Showing papers by "Colin Hay published in 2017"

Thatcher’s Children, Blair’s Babies, Political Socialization and Trickle-down Value Change: An Age, Period and Cohort Analysis

Abstract: To what extent are new generations ‘Thatcherite’? Using British Social Attitudes data for 1985–2012 and applying age-period-cohort analysis and generalized additive models, this article investigates whether Thatcher’s Children hold more right-authoritarian political values compared to other political generations. The study further examines the extent to which the generation that came of age under New Labour – Blair’s Babies – shares these values. The findings for generation effects indicate that the later political generation is even more right-authoritarian, including with respect to attitudes to redistribution, welfare and crime. This view is supported by evidence of cohort effects. These results show that the legacy of Thatcherism for left-right and libertarian-authoritarian values is its long-term shaping of public opinion through political socialization.

Penal Populism and the Public Thermostat: Crime, Public Punitiveness, and Public Policy

Abstract: This article makes the case that feedback processes in democratic politics—between crime rates, public opinion, and public policy—can account for the growth of penal populism in Britain. It argues that the public recognize and respond to rising (and falling) levels of crime, and that in turn public support for being tough on crime is translated into patterns of imprisonment. This contributes to debates over the crime–opinion–policy connection, unpacking the dynamic processes by which these relationships unfold at the aggregate level. This uses the most extensive data set ever assembled on aggregate opinion on crime in Britain to construct a new over-time measure of punitive attitudes. The analysis first tests the thermostatic responsiveness of punitive attitudes to changes in recorded crime rates as well as self-reported victimization, and then examines the degree to which changes in mass opinion impact on criminal justice policy.

Anti-Politics, Depoliticization, and Governance

Abstract: There is a mounting body of evidence pointing towards rising levels of public dissatisfaction with the formal political process. Depoliticization refers to a more discrete range of contemporary strategies that add to this growing trend towards anti-politics by either removing or displacing the potential for choice, collective agency, and deliberation. This book examines the relationship between these two trends as understood within the broader shift towards governance. It brings together a number of contributions from scholars who have a varied range of concerns but who nevertheless share a common interest in developing the concept of depoliticization through their engagement with a set of theoretical, conceptual, methodological, and empirical questions. This volume explores these questions from a variety of different perspectives and uses a number of different empirical examples and case studies from both within the nation state as well as from other regional, global, and multi-level arenas. In this context, this volume examines the potential and limits of depoliticization as a concept and its position and contribution in the nexus between the larger and more established literatures on governance and anti-politics.

Understanding and Challenging Populist Negativity towards Politics: The Perspectives of British Citizens

Abstract: This article adapts and develops the idea of a cynical or ‘stealth’ understanding of politics to explore how citizens’ estrangement from formal politics is processed cognitively through a populist lens. Earlier work has shown the widespread presence of stealth attitudes in the United States and Finland. We show that stealth attitudes are also well established in Britain, demonstrate their populist character and reveal that age, newspaper readership and concerns about governing practices help predict their adoption by individuals. Yet our survey findings also reveal a larger body of positive attitudes towards the practice of democracy suggesting that there is scope for challenging populist cynicism. We explore these so-called ‘sunshine’ attitudes and connect them to the reform options favoured by British citizens. If we are to challenge populist negativity towards politics, we conclude that improving the operation of representative politics is more important than offering citizens new forms of more deliber...

Thatcherism, Crime and the Legacy of the Social and Economic ‘Storms’ of the 1980s

Abstract: Using insights from the classical sociology of deviance and social structure (notably Durkheim and Merton) we explore the enduring impact of the social and economic changes which started in the UK in the early 1980s. In the two subsequent decades the UK went through a period of radical economic restructuring, leading to lasting social change. We seek to gauge the effect of these combined social and economic processes, which we label social and economic ‘storms’, at the national level. In so doing we assess, and ultimately defend, the heuristic utility of this conceptualisation, considering the extent to which such social and economic storms (individually and collectively) weakened bonds between individuals, within and between families, and across communities. We use proxy measures of economic and social changes in combination with recorded crime statistics to explore the degree to which such processes might be associated with victimisation rates. We find that crime was related to these macro-level ‘storms’, although ultimately they were driven by economic variables. Our analyses show how political decision making can shape long-term trends in crime rates.

The Interdependence of Intra- and Inter-Subjectivity in Constructivist Institutionalism

Abstract: Oscar Larsson’s sympathetic critique of constructivist institutionalism calls for a clarification of my understanding of subjectivity, inter-subjectivity, and their mutual interdependence. That interdependence lies at the heart of any genuinely constructivist approach, just as the interdependence of structure and agency lies at the heart of any genuinely institutionalist approach. As such, I reject the charge of subjectivism just as I would that of voluntarism. Building on the social ontology of Berger and Luckmann, we can distinguish between subjectivity and intra-subjectivity and proceed to show how the latter implies a notion of inter-subjectivity. An example of the social construction of a political crisis shows that social facts are made and remade through a fusion of inter- and intra-subjectivities.

Explanation, Prediction, Causation – An Unholy Trinity? Appreciative Comments on The Philosophy and Methods of Political Science:

Abstract: In this short but critical appreciation of Keith Dowding’s seminal Philosophy and Methods in Political Science I reflect on the distinctive treatment of both realism and explanation in contemporary political science that its author offers, expressing rather more sympathy for the former than the latter. I welcome his critique of the use and misuse of ‘isms’ in much of the existing literature, while pointing to some potential inconsistencies; I accept his broad and inclusive understanding of philosophic realism; and I praise Dowding for putting the question of explanation – and its adequacy – at the heart of the philosophy of political science (where I think it belongs). Yet I reject the idea that prediction is, or indeed, should be central to all social scientific explanation. Similarly, I take issue with the contention that we are typically distracted by questions of causation, suggesting that the presentation of a ‘credibly causal’ narrative is the crux of adjudicating good from bad explanation. I explor...

The Reconfiguration of the Welfare State in Europe

Abstract: Welfare systems characterize both European capitalisms and the way such capitalisms are governed politically. In recent years that relationship has been reconfigured as policymakers have become more aware of the economic externalities of welfare expenditure and have come increasingly to demand an economic return on the social investment that it represents. It is the general and regime type-specific reconfigurations that this has led to which this chapter seeks to describe and account for. It detects a transition from a demand-side to a supply-side oriented conception of the role of welfare within the workings of European capitalism; this it associates with the rise of the social investment state. Yet this tendency has been embraced more or less fully to produce a complex pattern of within-regime-type convergence and between-regime-type divergence.