Martin Steven

Religious Lobbies in the European Union: from Dominant Church to Faith-Based Organisation?

Abstract The political behaviour of national, state or dominant churches in Western Europe is being affected by European Union (EU) integration in two ways. First, supranational legislation – especially the harmonisation of fundamental citizen rights in policy areas such as education and employment – has led to the political privileges that these churches have traditionally enjoyed being challenged. While the Amsterdam Treaty protects the right of the individual citizen to freedom of religious expression, the EU is an inherently secular body with no mention of Christianity in any of its treaties or directives. Second, the transfer of power to Brussels has meant that the territorial political influence of national churches is no longer clear, in any case. These two factors combined give evidence to suggest that this changing policy environment is leading churches increasingly to adopt interest-group behaviour. Does ‘ever closer union’ inevitably mean a less certain – if not necessarily less influential – political role for Christian churches throughout Europe?

Scottish devolution and national identity

In opening this special edition of National Identities we will introduce the papers herein, which take Scottish devolution as their starting point for reflecting on Scottish national identity. Before so doing, we contextualize these analyses by giving a background to devolution and to studies of Scottish national identity in general. We lay out some of the approaches taken thus far and, in particular, raise points for further debate, which authors in this issue will take further.

Framing Electoral Reform in the 2011 UK Alternative Vote Referendum Campaign

The 2011 British referendum on the electoral system offered voters a change within the majoritarian family from single-member plurality to the alternative vote. The alternative vote is not proportional, but the ‘yes’ campaign in the United Kingdom included small parties and ‘democracy sector’ organisations previously associated with advocating proportional representation. This anomalous behaviour can be explained by applying social movement theory, especially interpretations related to political opportunity structures and frame analysis. The Liberal Democrats, Electoral Reform Society and others had previously criticised the alternative vote, yet decided to campaign in favour of it. This led to an unclear framing of their objectives and, ultimately, their failure. 2011年英国就选举制进行的公投为这个多数决体系的选民提供了一种从简单多数到排序复选的变革。排序复选并非比例制，但英国的“yes”运动包括先前主张比例代表制的小党和“民主部门”的组织。这样的缺少一贯之道可以用社会运动的理论特别是政治—机会的结构和框架分析来解释。自由民主派、选举改革学会及其他先前批评排序复选制的组织又决定声援它。这造成其目标的模糊和最终的失败。

Consulting and compromising : the (non-)religious policy preferences of British MEPs

The UK provides an important case study when analysing the influence of religious attitudes and values on political behaviour in the European Union. Our research shows British members of the European Parliament (MEPs) to be relatively at ease working with the different faith-based organisations (FBOs) which seek to influence the European policy process – and much more so than many of their colleagues from other member-states. This can potentially be explained by the more ‘pluralist’ political culture which is prevalent in the UK, and can also be related to the comparatively high rates of non-church attendance among the British sample which facilitates their even-handedness towards different groups. This, in turn, produces a resistance to allowing religious factors to disproportionately influence European policymaking.

The Conservative Party and devolved national identities: Scotland and Wales compared

This article focuses on the role of national identity in the behaviour and performance of the Scottish Conservative Party – the main voice of opposition to devolution in the 1990s. In particular, it will address the apparent flat-lining of its popular vote, arguing that this is a direct consequence of the party doggedly adhering to a more traditional form of ‘unionist nationalism’. This can be contrasted with Wales, where the party has adapted well to devolution, and enjoyed a steady improvement in its electoral performances.

ELECTORAL REFORM AND DEMOCRATIC ENGAGEMENT

Nobel Economics Laureate, Amartya Sen, has argued that democracy is the twentieth century’s greatest achievement (1999: 3–4). It is by far the most popular form of political system globally, defined first and foremost by open and fair electoral participation—the purest concept of representation—and also by freedom of speech and movement. Yet, at what should be its ‘moment of triumph’, there instead hangs a question mark over its quality in advanced industrial western states. Perhaps the most obvious aspect to this problem is that, despite elections constituting the most pivotal element of what defines democracy, partisan identification has been in steady decline for several decades in countries with long-established systems of democratic governance (Dalton and Wattenberg 2000; Webb et al. 2002), while electoral turnout itself has been falling since the 1990s (Blais 2007). This decline is interpreted by many as being especially problematic when we consider that age also appears to be an important factor—younger people seem to be less and less likely to vote, while the demographic of party memberships is now skewed heavily towards the upper end of the age spectrum (Dalton 2008: 86). In issue 44(2) of Representation, Michael Saward comments on the ‘widespread sense that we are facing a crisis of representation’ (2008: 93). As a consequence, a considerable amount of scholarly attention has been devoted to the question of how to improve levels of democratic engagement in countries like the United States (US) and the United Kingdom (UK) where democracy is prized as something intrinsically linked to national identity and a highly successful global export (Putnam 2000; Stoker 2006). Indeed, a number of solutions are possible within the context of British politics: introducing term limits for elected politicians to revive the concept of politics being about public service rather than careerism; greater constitutional reform, including the introduction of a fully elected upper chamber, as well as devolving more power away from London and closer to people in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland; and, most directly, electoral reform—which would do away with the existence of ‘safe seats’ where there seems little point in people voting at all. With that last point in mind in particular, this special issue of Representation, a journal with a long and distinguished record of publishing informed contributions to the debate on electoral systems, focuses, as a case study, on a political system where such questions are especially pertinent—one of the constituent parts of the UK: Scotland. Since May 2007, four different voting systems have been operating in Scotland—making it effectively one of the world’s most prominent electoral reform testing laboratories. With a relatively homogeneous electorate of four million voters and a Northern European political culture which is sometimes compared to that of the Nordic states (Arter 2004), any lessons to be learned here about civic engagement clearly cannot be replicated in every system of democratic governance. Nevertheless, case studies are important in political science—for example, it is widely

Rhetoric and the Rise of the Scottish National Party

The electoral success of the Scottish National Party (SNP) in recent years owes much to its rhetoric. Whatever its ideological origins, the SNP currently espouses an ill-defined form of social democracy, and is thus properly understood as a party of the centre-left. The ideological repositioning of Labour after 1994 created a political opportunity for the SNP, which reinforced its nationalist appeal by claiming to be the only significant Scottish party capable of articulating the country’s traditional, ‘progressive’ outlook. Leaders like Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon have possessed ethos in abundance and, as a party of government after 2007, the SNP has established its logos. In short, by 2011 the party enjoyed something akin to rhetorical ‘hegemony’ in Scottish politics to match its remarkable electoral performances.

‘Euro-Realism’ in the 2014 European Parliament Elections: The European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) and the Democratic Deficit

The European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) emerged as the third largest ‘Euro-party’ after the 2014 European elections, and are now well-positioned to perform a central role alongside the European People’s Party and the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats in the eighth session of the European Parliament (EP). Despite this, relatively little is known about the views that ECR politicians represent, especially their core party ideology of ‘Euro-realism’. In this article, it is argued that the development of ECR since 2009 is ultimately rooted in a central desire by its member party politicians to reform the European Union by addressing its ‘democratic deficit’ without destroying the wider integration project altogether. More widely, ECR is the most visible vehicle for ‘soft’ Euro-scepticism in the EP, promoting ‘governance before policy’.