An Experiment in Political Communication: The British Columbia Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform

The British Columbian Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform comprised a representative group of 160 randomly selected voters who were empowered to review the Province's electoral system and to decide if change was needed. It first met in January 2004 and issued its final report in December of that year. The Assembly has since been hailed as a democratic invention and attracted worldwide interest as a remarkable experiment in deliberative democracy. Its Terms of Reference required that it consult British Columbians. It did so via a series of public hearings held across the Province, and by establishing a website to publicise its purpose and to obtain public input. Hence, the Citizens' Assembly provides a case study or natural experiment that permits the comparative assessment of two very different forms of political communication – one traditional and the other a form of ‘e-consultation’, relying on newer information and communications technology. Based on published sources, as well as interviews with former members of the Assembly, this paper investigates the public input the Assembly obtained, and considers whether ‘e-consultation’– as is often claimed – does allow citizens to genuinely contribute to the making of public policy.     

The limits of engagement: British foreign policy and the crisis in Zimbabwe

This article examines how the British government has responded to Zimbabwe’s ongoing crisis. This case raises several wider issues for British foreign policy, most notably the question of how much leverage London can exercise on the international scene in general, and over relatively small and weak states like Zimbabwe in particular. Zimbabwe’s crisis also raises profound questions about the appropriate balance between bilateral and multilateral policies, and between engaging in public criticism and conducting so–called ‘quiet diplomacy’. While bilateralism clearly has not worked, multilateralism has revealed its own frustrations, especially given the reluctance of many African elites within a number of organizations to criticize President Mugabe’s policies. This reluctance threatens to unravel the British Labour government’s stated objectives in Africa while at the same time raising important doubts over the credibility of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), and whether an ‘Africa moment’ can be discerned in the manner articulated by prime minister Tony Blair.     

Global finance and the German model: German corporations, market incentives, and the management of employer-sponsored pension institutions

Where there was a settled political geography of state power and responsibilities, the remarkable growth of global finance has put enormous pressure on national economic, political and social institutions. Furthermore, the looming crisis facing many continental European social security systems has raised many doubts about the long-term viability of the German model compared to its Anglo-American rivals. In this context, large German corporations have sought ways of sustaining their global competitiveness by, in part, restructuring their national and regional commitments. To illustrate, in this paper we concentrate on the nature and organization of German employer-sponsored pension institutions in relation to Anglo-American management practice. Two issues drive the analysis. One has to do with an emerging coalition between corporate management and shareholders with respect to the market value of the firm. The second issue has to do with the allocation of risk and uncertainty between the social partners when negotiating the financing and final value of promised retirement income. The institutional framework of collective decision-making common to many of Germany's largest firms is under pressure; three models of investment decision making relevant to pension assets and liabilities are used to illustrate this point. In doing so, we suggest that the German model is more fragile than commonly realized. We also suggest that Anglo-American management practices have penetrated and affected German corporate (national and regional) institutions and regulations. The social market lauded by advocates of stakeholder capitalism is changing rapidly, at least in the sphere of large firms and global finance.     

What Was Parliamentary Reporting? A Study of Aims and Results in the London Daily Newspapers, 1780–96*

The nature of these newspaper reports – that is, the character of their principal content – has never been studied, despite its obvious importance and, as we shall see, its marked differences from our Hansard. This article relates their nature to a vital feature of parliamentary leadership, the ability to lead the argument in debate. The practical reasoning in parliamentary deliberation and justification, especially what speakers contributed towards the outcome or ‘the sense of the debate’, predominated in these reports. This implied a need for reporters to concentrate on the ‘substance’ of speeches and their bearing on the motion. One result was that speeches which were judged to define or develop arguments pro and con were treated at length, the defining speeches most extensively and others in proportion to what they added. Conversely, speeches which reiterated known positions or which were irrelevant to the arguments in hand were omitted or downplayed, even if they were important in some other way, while whole debates which added little to ongoing discussion could be treated quite briefly. But if being a front bencher did not guarantee coverage, being a back bencher was no bar: the criterion was the importance of a speaker's contribution, while the manner of coverage accented what was contributed. The reporters’ concerns emphasized debates that promised significant change in matters of national importance, but gave relatively little attention to recurrent or localised business as such. Their writing – they were known as debate writers or news-writers – was interpretation answering to evaluative and selective criteria rather than a record in a simple sense. Their work is not to be understood in the same terms as a modern Hansard, and in particular not as a defective Hansard, but rather is such that it requires further work on a wide range of new research questions if it is to be understood to best effect, a requirement which suggests a need to study it critically before using it as source material.     

The significance of the fossil hominid skull from Petralona,Greece

Evidence is accumulating that the hominid cranium found in the Petralona cave in 1960 is associated with cave deposits of middle Pleistocene age. If this is so, the fossil is the most complete middle Pleistocene cranium yet discovered and provides important morphological, metrical and radiographic information on the possible evolutionary transition from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens. The classification of the specimen is discussed and it is suggested that a grade system within Homo spaiens should be erected. The Petralona fossil would be allocated to Homo sapiens grade 1 rather than to Homo erectus or to a subspecies of Homo sapiens.