Nicholas Allen
Biographic Data
| ID | 3628381 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Nicholas Allen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Nicholas |
| FAMILY NAME | Allen |
| SIGNATURE | ALLEN N |
| AFFILIATIONS | Royal Holloway, University of London, London, UK |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3223-0770 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 240 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Transnationalism in Irish Literature and Culture
Transnationalism in Irish Literature and Culture offers a wide-ranging set of essays exploring the travels of Irish literature and culture over the last century and more. The essays focus on writers and artists whose work has been taken up and re-read overseas; on cultural producers who have engaged with transnational scales in their work; and on critical practices that pay attention to comparative, global, and planetary dimensions of Irish liter…
Why Was There a Hard Brexit? The British Legislative Party System, Divided Majorities and the Incentives for Factionalism
The UK parliament of 2017–2019 had to decide what form of Brexit, if any, it would accept in the government’s negotiations with the EU over a withdrawal agreement. Despite a large majority of MPs having supported Remain in the 2016 referendum, with most opposed to a ‘hard’ Brexit of looser ties between the UK and the EU, all attempts to pass a ‘soft’ Brexit failed. The final withdrawal agreement reflected a hard Brexit that was closer to the pref…
Interventions to Increase Sunscreen Use in Adults: A Review of the Literature
Skin cancers are the most common malignancy in Australia. Regular sunscreen use can reduce the incidence of cutaneous squamous cell carcinomas and actinic keratoses and has been associated with reducing the incidence of basal cell carcinomas and melanomas. However, sunscreen effectiveness is limited by the failure of the population to use it routinely. Interventions that promote the daily application of sunscreen may reduce the morbidity, mortali…
Ireland, Literature, and the Coast: Seatangled
The islands of Ireland are shaped by their relationships with land and sea. This book is a study of the various and changing ways in which literature has drawn the coast in lines that shape the contours of cultural experience. The literary and historical study of the sea has swelled in the last decade, as has an interest in the littoral and the archipelagic. Beginning with the early works of William Butler Yeats, this book travels through the div…
Coastal Works
In all the complex cultural history of the islands of Britain and Ireland, the idea of the coast as a significant representative space is critical. For many artists, coastal space has figured as a site from which to braid ideas of empire, nation, region, and archipelago. They have been drawn to the coast as a zone of geographical uncertainty in which the self-definitions of the nation founder; a peripheral space of vestigial wildness, of island r…
‘Felt Routes’: Culture of the Atlantic Edge
In ‘Ode’ (1935), Louis MacNeice writes of the necessity to ‘become the migrating bird following felt routes...And without soaring or swerving win by ignoring / The endlessly curving sea and so come to one’s home’. Much has been written about MacNeice’s search for ‘home’, his fraught relationship with Ulster, Ireland, and England, and about the difficulty of his ‘place’ within either Irish or English literary traditions. John Kerrigan has suggeste…
Finding a niche? Challenger parties and issue emphasis in the 2015 televised leaders’ debates
Do leaders of ‘challenger’ parties adopt a ‘niche’ strategy in national televised debates? This article answers this question by analysing the content of the two multiparty televised leaders’ debates that took place ahead of the 2015 British general election. Using computer-aided text analysis (CATA), it provides reliable and valid measures of what the leaders said in both debates and develops our theoretical understanding of how challenger-party…
Brexit, Butchery and Boris: Theresa May and Her First Cabinet
This note analyses the formation of Theresa May's first Cabinet. It locates her appointments against the backdrop of the Brexit referendum and compares them to those of other Prime Ministers who took office during the lifetime of a parliament. The scale of May's reconstruction marks her out as one of the readier 'butchers' of Downing Street. It demonstrated her acceptance of the Brexit referendum result, signalled a clear break with Cameron and s…
Public Foreplay’ or Programmes for Government? The Content of the 2015 Party Manifestos
This article analyses the content of the 2015 British General Election manifestos using manually derived Manifesto Project estimates and computer-assisted text analysis (CATA). It analyses the parties’ policy emphases, investigates their ideological positioning and movement, and further compares their policy agendas with voters’ concerns. It finds the three main parties moved slightly leftwards but continued to agree on the broad thrust of econom…
Imagining the Rising
Several of the leaders of the Rising—Patrick Pearse, Thomas McDonagh, and James Connolly—wrote plays, and many were closely engaged in theatrical enterprises (often conceived as alternatives to the Abbey Theatre) in the years leading up to the Easter Rising in 1916. Indeed, there is an argument that Easter 1916 itself was conceived as a public performance, albeit a performance with life-and-death consequences. This chapter considers the theatrica…
Global burden of diseases, injuries, and risk factors for young people's health during 1990–2013: A systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2013
Honesty above all else? Expectations and perceptions of political conduct in three established democracies
Experiencing gender in UK political science: The results of a practitioner survey
Does gender matter in the way in which we ‘perform’ academia? Drawing on the results of a practitioner survey, we argue that gender does matter, culturally and structurally, and can be institutionalised so that women are disadvantaged. This is not to deny women’s agency or the advances that they have made. Rather, we highlight the inequality of the playing field in which the academic endeavour is conducted. Uniquely, we ask UK political scientist…
Process Preferences and British Public Opinion: Citizens' Judgements about Government in an Era of Anti-politics
This article explores British citizens' evaluations of political processes against the backdrop of wider political disengagement. It adapts Hibbing and Theiss-Morse's framework for measuring attitudes in both ‘process space’ and ‘policy space’ and, drawing on data from a survey fielded in March 2011, analyses the factors that shape Britons' preferences concerning political decision making. It also analyses the relative importance of policy and pr…
Judging politicians: The role of political attentiveness in shaping how people evaluate the ethical behaviour of their leaders
Political theorists have developed well‐defined normative understandings of what constitutes ethical political conduct. Based on democratic theory as well as the demands of practical politics, these understandings prescribe certain types of behaviour and proscribe other types. However, it is unclear to what extent this normative framework has resonance for ordinary citizens. This article demonstrates that attention to politics tends to increase t…
Timothy Heppell, Choosing the Labour leader: Labour leadership elections from Wilson to Brown, reviewed by Nicholas Allen
No Sex Scandals Please, We’re French: French Attitudes towards Politicians’ Public and Private Conduct
The notion of distinct ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres underpins much normative and practical engagement with political misconduct. What is less clear is whether citizens draw distinctions between misdemeanours in the ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres, and whether they judge these in systematically different ways. This paper explores attitudes to political misconduct in France. French citizens are often said to be particularly relaxed about politicia…
Rules, Strategies and Words: The Content of the 2010 Prime Ministerial Debates
This article investigates the verbal content of the 2010 prime ministerial debates using computer-aided text analysis (CATA) and functional analysis. It seeks to provide reliable measures of what the leaders said, develop our theoretical understanding of televised debates in British elections, open up the 2010 debates for potential comparison with others, and provide additional evidence by which the democratic value of the debates might be assess…
The role of political trust in conditioning perceptions of corruption
Political trust and corruption have both elicited considerable academic and popular commentary in recent years. Much attention has been focused on the extent to which corruption has contributed to citizens’ increasing distrust of their politicians. But little attention has been paid to the possibility that distrust may condition responses to alleged corruption, and no work has hitherto demonstrated the veracity of this relationship in a mature de…
Reputations and Research Quality in British Political Science: The Importance of Journal and Publisher Rankings in the 2008 RAE
Research Highlights and Abstract The article seeks to make a contribution in the following areas: Departments that submitted a large proportion of books published with a top university press tended to do much better in the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), especially in respect of their 4* rating. Departments that submitted large numbers of top-10 journal articles as a proportion of their outputs tended to get higher 4* ratings than depart…
On either side of a moat? Elite and mass attitudes towards right and wrong
This article develops a cognitive institutionalist account of mass and elite evaluations of political ethics, which is tested on a new dataset from the United Kingdom. The analysis explores the extent of contemporary disagreement among British political elites and those they represent by comparing responses to questions asked in a representative survey of the public with similar questions asked of incumbent MPs and parliamentary candidates. There…
Democracy-Speak: Party Manifestos and Democratic Values in Britain, France and Germany
This article analyses changes in party-manifesto references to democracy in post-war Britain, the French Fifth Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany in order to explore changes in political parties' statements about democracy. It finds that in recent decades parties in all three countries have generally become more supportive of and more vocal in their calls for citizen participation in political decision-making, with a related increase in…
Off With Their Heads: British Prime Ministers and the Power to Dismiss
The British prime minister’s power to appoint and dismiss ministers is probably his most important single power. This article explores how prime ministers from Macmillan to Blair have used that power. The article considers the criteria that prime ministers use when choosing to appoint or dismiss individuals from office before examining the calculations and miscalculations that prime ministers have made in practice. Finally, the article analyses t…
Keeping MPs Honest: Ethics Reforms in the British House of Commons
This article examines a series of ethics reforms instituted by the British House of Commons in 1995 (the Nolan reforms) and compares them with further changes introduced in 2009. Drawing on a range of sources, it describes the impact of the Nolan reforms on the practice of ethics regulation at Westminster, and, placing the reforms in the broader context of British legislative ethics, it reflects on some of their consequences. It concludes by noti…
Exploring the Inland Empire: Life, Work, and Injustice in Southern California's Retail Fortress
Process Preferences and British Public Opinion: Citizens' Judgements about Government in an Era of Anti-politics
This article explores British citizens' evaluations of political processes against the backdrop of wider political disengagement. It adapts Hibbing and Theiss-Morse's framework for measuring attitudes in both ‘process space’ and ‘policy space’ and, drawing on data from a survey fielded in March 2011, analyses the factors that shape Britons' preferences concerning political decision making. It also analyses the relative importance of policy and pr…
Off With Their Heads: British Prime Ministers and the Power to Dismiss
The British prime minister’s power to appoint and dismiss ministers is probably his most important single power. This article explores how prime ministers from Macmillan to Blair have used that power. The article considers the criteria that prime ministers use when choosing to appoint or dismiss individuals from office before examining the calculations and miscalculations that prime ministers have made in practice. Finally, the article analyses t…
"Machiavellian" Intelligence as a Basis for the Evolution of Cooperative Dispositions
How to promote cooperative behavior is classically solved by incentives that lead self-interested individuals in socially desirable directions, but by now well-established laboratory results show that people often do act cooperatively, even at significant cost to themselves. These results suggest that cooperative dispositions might be an evolved part of human nature. Yet such dispositions appear inconsistent with the "Machiavellian intelligence" …
The role of political trust in conditioning perceptions of corruption
Political trust and corruption have both elicited considerable academic and popular commentary in recent years. Much attention has been focused on the extent to which corruption has contributed to citizens’ increasing distrust of their politicians. But little attention has been paid to the possibility that distrust may condition responses to alleged corruption, and no work has hitherto demonstrated the veracity of this relationship in a mature de…
On either side of a moat? Elite and mass attitudes towards right and wrong
This article develops a cognitive institutionalist account of mass and elite evaluations of political ethics, which is tested on a new dataset from the United Kingdom. The analysis explores the extent of contemporary disagreement among British political elites and those they represent by comparing responses to questions asked in a representative survey of the public with similar questions asked of incumbent MPs and parliamentary candidates. There…
A New Ethical World of British MPs
Following a series of financial scandals in the early 1990s, the House of Commons implemented new ethics rules and regulatory procedures, including a Code of Conduct, a ban on paid advocacy, a Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards and a Select Committee on Standards and Privileges. In the absence of hard data about parliamentary integrity and the prevalence or otherwise of unethical parliamentary conduct, this paper explores the possible effec…
Experiencing gender in UK political science: The results of a practitioner survey
Does gender matter in the way in which we ‘perform’ academia? Drawing on the results of a practitioner survey, we argue that gender does matter, culturally and structurally, and can be institutionalised so that women are disadvantaged. This is not to deny women’s agency or the advances that they have made. Rather, we highlight the inequality of the playing field in which the academic endeavour is conducted. Uniquely, we ask UK political scientist…
Why Was There a Hard Brexit? The British Legislative Party System, Divided Majorities and the Incentives for Factionalism
The UK parliament of 2017–2019 had to decide what form of Brexit, if any, it would accept in the government’s negotiations with the EU over a withdrawal agreement. Despite a large majority of MPs having supported Remain in the 2016 referendum, with most opposed to a ‘hard’ Brexit of looser ties between the UK and the EU, all attempts to pass a ‘soft’ Brexit failed. The final withdrawal agreement reflected a hard Brexit that was closer to the pref…
Public Foreplay’ or Programmes for Government? The Content of the 2015 Party Manifestos
This article analyses the content of the 2015 British General Election manifestos using manually derived Manifesto Project estimates and computer-assisted text analysis (CATA). It analyses the parties’ policy emphases, investigates their ideological positioning and movement, and further compares their policy agendas with voters’ concerns. It finds the three main parties moved slightly leftwards but continued to agree on the broad thrust of econom…
Moves on a Chess Board’: A Spatial Model of British Prime Ministers' Powers over Cabinet Formation
We use an institutional rational choice approach to help us understand how prime ministers in the UK make cabinet appointments and the implications for prime ministerial power. Assuming that prime ministers attempt to form a cabinet so as to get an overall package of policies as close as possible to their ideal, we show why the trade-offs they face are so complex, why apparently common-sense rules for making appointments might not always work wel…
Brexit, Butchery and Boris: Theresa May and Her First Cabinet
This note analyses the formation of Theresa May's first Cabinet. It locates her appointments against the backdrop of the Brexit referendum and compares them to those of other Prime Ministers who took office during the lifetime of a parliament. The scale of May's reconstruction marks her out as one of the readier 'butchers' of Downing Street. It demonstrated her acceptance of the Brexit referendum result, signalled a clear break with Cameron and s…
No Sex Scandals Please, We’re French: French Attitudes towards Politicians’ Public and Private Conduct
The notion of distinct ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres underpins much normative and practical engagement with political misconduct. What is less clear is whether citizens draw distinctions between misdemeanours in the ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres, and whether they judge these in systematically different ways. This paper explores attitudes to political misconduct in France. French citizens are often said to be particularly relaxed about politicia…
Democracy-Speak: Party Manifestos and Democratic Values in Britain, France and Germany
This article analyses changes in party-manifesto references to democracy in post-war Britain, the French Fifth Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany in order to explore changes in political parties' statements about democracy. It finds that in recent decades parties in all three countries have generally become more supportive of and more vocal in their calls for citizen participation in political decision-making, with a related increase in…
Judging politicians: The role of political attentiveness in shaping how people evaluate the ethical behaviour of their leaders
Political theorists have developed well‐defined normative understandings of what constitutes ethical political conduct. Based on democratic theory as well as the demands of practical politics, these understandings prescribe certain types of behaviour and proscribe other types. However, it is unclear to what extent this normative framework has resonance for ordinary citizens. This article demonstrates that attention to politics tends to increase t…
Rules, Strategies and Words: The Content of the 2010 Prime Ministerial Debates
This article investigates the verbal content of the 2010 prime ministerial debates using computer-aided text analysis (CATA) and functional analysis. It seeks to provide reliable measures of what the leaders said, develop our theoretical understanding of televised debates in British elections, open up the 2010 debates for potential comparison with others, and provide additional evidence by which the democratic value of the debates might be assess…
Honesty above all else? Expectations and perceptions of political conduct in three established democracies
Keeping MPs Honest: Ethics Reforms in the British House of Commons
This article examines a series of ethics reforms instituted by the British House of Commons in 1995 (the Nolan reforms) and compares them with further changes introduced in 2009. Drawing on a range of sources, it describes the impact of the Nolan reforms on the practice of ethics regulation at Westminster, and, placing the reforms in the broader context of British legislative ethics, it reflects on some of their consequences. It concludes by noti…
Finding a niche? Challenger parties and issue emphasis in the 2015 televised leaders’ debates
Do leaders of ‘challenger’ parties adopt a ‘niche’ strategy in national televised debates? This article answers this question by analysing the content of the two multiparty televised leaders’ debates that took place ahead of the 2015 British general election. Using computer-aided text analysis (CATA), it provides reliable and valid measures of what the leaders said in both debates and develops our theoretical understanding of how challenger-party…
Reputations and Research Quality in British Political Science: The Importance of Journal and Publisher Rankings in the 2008 RAE
Research Highlights and Abstract The article seeks to make a contribution in the following areas: Departments that submitted a large proportion of books published with a top university press tended to do much better in the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), especially in respect of their 4* rating. Departments that submitted large numbers of top-10 journal articles as a proportion of their outputs tended to get higher 4* ratings than depart…
The Evolution of Political Intelligence: Simulation Results
Several bodies of theory develop the idea that the intelligence of highly social animals – most interestingly, humans – is significantly organized around the adaptive problems posed by their sociality. By this ‘political intelligence’ hypothesis, sociality selects for, among other attributes, capacities for ‘manipulating’ information others can gather about one's own future behaviour, and for ‘mindreading’ such manipulations by others. Yet we hav…
Exploring the Inland Empire: Life, Work, and Injustice in Southern California's Retail Fortress
The Evolution of Political Intelligence: Simulation Results
Several bodies of theory develop the idea that the intelligence of highly social animals – most interestingly, humans – is significantly organized around the adaptive problems posed by their sociality. By this ‘political intelligence’ hypothesis, sociality selects for, among other attributes, capacities for ‘manipulating’ information others can gather about one's own future behaviour, and for ‘mindreading’ such manipulations by others. Yet we hav…
"Machiavellian" Intelligence as a Basis for the Evolution of Cooperative Dispositions
How to promote cooperative behavior is classically solved by incentives that lead self-interested individuals in socially desirable directions, but by now well-established laboratory results show that people often do act cooperatively, even at significant cost to themselves. These results suggest that cooperative dispositions might be an evolved part of human nature. Yet such dispositions appear inconsistent with the "Machiavellian intelligence" …
A New Ethical World of British MPs
Following a series of financial scandals in the early 1990s, the House of Commons implemented new ethics rules and regulatory procedures, including a Code of Conduct, a ban on paid advocacy, a Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards and a Select Committee on Standards and Privileges. In the absence of hard data about parliamentary integrity and the prevalence or otherwise of unethical parliamentary conduct, this paper explores the possible effec…
Moves on a Chess Board’: A Spatial Model of British Prime Ministers' Powers over Cabinet Formation
We use an institutional rational choice approach to help us understand how prime ministers in the UK make cabinet appointments and the implications for prime ministerial power. Assuming that prime ministers attempt to form a cabinet so as to get an overall package of policies as close as possible to their ideal, we show why the trade-offs they face are so complex, why apparently common-sense rules for making appointments might not always work wel…
Ireland and Books
Book Review| January 01 2009 Ireland and Books Raymond Gillespie and Andrew Hadfield, eds. The Oxford History of the Irish Book, Volume III: The Irish Book in English, 1550-1800 (Oxford: Oxford Univ., 2006). Pp. 477. 12 ills. $160. ISBN 0-19-924705-6 Nicholas Allen Nicholas Allen Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Eighteenth-Century Life (2009) 33 (1): 67–70. https://doi.org/10.1215/00982601-2008-027 Views Icon Views Artic…
Democracy-Speak: Party Manifestos and Democratic Values in Britain, France and Germany
This article analyses changes in party-manifesto references to democracy in post-war Britain, the French Fifth Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany in order to explore changes in political parties' statements about democracy. It finds that in recent decades parties in all three countries have generally become more supportive of and more vocal in their calls for citizen participation in political decision-making, with a related increase in…
Off With Their Heads: British Prime Ministers and the Power to Dismiss
The British prime minister’s power to appoint and dismiss ministers is probably his most important single power. This article explores how prime ministers from Macmillan to Blair have used that power. The article considers the criteria that prime ministers use when choosing to appoint or dismiss individuals from office before examining the calculations and miscalculations that prime ministers have made in practice. Finally, the article analyses t…
Keeping MPs Honest: Ethics Reforms in the British House of Commons
This article examines a series of ethics reforms instituted by the British House of Commons in 1995 (the Nolan reforms) and compares them with further changes introduced in 2009. Drawing on a range of sources, it describes the impact of the Nolan reforms on the practice of ethics regulation at Westminster, and, placing the reforms in the broader context of British legislative ethics, it reflects on some of their consequences. It concludes by noti…
Exploring the Inland Empire: Life, Work, and Injustice in Southern California's Retail Fortress
Reputations and Research Quality in British Political Science: The Importance of Journal and Publisher Rankings in the 2008 RAE
Research Highlights and Abstract The article seeks to make a contribution in the following areas: Departments that submitted a large proportion of books published with a top university press tended to do much better in the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), especially in respect of their 4* rating. Departments that submitted large numbers of top-10 journal articles as a proportion of their outputs tended to get higher 4* ratings than depart…
On either side of a moat? Elite and mass attitudes towards right and wrong
This article develops a cognitive institutionalist account of mass and elite evaluations of political ethics, which is tested on a new dataset from the United Kingdom. The analysis explores the extent of contemporary disagreement among British political elites and those they represent by comparing responses to questions asked in a representative survey of the public with similar questions asked of incumbent MPs and parliamentary candidates. There…
Rules, Strategies and Words: The Content of the 2010 Prime Ministerial Debates
This article investigates the verbal content of the 2010 prime ministerial debates using computer-aided text analysis (CATA) and functional analysis. It seeks to provide reliable measures of what the leaders said, develop our theoretical understanding of televised debates in British elections, open up the 2010 debates for potential comparison with others, and provide additional evidence by which the democratic value of the debates might be assess…
The role of political trust in conditioning perceptions of corruption
Political trust and corruption have both elicited considerable academic and popular commentary in recent years. Much attention has been focused on the extent to which corruption has contributed to citizens’ increasing distrust of their politicians. But little attention has been paid to the possibility that distrust may condition responses to alleged corruption, and no work has hitherto demonstrated the veracity of this relationship in a mature de…
Timothy Heppell, Choosing the Labour leader: Labour leadership elections from Wilson to Brown, reviewed by Nicholas Allen
No Sex Scandals Please, We’re French: French Attitudes towards Politicians’ Public and Private Conduct
The notion of distinct ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres underpins much normative and practical engagement with political misconduct. What is less clear is whether citizens draw distinctions between misdemeanours in the ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres, and whether they judge these in systematically different ways. This paper explores attitudes to political misconduct in France. French citizens are often said to be particularly relaxed about politicia…
Process Preferences and British Public Opinion: Citizens' Judgements about Government in an Era of Anti-politics
This article explores British citizens' evaluations of political processes against the backdrop of wider political disengagement. It adapts Hibbing and Theiss-Morse's framework for measuring attitudes in both ‘process space’ and ‘policy space’ and, drawing on data from a survey fielded in March 2011, analyses the factors that shape Britons' preferences concerning political decision making. It also analyses the relative importance of policy and pr…
Judging politicians: The role of political attentiveness in shaping how people evaluate the ethical behaviour of their leaders
Political theorists have developed well‐defined normative understandings of what constitutes ethical political conduct. Based on democratic theory as well as the demands of practical politics, these understandings prescribe certain types of behaviour and proscribe other types. However, it is unclear to what extent this normative framework has resonance for ordinary citizens. This article demonstrates that attention to politics tends to increase t…
Imagining the Rising
Several of the leaders of the Rising—Patrick Pearse, Thomas McDonagh, and James Connolly—wrote plays, and many were closely engaged in theatrical enterprises (often conceived as alternatives to the Abbey Theatre) in the years leading up to the Easter Rising in 1916. Indeed, there is an argument that Easter 1916 itself was conceived as a public performance, albeit a performance with life-and-death consequences. This chapter considers the theatrica…
Global burden of diseases, injuries, and risk factors for young people's health during 1990–2013: A systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2013
Honesty above all else? Expectations and perceptions of political conduct in three established democracies
Experiencing gender in UK political science: The results of a practitioner survey
Does gender matter in the way in which we ‘perform’ academia? Drawing on the results of a practitioner survey, we argue that gender does matter, culturally and structurally, and can be institutionalised so that women are disadvantaged. This is not to deny women’s agency or the advances that they have made. Rather, we highlight the inequality of the playing field in which the academic endeavour is conducted. Uniquely, we ask UK political scientist…
Coastal Works
In all the complex cultural history of the islands of Britain and Ireland, the idea of the coast as a significant representative space is critical. For many artists, coastal space has figured as a site from which to braid ideas of empire, nation, region, and archipelago. They have been drawn to the coast as a zone of geographical uncertainty in which the self-definitions of the nation founder; a peripheral space of vestigial wildness, of island r…
‘Felt Routes’: Culture of the Atlantic Edge
In ‘Ode’ (1935), Louis MacNeice writes of the necessity to ‘become the migrating bird following felt routes...And without soaring or swerving win by ignoring / The endlessly curving sea and so come to one’s home’. Much has been written about MacNeice’s search for ‘home’, his fraught relationship with Ulster, Ireland, and England, and about the difficulty of his ‘place’ within either Irish or English literary traditions. John Kerrigan has suggeste…
Finding a niche? Challenger parties and issue emphasis in the 2015 televised leaders’ debates
Do leaders of ‘challenger’ parties adopt a ‘niche’ strategy in national televised debates? This article answers this question by analysing the content of the two multiparty televised leaders’ debates that took place ahead of the 2015 British general election. Using computer-aided text analysis (CATA), it provides reliable and valid measures of what the leaders said in both debates and develops our theoretical understanding of how challenger-party…
Brexit, Butchery and Boris: Theresa May and Her First Cabinet
This note analyses the formation of Theresa May's first Cabinet. It locates her appointments against the backdrop of the Brexit referendum and compares them to those of other Prime Ministers who took office during the lifetime of a parliament. The scale of May's reconstruction marks her out as one of the readier 'butchers' of Downing Street. It demonstrated her acceptance of the Brexit referendum result, signalled a clear break with Cameron and s…
Political science (23 works) · Law (20 works) · Sociology (20 works) · Politics (18 works) · Law (17 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (12 works) · Economics (10 works) · History (9 works) · Public Administration (9 works) · Political economy (8 works)