Toby S. James

Statecraft and the Assessment of National Political Leaders: The Case of New Labour and Tony Blair

This article makes the case for employing the statecraft approach (associated with the late Jim Bulpitt) to assess political leadership in Britain. Rather than ‘importing’ methodologies from the US, as some scholars have done, statecraft is preferred in the UK context for two main reasons. First, statecraft is concerned with the motives and behaviour of leadership cliques, and as a result, it is more appropriate for the collective leadership style that is a characteristic of parliamentary systems such as that in Britain. Second, statecraft goes some way towards incorporating a sense of structural context into our evaluation of leadership performance. This need to take into account the broader institutional constraints facing chief executives is something that an increasing number of academics in this area have been calling for. The utility of the approach is illustrated through a case study of the Blair administration.

Only in America? Executive partisan interest and the politics of election administration in Ireland, the UK and the USA

What role does executive partisan interest play in the reform of election administration? The forces for reform and continuity in the USA, the UK and Ireland from 1980 to 2007 are compared. Partisan involvement is found to be present in the USA and the UK but less so in Ireland. This is explained by conceiving partisan interest as a context-specific causal mechanism which varies according to three factors. First, an issue trigger may be required to bring election administration on to executive policy agenda. Five such triggers are identified in the cases. Second, the systemic institutional features of political systems shape and refract the (non-)politics of election administration by altering the incentives, opportunities for and constraints upon elite action. Executive interest in and action on election administration are influenced by the electoral system, party system and constitutional control over procedures. Finally, executive strategy on election administration is influenced by the reform process of other electoral institutions.

ELECTORAL ADMINISTRATION AND VOTER TURNOUT: TOWARDS AN INTERNATIONAL PUBLIC POLICY CONTINUUM

In recent years many states have reformed (or considered reforming) their electoral administration to increase turnout. This article uses the existing international literature on electoral administration and voter turnout to construct a continuum on which electoral procedures can be classified according to whether they have ‘restrictive’ or ‘expansive’ effects on participation. This continuum is argued to be a useful heuristic device for political scientists and policy‐makers seeking to identify the likely effects of reforms and can help to structure future debate and research.

Whatever happened to Régulation theory? The Régulation approach and local government revisited

This article contributes to an ongoing debate about the causal source of policy change by considering whether the Régulation approach, which has been largely discarded since the 1990s, can help to explain change in economic development polices at the level of local government in the UK. First, the ‘decline’ of the approach is explained by interviewing key exponents of the approach from the 1990s. Second, the approach is applied to a narrative of local economic policy in the City of York 1980–2006. In applying the Régulation approach, a number of problems are encountered. Chiefly, as a macro-approach, it lacks the finer tools to be able to explain all aspects of local change. Moreover, the approach is open to the charge of over-determinism by over-privileging the role of economic crisis in change. In the case of York, the cause of change has not been any crisis of Fordism but instead an acceptance of neo-liberalism in national and international spheres of governance, the inevitability of which may be overstated by exponents of the crisis of Fordism. However, the application of the Régulation approach to the case study reaffirms the importance of broader hegemonic political struggles and economic change to the study of local institutions, and the insights that more holistic analysis can make to the study of institutional change. Without some linkage to the broader economic and political hegemonic struggles, that the Régulation approach provides, meso-level theories are inherently wanting. The approach may be worth revisiting in the light of the new crisis of capitalism.

Researching Electoral Administration in America: Insights from the ‘Post-Florida’ era

This article reviews four new additions to the growing literature on electoral administration. It argues that each book adds usefully to the literature, but that there remains an absence of cross-national reflection. The books make important contributions by highlighting the importance of electoral administration, which is often overlooked in democracies; by making important normative contributions to the case for particular procedures; and by developing a number of methodologies that may be of use to researchers and practitioners. They remain, however, based almost exclusively on American elections, reflecting the bias of the broader literature. There is a need for a more comparative approach to the study of electoral administration so that: (a) lessons from ‘overseas’ can be taken to the US; (b) countries other than the US spend more time scrutinising the way in which they run elections; and (c) we can test the existing research findings in new contexts to deepen our understanding of frequently overlooked mechanics of electoral administration.

The cost of elections: the effects of public sector austerity on electoral integrity and voter engagement

Concerns have been raised that insufficient funding has been affecting the delivery of elections in many countries. This paper presents a case study of England and Wales from 2010–2016. It demonstrates that many local authorities saw major real terms cuts and were increasingly over-budget. Those subject to cuts were less likely to undertake public engagement activities. State efforts to encourage voter participation may therefore be a casualty of austerity.

The effects of centralising electoral management board design

ABSTRACT The public administration of elections frequently fails. Variation in the performance of electoral management bodies around the world has been demonstrated, illustrated by delays in the count, inaccurate or incomplete voter registers, or severe queues at polling stations. Centralising the management of the electoral process has often been proposed as a solution. There has been little theorisation and no empirical investigations into the effects that centralising an already decentralised system would have, however. This article addresses this lacuna by conceptualising centralisation through the literature on bureaucratic control and discretion. It then empirically investigates the effects through a case study of centralisation in two UK referendums. Semi-structured interviews were used with those who devised the policy instrument and those who were subject to it. The introduction of central directions had some of the desired effects such as producing more consistent services and eliminating errors. It also had side effects, however, such as reducing economic efficiency in some areas and overlooking local knowledge. Furthermore, the reforms caused a decline of staff morale, job satisfaction and souring of relations amongst stakeholder organisations. The process of making organisational change therefore warrants closer attention by policy-makers and future scholarship on electoral integrity.

Political leadership as statecraft? Aligning theory with praxis in conversation with British party leaders:

How should prime ministerial and party leadership be understood and assessed? One leading approach posits that we should assess them in terms of whether they achieve statecraft, that is, winning and maintain office in government. This article supplements and then assesses that theory by drawing from Pawson and Tilley’s concept of the realistic interview, in which practitioners are deployed as co-researchers to assess and revise theory. Unprecedented interviews with British party leaders were therefore undertaken. The article provides new empirical support for the framework because many of the key generative mechanisms identified within the neo-statecraft model were present in an analysis of the interviews. The interviews also allowed the limitations of the model to be demarcated. Statecraft focuses purely on cunning leadership where the aim is to maximise power and influence. This approach differs from leadership by conscience where the aim is to achieve normative goals.

The Pseudo-Democrat's Dilemma: Why Election Observation Became an International Norm by Susan D. Hyde. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 2011. 245pp., £22.95, ISBN 9780801449666

breadth of issues relating to climate change governance, the text achieves its objective of catering to both academic and non-academic tastes (p. 144).While specialists may have hoped for further in-depth analysis regarding global institutions and states’ behaviour within them, the strong theoretical insights and policy proposals that are included in its pages make this book necessary reading for anyone in the field. In sum therefore, The Governance of Climate Change provides a vital snapshot of the contemporary global climate change arena while also setting the agenda for future policy discussions.

Electoral Malpractice by Sarah Birch . Oxford : Oxford University Press , 2011 . 224pp., £50.00, ISBN 9780199606160

Hezbollah carried out attacks on the Shebaa Farms to pressure Israel to release Lebanese prisoners; Morocco reasserted its claims to Ceuta and Melilla on the eve of negotiations with Spain over fishing rights and immigration; and China increased its forces on the border with the Soviet Union in response to disagreements with the Soviet Union over Vietnam, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the stationing of Soviet troops in Mongolia. Wiegand fits her work into a gap in the literature on territorial disputes that has tended to focus on the settlement of territorial disputes either through measures of the value of the territory itself or the use of the territory for purposes of domestic political accountability or mobilisation. Wiegand’s insight is that the decision to pursue or resolve a territorial dispute is not itself an end of policy, but rather a means of achieving broader strategic objectives. This is a very intriguing argument that Wiegand skilfully weaves through her four cases. It also appears to have broader applicability, albeit perhaps not so much as the book suggests. In this regard, one might question some of Wiegand’s coding choices. Are the disputes between North and South Vietnam, North and South Korea and East and West Germany really territorial disputes in the same way that there are differences over the desert borders between Saudi Arabia and Yemen or Morocco and Mauritania? There are differences between claims that fundamentally reject a country’s statehood itself, an existential threat, as opposed to simply rejecting its sovereignty over a portion of territory. Those interested not only in territorial disputes but also in issue linkage will find Wiegand’s wellcrafted book a fruitful read.