A Crisis of Urban Conservatism? Politics and Organisation in Edwardian Norwich

Writing in the mid 1990s, Ewen Green suggested that the Edwardian Conservative Party was locked in a crisis which, after 1910, was leading towards a disintegration of Unionism. Recent research has challenged this view, contending that at constituency level, Conservative activists and parties were recovering, rebuilding around issues such as Ireland, land reform and opposition to National Insurance. However, there are few studies of the causes and consequences of the crisis of Conservatism in urban constituencies or the extent to which the party may have been recovering by the outbreak of the Great War. This article considers these issues in the city of Norwich. It assesses the profile of activists; the fortunes of the Conservatives in the parliamentary election contests of the period, addressing the ways the party used a variety of candidates to attempt to attract popular support; and the particular issues of tariff reform and socialism, to determine the extent to which voters and activists were willing to accept protection as part of a broader defence against socialism. These national issues are contrasted with the performance of the party in municipal elections, considering the basis of the growing appeal they evidenced in council elections after 1906, along with the continuing emphasis on organisational weakness evidenced by party leaders. Overall, it suggests that, despite their municipal strength, the continued commitment of the local party to tariffs prevented them from challenging effectively for the constituency against a Liberal‐Labour alliance with a shared belief in free trade.     

Astroturf and populism in Australia: The Convoy of No Confidence

The ‘Convoy of No Confidence’ was a trucking convoy that converged on Canberra in 2011 in a failed attempt to force the Gillard Labor government to an early election. At the time, there was widespread speculation that it was an ‘astroturf’ or synthetic grassroots movement. This article assesses the extent to which this alleged astroturf event exhibited populist elements, measured against Taggart's definition of populism. Unlike most Australian populist movements, which have been hostile towards all major parties (or all the big banks), the convoy's participants directed their anger almost entirely towards the Gillard government. In this, they were joined by Coalition politicians and right-wing media. The article finds that such one-sidedness is insufficient to characterise the convoy definitively as an Astroturf group, and therefore not genuinely populist. It also suggests that there may be a continuum between populist and astroturf movements.

“不信任游”是2011年坎贝拉的一次失败的卡车游行,意在迫使吉拉德工党政府提前大选。这是一个“人工草皮”或合成的草根运动。本文根据泰格特的民粹主义定义,探讨了这次所谓草根运动到底包含多少民粹因素。与仇视所有主要政党的大多数澳大利亚民粹主义运动不一样,这次游行的参与者把愤怒完全投向吉拉德政府。因此,他们得到了联盟政治家以及右翼媒体的联手。作者发现,由于这种单面性,该运动算不上草根群体,并非真正的民粹主义。作者认为,在民粹与人工草根运动之间存在着一个量变的连续体。     

The reinvention of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, 1992–2012

This article examines the most recent history of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, with particular emphasis on how this laboratory shifted its research program from accelerator-based particle physics towards astroparticle physics, cosmology and multi-disciplinary photon science. Photon science became the central experimental research program through a series of changes in the organisational, scientific, and infrastructural set-up and in its science policy context. The article shows that SLAC’s reinvention unfolded in a science policy context in which funding priorities drifted towards the materials sciences and the life sciences at the expense of nuclear and particle physics, which had dominated science budgets during the Cold War. SLAC took a lead position in this global development by partly dismantling and also redeploying scientific and technical capabilities from its particle physics program for these new fields, thus, providing novel experimental facilities for user communities to expand across academia and industry.     

Structures and Members: An Overview of The Cumann na nGaedheal Party Organisation, 1923–33

This article re‐examines Cumann na nGaedheal's approach to party organisation. Cumann na nGaedheal has been portrayed as a badly organised, ‘top‐down’ party that suffered electorally for its reluctance to match the structure and organisation of its main anti‐Treaty rival, Fianna Fáil. Moreover, the party has been caricatured as a conservative organisation with little affinity for the ideology of the Irish revolution. While recent studies have reappraised Cumann na nGaedheal's engagement with the revolutionary inheritance, while highlighting underappreciated aspects of the party's electoral innovations, its organisational structures require further scholarly attention. Closer scrutiny of Cumann na nGaedheal's organisational structures sheds further light on its fate as nationalist Ireland's first party of government and ultimately its demise as a distinct party in 1933.     

The Process of Kinship in the Paternal/Fraternal House of the Austronesian‐speaking Amis of Taiwan

In this essay, I will describe the traditional social organisation of the Amis peoples of Taiwan which previous ethnographers have portrayed as consisting of a matrilineal clan‐based system conjoined with a residential‐based male age‐set/grade system. Following David Schneider's critique of ‘kinship’ cross‐culturally and the ‘new kinship studies' which his work inspired, I will attempt a reinterpretation of overall Amis social organisation as instead a total kinship‐based system comprised of a paternal/fraternal system which integrates and encompasses the multiplicity of maternal‐focused houses constitutive of village communities. Rather than being a system composed of kinship and non‐kinship parts, I argue that Amis social organisation is comprehensively kinship‐based. Moreover, I shall describe how through paternal/fraternal relations generated by rites of male initiation and rebirth this overall integration of diverse matrifocal units is achieved. In the first section, I will describe the structure of the paternal/fraternal initiatory system. In the following section, I will draw upon the major anthropological theories of initiation including rites of passage and the literature on sacrifice to describe numerous aspects of initiation activities, showing how the classificatory father‐son and elder‐younger‐brother relations between and within the initiation sets are explicitly represented by the concepts and practices of the Amis.     

Water Management in Post-colonial Darjeeling: The Promise and Limits of Decentralised Resource Provision

Water crises are spreading across the length of South Asia at an alarming rate, and some of the pockets of stress include unexpected locations such as Darjeeling, West Bengal, where rainfall is plentiful. This article explores the problems of post-colonial water management in the former British hill station to illuminate the prospects for integrated resource provision. We argue that to improve the scope of water distribution and provision, post-colonial townships such as Darjeeling need to acknowledge and address the multiple ways in which people get water from the centralised supply as well as the decentralised solutions that have arisen through community organisation in collectives known as samaj. Notably, the samaj have a distinct character based on histories of colonial neglect that prompted villages throughout the Darjeeling region to solve socioeconomic problems independently of centralised systems. The discussion overlaps the numerous resource pathways with the plethora of social and political organisations operating in Darjeeling to argue that municipalities would do well to harness the varied ways in which water flows through the township. Integrated within larger questions of sustainable development in India’s urbanising townships, the text offers a glimpse into the possibilities for more holistic and equitable water management.     

Modelling the built environment: Spatial patterns,siting techniques and layout works of non-monumental architecture in Early Bronze Age Eastern Arabia

Interest in the built environment of Early Bronze Age (EBA) Eastern Arabia is rapidly increasing with the emergence of new field data from the excavation of settlement sites. However, little is known about architectural planning and spatial patterns in the region. This article explores non-monumental architecture throughout the third millennium BCE. A series of methods (Pythagorean triples, modular grids, interception of circles) were used to assess the geometric and metric characteristics of buildings, and to stress regularities and variation in the long term. The results of these analyses suggest the application of specific techniques in layout and construction works: the intersection of circles during the Hafit occupations, and more sophisticated techniques, combining the properties of circles and triangles, during the Umm an-Nar period. The diachronic approach allowed by the temporal span of the occupations highlights a firm progression of architectural paradigms and building crafts throughout the EBA. The evidence hints at the existence of a specialised workforce since the dawn of the Bronze Age, and reveals a sharp increase of technicity and standardisation towards the end of the third millennium.     

Managers and Agents: Conservative Party Organisation in the 1850s*

During the 1850s in the wake of the calamitous Peelite split, Britain's Conservative Party struggled to rebuild its numbers in the house of commons. The structure of the party's electoral organisation is well known‐parliamentary leaders, election managers such as Sir William Jolliffe and Philip Rose, plus local constituency based agents. Jolliffe's and Rose's 1859 election notebooks help understand this, but they also reveal serious gaps in the Conservatives' information networks. This article delineates the electoral activities of Sir John Yarde Buller (first Baron Churston) and his ally Samuel Triscott, who supplemented the spasmodic flow of information from small boroughs in at least two counties. Mid‐level or second‐tier managers, to whom no attention has previously been given, assisted the Conservatives in their gradual electoral recovery. Their roles also suggest that the party's organization may have been more complex than previously believed.     

By‐Elections and Political Change in a Local Context: The Case of the 1973 Dundee East By‐Election and the SNP

With their unpredictability and occurrence in between nationwide elections, by‐elections have attracted a degree of scholarly interest. However, this has focused almost exclusively on how the contests have affected, or failed to affect, the direction of national politics. This article seeks to, instead, explore their influence upon the locality in which they are fought. It will achieve this through an analysis of the 1973 Dundee East by‐election and its consequences for the development of the local Scottish National Party (SNP). Prior to the by‐election, the party had not been particularly strong in Dundee. Yet the contest provided a setting in which it was able to transform itself into one of the most effective Nationalist organisations in Scotland, capable of cementing an SNP MP in the constituency from 1974 until 1987, holding firm against the collapse in the party's support across the country in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The article will examine the extent to which this resistance to the national swing was facilitated by the legacies of the by‐election and the extent to which its wider footprint contributed towards the development of an enduring party tradition that has persisted for decades.     

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’.