Hosni Mubarak and the Future of Democracy in Egypt gives a detailed account of the degree of corruption, nepotism, and NDP-monopolized politics prevalent in Egypt until 2009. The insights provided in the book may assist in understanding the grave structural developments and shortcomings of the political system, which ultimately pushed the Egyptian people to the streets and explain why the Egyptian revolution has so far been considered unfinished,writes Inez von Weitershausen.

This book examines how and why the business world, commercial relations, and company activities have increasingly become subject to legal and constitutional forms of regulation and governance at an international level. Anyone with an interest in the current global economic and political establishments would find much to admire in this text, writes Luke McDonagh, but globalisation optimists beware: this pessimist’s account may not be the book for you.

A fundamental issue for economists is what determines civil conflict. One unsettled question is the relative importance of political freedoms versus economic development. This paper takes a new approach to provide an answer by using micro-data based on surveys of revolutionary preferences of 130,000 people living in 61 nations between 1980 and 1997. Controlling for personal characteristics, country and year fixed effects, more freedom and economic growth both reduce revolutionary support. Losing one level of freedom, equivalent to a shift from the US to Turkey, increases support for revolt by 4 percentage points. To reduce support by the same amount requires adding 14 percentage points on to the GDP growth rate. Being Muslim in a free country has no effect on the probability of supporting revolt compared to a non-religious person. However, being Muslim in a country that is not free increases it by 13 percentage points. Being Christian in a free country decreases the chance of supporting revolt by 4 percentage points, compared to a non-religious person, and in a not-free country by 1 percentage point.

Homeowners have incentives to control and limit local land development and anecdotic evidence suggests that ‘homevoters’ indeed actively support restrictive measures. Yet, US metro area level homeownership rates are strongly negatively related to corresponding measures of the restrictiveness of land use regulation. To shed light on these seemingly contradictory stylized facts, we present a dynamic model with a planning board that maximizes a weighted social welfare function (SWF). The SWF can be interpreted as the reduced form of various political economy models of voting and lobbying. We consider three special cases: a median voter model, a probabilistic voting model, and an ‘influence for sale’ model. In all three cases conditions exist that predict outcomes which are consistent with the presented stylized facts. Generally, our model predicts that the homeownership rate has an ambiguous effect on the regulatory restrictiveness.

The Daily Mail article asserting that Ralph Miliband hated Britain has caused outrage and sparked debate about the role of the press in political discourse. In this article Bart Cammaerts gives his views, writing that newspapers like the Daily Mail and what they represent are a festering cancer within British democracy, which is in a pretty dire state already. A potentially positive outcome of all this is that many people may go and actually read the work of Ralph Miliband.

Recent weeks have seen the tax avoidance of large multinationals such as Google and Apple brought into sharp relief, with their executives claiming that these companies pay the amount of tax that they are legally obligated to. In the wake of a European Council summit which focused on tax evasion, Bart Cammaerts argues that governments and political elites are largely complicit in enabling tax avoidance through creating loopholes and not enforcing regulations.

This paper examines the relationship between the concept of neutrality in community mediation and the inherently partisan nature of politics. Mediation theory often highlights the central importance of mediator neutrality in mediation practice. We examine the interplay between these two fields through an analysis of a donorsupported community mediation program in the Central and Western Terai, the belt of lowland plains in the south of Nepal. This paper tries to understand why, in areas where politician’s role in dispute settlement is considered highly biased, neutrality in mediation can still be an option for these politicians. This paper argues that, despite clear reasons for mediators to act in a biased way, there are also incentives for them to act neutrally. These incentives stem primarily from political concerns as related to authority and standing in the community. In a context where both disputants and politicians ‘shop’ between different dispute settlement mechanisms, this paper finds that these incentives influence where these groups choose to adjudicate cases. In this wider dispute settlement context, where politicians have incentives to be neutral in mediation, but partisan in other dispute settlement settings, there is a danger that while the ‘internal’ neutrality of community mediation might be upheld...

During the inception period of the JSRP, members of the consortium undertook a series of systematic reviews of the literature on key topics of concern to the programme. This paper is based on a systematic peer-led review of hybrid security arrangements in conflict affected areas. The authors sought to assess the extent of existing evidence for an end-user approach to security programming in such situations and to identify evidence gaps. The paper discusses the process of undertaking the evidence review and includes a detailed methodology. The authors critically assess the results and the existing evidence gaps and the implications for the JSRP agenda and for future research. The paper includes an annotated bibliography appendix.

The contemporary state has been the focus of considerable controversy – about whether it exists and has ontological status (or not); about how it may be delineated; and about the sense in which it operates as a unity or some form of integrated agency in relation to civil society, and viz a viz other states. I argue that the modern state in liberal democratic societies can be understood as a multi-system - the complex amalgam of ten different forms of state, which are held together or integrated by six main attractive and inter-connecting factors. States additionally cohere because of their endogenous dependence on a particular economic system, interactions with national culture, and the generic impact of state efficacy. If we are to make progress in analysing states, both political science and the social sciences more generally need to move on from previously over-simplistic concepts of what the unity of the state entails. On the one hand, to deny the existence of the state because of institutional multiplicity, or a diversity of organizational forms, is crude and ungrounded. On the other hand, traditional statism cannot be rescued by emphasizing just one form of the state, or over-weighting a particular integrative force. Instead we need to recognize the simultaneous systemic oneness and empirical diversity of the state as a multi-system.

England’s biggest cities will soon vote on whether or not they want to be run by directly elected mayors. The Institute for Government’s Sam Sims argues that mayoral governance offers significant benefits, but the centre must give mayors real power if the government is to achieve its decentralisation ambitions

Suki Ferguson finds Brown at 10 to be a candid gem of political history, in which the former Prime Minister comes across as a man of sincere principle.

Policy makers appear to be recognising that the lack of representativeness of both Parliament and the civil service is a problem. A better mix of backgrounds may also help the public rebuild some trust in political institutions. Mathew Flinders, Felicity Matthews and Christina Eason discuss recent research looking reasons behind the continued traditional make-up of public appointments.

Pairing Brown with Blair on a ballot paper might have been unthinkable for the Labour party, yet Michael Marsh, looking at the case of Ireland’s preference voting PR system, illustrates that the choices voters are faced with in the ballot box may play a stronger role in their choice of candidates than either their political knowledge or party loyalty and interest.

Paul Kelly believes that Wyn Grant’s The Development of a Discipline, which charts the nature of the systematic study of politics and how it entered the academy as an autonomous discipline, will appeal to many.

Increasing numbers of liberal economists are gravely worried that the UK has made a wrong turn in choosing an austerity budget. Here Professor John Van Reenen, Director of the LSE’s Centre for Economic Performance, explains why the budget measures fulfil only a political logic, and risk creating a double-dip recession.

British media and most commentators are not practised in understanding where power lies in a hung Parliament situation. Here Patrick Dunleavy explains what light political scientists can throw on the situation, using two kinds of power or influence measures.

The glacial pace of change in improving women’s representation in Parliament and British government has provoked some of the first substantial controversy querying what’s really changed in the coalition government’s ‘new style of politics’. Pippa Norris reviews the evidence of the UK’s lagging efforts to combat gender inequality in political life.

Nick Clegg’s political difficulties have recently worsened over the rushed effort to get the AV referendum accomplished by May 2011. Anthony Wells reads the runes on what voters think of the change at present and who would benefit if the Alternative Vote survives its key test.

This post originally appeared on Charlie Beckett’s blog on 4 September. Charlie Beckett is the Director of POLIS.