The 2008 global financial crisis unexpectedly thrust the nation state back to the centre of political and economic decision-making, and left much-vaunted global policy institutions struggling ineffectually. Yet Patrick Dunleavy argues that the huge government interventions triggered by the collapse of the economic ‘boom’ years have now very quickly sparked perverse efforts to deny that these events happened. A strong reluctance to recognise that society depends upon the state across many dimensions has been compounded by the sovereign debt crisis – as smaller European states buckle under the burden of forcibly socialized bank debts. Meanwhile the decline of west and the rise of the east and south in world politics increase the unease and anger in western public opinion

Alasdair Cochrane considers animal welfare and rationality in his new book, as reviewed by Richard Seymour.

The 2008-11 economic crisis has dramatically increased the role of the (nation) state, which re-emerged as the inescapable mainstay of liberal capitalism and the rescuer of last resort for the weak global policy system, which crumbled into ineffectuality when the chips were down. But equally rapidly a strong aversive reaction to state dependency has emerged on both sides of the Atlantic. Patrick Dunleavy continues his exploration of how the pushback to ‘hating the state’ will affect future scenarios. The political and ideological right on both sides of the Atlantic is already opportunistically exploiting the increase in state borrowing and deficits to push through ‘shock doctrine’ privatizations and long-run reductions in the role of government.

The Conservative-Liberal Democrat government’s Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill will completely change the UK’s electoral map, in the cause of making all Westminster constituencies exactly the same size. Yet the political and community impacts of seats cuts and redistributions are enormous. And Ron Johnston finds a worrying gap in the accountability of the new system for boundary review.

The British and American response to the ‘global war on terror’ has put a premium on secrecy in the name of ‘national security.’ Adam Brown argues that the UK government has covered-up both past human rights abuses by its own or allied armed forces and intelligence services, and its collusion with Islamic extremists for political and economic expediency. Yet both policies denying transparency have ultimately made Britain and the West less secure

While others have tried to look into their crystal balls and predict the effects of the government’s Comprehensive Spending Review on the economy and society, it is just as important to look at how it was carried out. Professor George Jones argues that the political games and ploys used reflect the realities of cabinet government

The Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP) provides the only time series of estimated party policy positions in political science and has been extensively used in a wide variety of applications. Recent work (e.g., Benoit, Laver, and Mikhaylov 2009; Klingemann et al. 2006) focuses on nonsystematic sources of error in these estimates that arise from the text generation process. Our concern here, by contrast, is with error that arises during the text coding process since nearly all manifestos are coded only once by a single coder. First, we discuss reliability and misclassification in the context of hand-coded content analysis methods. Second, we report results of a coding experiment that used trained human coders to code sample manifestos provided by the CMP, allowing us to estimate the reliability of both coders and coding categories. Third, we compare our test codings to the published CMP "gold standard" codings of the test documents to assess accuracy and produce empirical estimates of a misclassification matrix for each coding category. Finally, we demonstrate the effect of coding misclassification on the CMP's most widely used index, its left-right scale. Our findings indicate that misclassification is a serious and systemic problem with the current CMP data set and coding process...

Matthew Goodwin‘s recent book will be essential reading for those interested in studying recent British political history, finds Matthew Partridge.

Matthew Partridge reviews a book on the corruption and corporatism at work in Tunisia, and how the rhetoric of “modernisation” was used in some cases to justify policies that increased the power of the state.

The coalition government at Westminster has promised more devolution to Scotland. But in May 2011 Scottish voters gave SNP leader Alex Salmond a clear majority in the Scottish Parliament, thus making a referendum on secession from the UK inevitable by 2014. Rob Johns, James Mitchell and Chris Carman from the Scottish Election Study read the runes on what Scots voters intended at this historic election, and find that they were overwhelmingly rewarding Salmond and the SNP for effective leadership and government at Holyrood. The 2011 election may hence be more ‘ordinary’ than it appears, with voters responding to the same political cues that matter across the UK.

The government’s proposals to reform the House of Lords are only the latest in a long line of initiatives. Iain McLean takes an in-depth history of movements to reform the House of Lords, and finds that while over much of the 20th century, political parties fought over reform, 2010 was the first time that an elected upper house was in the manifestos of all three major parties.

One feature of modern political life is the ‘revolving door’ between business, government, and the civil service. Liz David-Barrett argues that this close relationship can often lead to abuses of office and influence, and that our current system of self-regulation is no longer working.

The summer marching season has again seen violence in Northern Ireland. Jon Tonge and James McAuley have conducted the first-ever membership survey of the Orange Order to garner their views on religion and politics. The results show that its members are steadfast supporters of their faith and their Britishness.

We should welcome the government’s reforms to overhaul the House of Lords, writes Graham Allen MP, the elected Chair of the Select Committee on Political and Constitutional Reform, as they stand to lead us from our current unacceptable arrangements into a world-leading democratic practice

The combination of coalition government and the modern media is unprecedented in UK political history. Dr Nick Anstead considers the relationship between coalition government and the media since May 2010, looking back to Stanley Baldwin’s announcement coalition government of 1931, and to the present coalition’s relationship with 24 hour news and online media.

Can electoral rules be designed to achieve political ideals such as accurate representation of voter preferences, accountable governments, and strong economic performance? The academic literature commonly divides electoral systems into two types, majoritarian and proportional, and asserts that the choice between these implies a straightforward trade-off by which having more of an ideal that a majoritarian system provides implies less of something that PR delivers in equal measure. We posit that these trade-offs are better characterized as non-linear and that one can gain most of the advantages attributed to PR, while sacrificing less of those attributed to majoritarian elections, by maintaining district magnitudes in the low to moderate range. We test this intuition against data from 610 election outcomes in 81 countries between 1945 and 2006. Electoral systems that use low-magnitude multi-member districts produce disproportionality indices almost on par with those of pure PR systems while limiting party system fragmentation, producing simpler government coalitions, and surpassing both majoritarian and pure PR systems on some indicators of government performance.

In March 2010, President Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which marked the most comprehensive reform of the American health care system since the Johnson Administration. This federal legislation makes the American states key political stakeholders for achieving major goals of the reform, one of which is to make health insurance coverage more inclusive and equal. Focusing on the state-level picture, Ling Zhu and Jennifer H. Clark examine how partisan politics produce far-reaching distributional consequences in health care. They show that inequality in health insurance coverage persists at the state level, especially in conservative states with diverse populations.

Beginning in the early nineteenth century and ending with the assassination of Arch Duke Franz Ferdinand, historian Margaret MacMillan sets out to uncover the huge political and technological changes, national decisions and the small moments of human muddle and weakness that led Europe to the First World War. Christopher Prior finds this book effective in providing the reader with a sense of some of the complexities of topics less frequently visited by Anglophone historiography.

How can political activism make more of an impact? In Protest Inc., Peter Dauvergne and Genevieve LeBaron argue that the corporatization of protest has left us today with little more than an illusion of activism; one that serves citizens’ restless desire to do something (albeit on their own terms), but one that ultimately fails to get to the root cause of most global problems. This is an angry, frustrated and pessimistic attack on the current state of protest and activism, writes Alex Hensby, but what we are to do about it, nobody seems to know. Provocative reading for readers interested in protest politics and the future of NGOs and social movements.