Joel D. Wolfe

Party Competition on the Internet in the United States and Britain

This article examines the prominence of Web sites of major and minor parties in the United States and the United Kingdom, comparing features such as search capabilities, membership forms, information on party organization and issues, characteristics of graphics, and currency of updates as well as their relative quality and sophistication.We also look at the prominence of major and minor parties in newspapers and magazines and in various search engines and sites for political junkies. We find that minor parties have a greater presence on the Web in the United Kingdom than in the United States, but even so, the sites of major parties in both countries are more prominent and sophisticated than those of minor parties, and major parties generally receive more media coverage than minor parties, both on-line and off-line.The data suggest that the established interests dominating most of the communications, transactions, elections, and political processes of advanced industrialized countries are extending their influence to these processes in cyberspace.

Power and Regulation in Britain

With the sell-off of the nationalized utilities, regulation became central to the way Britain is governed. The withdrawal of state ownership and provision, however, challenges agency models of state power, which suggest that state capacity increases only with increased resources. This paper suggests that distinguishing between direct and indirect power explains how diminishing state intervention can enhance state control. After reconceptualizing regulation in terms of these two media of power, the paper examines British utility regulations as the operations and effects of marketizing delegation. It shows how market processes operate as a medium of indirect control, permitting the core state to hold direct power in reserve and enhancing overall state power.

The Politics of economic adjustment : pluralism, corporatism, and privatization

Introduction Reorganizing Interest Representation: A Political Analysis of Privatization in Britain The Politics of Industrial Policy in the United States The Industrial Policy Controversy in West Germany: Organized Adjustment and the Emergence of Meso-Corporatism Neoliberalism and the Battle over Working-Time Reduction in West Germany Democracy at the Margins: The International System and Policy Change in France Industrial Adjustment in the French Steel Industry Deindustrialization, Economic Performance, and Industrial Policy: British and American Theories Applied to Italy Democracy and Economic Adjustment: A Comparative Analysis of Political Change Selected Bibliography Index

Who rules the EU? Pragmatism and power in European integration theory

Who rules the European Union? The answers of the main schools of European Union (EU) theory diverge: neofunctionalism highlights function, group pressure, entrepreneurial leadership; international relations realism privileges state interests; and neo‐institutionalisms favor the influence of incentive structures, organizational processes, or norms. These explanations reflect different concepts of power, producing irreconcilable disputes that expose the conflict among meta‐theoretical methods in the warranting of knowledge. In confronting this dilemma, Deweyan pragmatism provides a tool for investigating the way meta‐theoretical concepts ground ideas of power. Using this to examine the effects of philosophical assumptions in selected theories of the EU integration and policy‐making demonstrates the impact of meta‐concepts in shaping the analysis of power and calls for an alternative philosophical approach for studying who rules the EU.

Class formation and democracy: The decline of working‐class power in Britain

The debate about the future of working‐class power in Britain raises for class theory an important, if neglected, question about how internal politics affects class formation and power. To provide an answer, this article develops an analysis that conceptualises class representation as a particular power relation in a pluralist system, and assesses recent changes in the internal power relations in the labour movement. The conclusion that the fragmentation and disorientation of traditional practices of internal democracy has weakened the movements collective strength demonstrates that internal politics does matter to class formation.

The New Right and State Power

The fundamental difficulty facing British politicians in the late 1960s and 1970s was a failure of state power, not simply economic and geopolitical decline. Both political parties had been discredited by the end of the 1970s. As the crisis deepened, so ideological debate intensified. For the Conservatives, the ‘undermining of the traditional authority of the state that was thought to be occurring in the 1970s’ led to the development of the new right or Thatcherism (Barry, 1990, p. 21). This, along with efforts by the Labour Party to renew socialism marked what Raymond Plant refers to as ‘a tacit admission of the failure of the British state to govern efficiently, justly and authoritatively’ (1988, p. 9). Carried out in the discourse of economic language, this debate posed the question of how political control was to be reestablished.

Book Review: Charles F Andrain, Political Power and Economic Inequality: A Comparative Policy ApproachPolitical Power and Economic Inequality: A Comparative Policy Approach by AndrainCharles F. Plymouth: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014. 228pp., £49.95 (h/b), ISBN 978-1442229464

and the nature of being in power had been considered especially detrimental for populist politics (p. 3). However, the last decade has witnessed the populists’ rise to power either as ruling parties or coalition partners in Europe, and some of these parties have proved to be extremely durable. The pioneering study of Daniele Albertazzi and Duncan McDonnell, Populists in Power, focuses on this relatively new development in European politics. In contrast to the above-mentioned tendencies of the literature on populism, the authors argue that populism is neither necessarily limited to rapidly rising and disappearing personal parties nor destined to fail in incumbency (p. 3). In order to support their argument, the authors conducted in-depth interviews and questionnaires with the members of three populist parties that had recently been in positions of power in Italy and Switzerland. Albertazzi and McDonnell focused on the performance of Lega Nord and Popolo della Libertà in Italy between 2008 and 2011 and the Schweizerische Volkspartei in Switzerland between 2003 and 2007, evaluating the effect of their incumbency on their electoral performance. The authors also analysed these parties in terms of their ideological and organisational traits and evaluated to what extent these parties were successful at matching their pledges with their actions in government and persuading their members to accept the concessions required by incumbency. Through their clearly designed research, the authors of Populists in Power convincingly illustrate that populist parties are not destined to fail in government when it comes to achieving their goals and sustaining a considerable degree of ‘responsibility’. They do not necessarily lose votes as a result of incumbency either, and members of populist parties may even evaluate their parties’ performance in power positively, as the case of the Schweizerische Volkspartei makes particularly clear (pp. 165–167). The only lacuna in the book is the lack of any discussion regarding the numerous populist parties that remained in power for remarkably long periods in Latin America, but this does not change the relevance of the findings presented in the book regarding the destinies of populist parties in power within Europe. Hence, Populists in Power is indeed a pioneering and valuable contribution to our understanding of contemporary populism. Apart from its obvious significance to scholars already interested in populism, the extremely rich empirical material and the voices of populist party members presented throughout the book (particularly in chapter 7) make it an interesting read even for non-experts.

Power and Society: A Framework for Political Inquiry by Harold D. Lasswell and Abraham Kaplan. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2014. 295pp., £30.50, ISBN 9781412852807

on both normative and analytical grounds. I like the term’s connotations, yet I came away unclear as to what it actually signified here beyond a broad label for deliberating democrats of a generally Habermasian persuasion.A well-edited and engrossing collection, something nevertheless felt missing: an agonist ethos. Rhetoric – explicitly foregrounded here – involves argumentation and contestation. The editors indicate their acceptance of ‘political discussion as essentially agonist’ (albeit as only one of many ‘concerns’ that ‘inform [their] thinking’ [p. 7]), and Manfred Kraus points to this aḡon in his admirable chapter on the Sophists, but agonism is missing from both the index and the third section’s deliberative prescriptions.This is a shame. Nevertheless, the collection convinces that rhetorical citizenship is a concept worth pursuing further.

Pragmatism: An Introduction by Michael Bacon. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012. 221pp., £16.99, ISBN 978 0 7456 4665 7

In his survey of pragmatism, Michael Bacon explains the key ideas of its leading architects, from the original nineteenthand early twentieth-century founders to mid-century and contemporary philosophers. A contestable tradition, reflecting interactions with other philosophical influences, pragmatism includes a diverse array of major philosophers identifiable by the concepts they use rather than by their self-identification. Seeing pragmatism in this way, Bacon rejects the notion that pragmatism flourished with Pierce, James and Dewey and then declined after the Second World War, only resurfacing when Rorty published his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature in 1979. In the interim, Bacon shows, the analytic philosophers Quine, Sellars and Davidson appropriated pragmatist themes involving the role of language, meaning and communication to refine positivism. The neopragmatism of Rorty problematises realism and antirealism, attacking representationalism and advocating a romanticist aspiration for community self-creation and social progress, whereas that of Putnam finds facts and values interdependent and accountable to the real world. Continental and pragmatist themes merge in Habermas, whose acceptance of pragmatism’s vision of fallibilism, naturalism and socially constructed knowledge takes a transcendental turn, and in Bernstein’s use of Rorty, Gadamer and Habermas to reassess fallibilism and pluralism, objectivism and relativism, and democracy. Piercean themes are resurgent in Haack, whose epistemological project combines foundationalist and coherentist epistemological strategies, and in Misak, who argues that inquiry leads to truth and that truth finds confirmation by inquiry. Finally, the normative rationalist approach of Robert Brandon and the linguistic and anti-representationalist perspective of Huw Price exemplify pragmatist themes. In concluding, Bacon points to common themes, the focus on the practical, the concern to get things right, the recognition of fallibility of actions based on reason, and an inclination for meliorism. Overall, this is a concise, reliable and lucid overview of major pragmatist thinkers. Its inclusive perspective on pragmatism, while contestable, is instructive. It brings to light ideas of old and new contributors, though one might wish for overviews of others as well, for example George Herbert Mead or Cornell West, or chapters on the recent proliferation of work going on within the traditions of Pierce, James and Dewey. Nonetheless, Bacon’s wide-ranging overview expands our understanding of the pragmatist tradition as a perspective emphasising that humans rely on cognitive tools to mediate and reconstruct their relations with the world. Finally, its substantive achievement underscores the urgent need for a fuller exploration of the ways in which various pragmatisms provide new capacities for advancing political and social theory.

The State as Cultural Practice – By Mark Bevir and R. A. W. Rhodes

from war zones or the ramifications of photo and video shootings from prisons distributed globally) has not only resulted in a loss of control on behalf of traditional communications operations. It has also partially altered the mainstream media’s agenda and the whole context of societal and transnational communications. His case studies of the respective developments in the Iraq War since 2003 – the dialectical relationship between embedding efforts and blogging from below and, later on, the intertwinement of politically motivated attempts at sousveillance and rather apolitical habits of taking and sharing trophy shots at Abu Ghraib or postings in military blogs – are carefully argued, insightful and revealing.They should inevitably become required readings on the mediatisation of international relations as they diligently illuminate the underlying complex and at times ambiguous dynamics. Bakir’s conclusion that it more often than not has been acts of private, non-intended quasi-sousveillance that have resulted in media-political uproar (as against deliberate attempts at sousveillance), is fascinating and gives Mann’s traditional conception a different spin. It may thus be the de facto agenda-building effects of new media technologies and the recirculation of accounts established there in mainstream media that are to be tackled in future research. Alexander Spencer, in his study of how the so-called ‘new terrorism’ is being debated and ultimately covered in Western tabloids, shifts the focus away from the media environment to actual patterns of the construction of meaning. However, although he offers a lot of insights into recent trends and debates in (traditional, critical and post-critical) terrorism studies, he says – given the book’s title – surprisingly little on media themselves. This does not mean that the book is without merits; to the contrary, it offers, for instance, a lucid discussion of the research field ‘terrorism studies’ and its recent turn away from fruitless definitional debates. Consequently, as Spencer states, it is the various societal interpretations attributed discursively to terrorist acts as well as actors that matter most. Such a positioning certainly entails a healthy scepticism towards the notion of a ‘new’ quality of terrorism, which often goes unquestioned and seemingly implies ‘new’ counter-terrorism measures, too. And of course, such a constructivist turn in terrorism research opens up the whole field of methodological debates, that is, what to study, which phenomena to analyse (and how to do this). Here the book provides interesting inroads, especially in demarcating the difference between critical but still materialist terrorism researchers and constructivist yet critical proponents of the field. Spencer’s thoughts on that matter – even though they are presented in a slightly repetitive manner – will certainly not encounter much resistance in the camp of those already bent on constructivist thinking. It remains to be seen whether the traditionalists are convinced. As already said, one is however surprised that media in a meaningful way only surface in the fifth and penultimate chapter. Spencer here analyses what discursively established meanings/metaphors have prevailed in two tabloids’ constructions of terrorist acts and terrorism in general. He suggests that the notions of terrorism as ‘war’, ‘crime’, ‘natural’, as embodying the ‘uncivilised evil’ and a ‘disease’, have been most popular in the coverage of Germany’s Bild and Britain’s The Sun. And he suggests that there is a link between such specific constructions of the problem and various countermeasures taken in both countries. Although that may have been the case, and although the asserted linkages are intuitively plausible at a very general level, it seems that a bit more space and analysis would have been needed really to bring home the case of a thorough predication of terrorism (and ways of how to cope with it) through the media.