CBC News Coverage of Canada's 2006 Liberal Party Leadership Candidates

Content-coded CBC evening newscasts are used in this article to examine reports on the eight candidates for Liberal Party leader in the weeks before the party's 2006 convention. In a sharp contrast to news reports on US presidential nominations, The National provided coverage balanced between the horse race and more substantive matters, including policy discussions and a candidate's personality and leadership qualities. But as with US nomination coverage, The National largely ignored trailing candidates, focusing nearly all its attention on the likely and plausible nominees. In terms of tone, The National provided “compensatory coverage,” where front-runners were treated more negatively than the candidates who were further back in the field.     

Keystone of the patriarchal family? Indissoluble marriage,masculinity and divorce in Liberal Italy

While divorce laws were introduced in most of western Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century, the majority of Italian statesmen exhibited strong reluctance to take such a measure on the occasions it was proposed by a number of progressive parliamentarians between unification and 1920. This essay examines the debates over whether or not to introduce a divorce law during Italy's Liberal period, arguing that many Italians saw indissoluble marriage as a way of protecting the ‘natural’ gender order against the corruptive tendencies of modernity seen elsewhere, particularly in France. Much rhetoric was expended on the notion that marriage protected Italian women in particular, but a divorce law would also have righted the radical asymmetries of power that lay at the heart of the Italian marriage contract. These were asymmetries that gave the husband distinct privileges and helped to construct masculine identity. For that reason, the maintenance of marriage as a contract only dissoluble by death can be read as a determination to protect traditional notions of masculinity.     

Triangular Contests and Caucus Rhetoric at the 1885 General Election*

This article explores the role played by late‐Victorian political associations during parliamentary election campaigns. The central hypothesis is that party organisation, known popularly as the ‘caucus’, is best understood as a rhetorical device used by politicians and the press to gain legitimacy in the new context created by an expanded and quasi‐democratic electorate. The hypothesis is tested by examining the 1885 general election campaigns in Nottingham West and Sheffield Central. Both constituencies witnessed a triangular contest whereby an ‘additional’ candidate, standing on a radical platform, entered the campaign and pursued a distinctly ‘anti‐caucus’ agenda that was aimed primarily at the local Liberal Party Association. The manner in which the ‘caucus’ issue was articulated by all sides involved throws new light on the role played by party organisation during this period. While all sides described their association in a way that both defended and asserted its legitimacy, they equally used ‘anti‐caucus’ rhetoric to diminish the credibility of their opponent's organisation, even though they were emulating the deeds they were denouncing. Indeed, it was those within official Liberalism that indulged in the most virulent ‘anti‐caucus’ rhetoric. Thus, it is suggested that, with regard to the attitude of radicals towards official Liberalism, this ‘anti‐caucus’ rhetoric reflected not a real popular resistance against party organisation or ‘party’, but simply intense competition and imitation between rival ‘caucuses’.     

Empires ancient and modern: strength,modernity and power in imperial ideology from the Liberal period to Fascism

This article examines the image of Empire developed in public discourse in Italy during the late Liberal period and Fascism by placing it in the context of representations of the British Empire, with which Italian imperial ambitions were compared. There is a continuity in seeing the British Empire as the expression of industrial and commercial modernity and its resultant strength, but what in the Liberal period was seen as an unparalleled superiority became under Fascism a supremacy acquired in a particular period but now exhibiting signs of decline, which Fascism should contest and surpass. Admiration of the British was mixed with disparagement: key figures expressed a competitive resentment towards Britain and its dominant international position, seeing it as the epitome of ‘modern’ imperial power against which Fascism was destined to be measured. In the 1930s signs of the British Empire's decline were sought, developing the idea in Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that British domination would also rise and fall, and announcing the replacement of the ‘British order’, founded on commercial modernity and the strength of money and capital, by Fascism's new civilisation, with its authentic heritage of imperial romanità. This competitiveness towards Britain, which historiography has principally seen as a component of foreign policy (as was clear over Ethiopia), has additional significance when seen as an element of political culture that relates to the concept of the State. The autonomy and strength of the State were an important feature of Fascism's self-representation and of its legal culture, and in this light the possession of an empire came to be seen as an essential aspect of statehood and power.     

‘A Great People Struggling for Their Liberties’: Spain and the Mediterranean in the Eyes of the Benthamites

Summary

This article examines the relationship of Jeremy Bentham and some of his disciples within Romantic Liberalism in the Mediterranean in the early 1820s. By studying the content of Bentham's correspondence with his collaborators and some Spanish political leaders, the text sheds light on Bentham's ideas on constitutional rule, the independence of Latin America and religious tolerance.     

Bounded political contestation: the domestic translation of international health and housing rights in Australia

Political contestation within liberal democratic states is an important, albeit limited, guide in defining how these states domestically implement their international human rights obligations. While often ritualistically endorsing human rights standards, political actors allow themselves a limited policy space with their domestic political contest circumscribed by more pervasive influences, often at odds with the state's international commitments. This article examines recent health and housing policy initiatives by Australia's two major political parties and assesses them against its international commitments. Applying a social constructivist approach, this article argues that the dominant neoliberal political discourse and the state's institutional structure set contextual boundaries to the parties’ policy contestation and reveal the limited influence of domestic political contestation in determining Australia's rights implementation.     

The integration of geography in a curriculum focused to internationalization: an interdisciplinary liberal arts perspective from the Netherlands

Internationalization has been an important concept in higher education over the past two decades. The way that internationalization is manifest has consequences to academic disciplines, including geography. A new system of liberal arts colleges in the Netherlands has created opportunities for interdisciplinary education, representing a departure from the traditional model of European higher education. At Leiden University College the focus on global challenges created an opportunity for geography to be integrated into a diverse interdisciplinary and international curriculum. The positioning of geography into the curriculum, however, occurred because its adaptability and breadth, which enabled it to be incorporated into diverse facets of the overall teaching programme. To be successful, however, geographers should be cognizant of specific facets of the discipline suited for an international context. The case study herein reviewed highlights important differences between the U.S. and Dutch (European) context. Additionally, important points for academic geographers (academics) who are in interdisciplinary programmes (i.e. not a geography department) are emphasized, which relates to the development of course materials to suit an international context. The identification of key thematic and methodological disciplinary strands serves as bridges to interdisciplinary opportunities, which was essential to geography’s successful establishment within an international curriculum.     

沙特阿拉伯宪政历程的源头--自由亲王运动

"自由亲王"是沙特阿拉伯现代化发展初期的第三种政治力量,是沙特阿拉伯经历从传统君主制到"发展的独裁模式"之历史性变革的重要推手。自由亲王运动根源于石油时代沙特阿拉伯经济社会秩序的变动,在沙特阿拉伯首次提出宪政民主等现代政治理念并尝试付诸实践,由此成为沙特阿拉伯宪政历程的源头,对沙特阿拉伯政治现代化的发展具有启蒙意义,预示着沙特阿拉伯政治现代化进程的发展方向。     

Electioneering,the Third Reform Act,and Political Change in the 1880s*

This article investigates the impact of the 1883–5 electoral reforms on the political culture of elections and electioneering in the constituencies, using the borough of Ipswich as its focus. It argues that historians have underestimated the extent to which the Franchise and Redistribution Acts of 1884–5 transformed political cultures outside the countryside and large cities, and that the Corrupt Practices Act of 1883 had a major impact on the modernisation of party organisation. Principally, however, it challenges the prevailing historical consensus that the basis of post‐reform constituency politics remained, to a large extent, local in nature, by suggesting that electioneering cultures were placed under considerable ‘nationalising’ influences from the early 1880s on. Rather than resisting these influences, the established Ipswich parties largely embraced them. Moreover, a general decline in corruption, and a general increase in the number of speeches reported in local newspapers from ‘carpetbagger’ candidates and national leaders, created a climate in which it was now more difficult for any constituency, however idiosyncratic, to insulate itself from ‘national’ politics.     

The Candidates of the Liberal Unionist Party, 1886–1912*

Historians have hitherto based discussion of the electoral performance of the Liberal Unionist Party on incomplete data regarding the candidates of the party, as published sources, including F.W.S. Craig's British Parliamentary Election Results, 1885–1918, the standard reference work, include a number of cases where the party label of a Unionist candidate (either Liberal Unionist or Conservative) is uncertain or incorrect. Utilising a wide range of primary and secondary sources, this article resolves a number of these cases, and thus creates the most accurate list of Liberal Unionist candidates available. The creation of this list allows for accurate analysis of the party's history, and the article makes some preliminary observations based on the data presented. Among these observations are that the Liberal Unionists comprised a consistent percentage of the overall Unionist Party in the house of commons, that the number of seats contested by Liberal Unionists remained steady through the January 1910 election, and that existing interpretations of the electoral pact between the Liberal Unionists and Conservatives may be flawed.