions in Comparative Perspective

American unions have been stronger and more politically active than a simple “exceptionalist” perspective would suggest. However, the combination of economic trends evident in other advanced democracies combined with an unsympathetic legal environment has made the decline of private sector unions in the US particularly severe. The growth of unions in the public sector compensates only partially for this decline and creates additional problems for the cause of organized labor in general.