Volume 5, Issue 3

The new editor of The Forum, Byron Shafer, explains the mission of the journal and highlights new directions of interest for contributors and readers.

Tony Blair was one of the longest serving and most gifted of modern British prime ministers. This article offers an assessment of his impact on public policy, politics, institutions and the constitution. Blair's tremendous success in leading Labour to three election victories resulted in a period of policy consolidation rather than dramatic innovation. His political successes were based on surprisingly weak foundations. His lasting impact will probably be on the constitution.

There have been three discernible political eras and political orders in post-World War II Britain: (1) the collectivist consensus (social democracy, Butskellism), 1945-1970; (2) turmoil, 1970-1979; and (3) neoliberalism, 1979-2007. After discussing how to discern a new political era (overall policy orientation) and a political order (institutional arrangements), this article elaborates how the three periods developed. The key ingredient in changing a political era and a political order is change in the governing ideas and assumptions of the political elite. While in the first two periods the political era and political order changed together, in the third period the era changed first, followed by the order. The movement toward a neoliberal economy under Conservative governments largely has been supported by New Labor, but the latter has also introduced constitutional changes. Even though much has changed, there are still continuities, such as the basic welfare state. Furthermore, the linchpins of the British constitutional order, strong central executive authority and the single member plurality electoral system, remain in place.

An effort to pump new life into the notions of political order and political era suggests that the Untied States has seen three different mixes of key structural elements, influential policy conflicts, and the dynamic following from their interaction since the Second World War. For a full generation after the end of World War II, American politics was really just an extension of what had gone before, in effect the Late New Deal Era. Yet this same effort suggests that larger social trends were undermining the stability of this era well before major anomalies began to break through in the late 1960s, ultimately producing a different mix of structure and substance, one that we now recognize as the Era of Divided Government. And it suggests, by 2000, that major anomalies were breaking through again, so that the next analytic challenge is to see which of these are harbingers of lasting shifts and which are just the ructions that inevitably accompany the death of an old order, without revealing anything about the new.

Since its 2005 federal election, Germany has been governed by the country's two historically strongest political rivals, the center-right Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU) and center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD). Despite initial hope in some quarters that this broad-based Grand Coalition under Chancellor Angela Merkel could overcome partisan gridlock and enact major policy changes, seeking to work together has only fed frictions within as well between both partners. A resulting stalemate has reinforced the more skeptical view that this government was in fact destined to remain at most a transitional one. It only came about in the first place due to an increasing fractionalization of the party system, as the declining core support for CDU/CSU and SPD boosted several smaller contenders, yet also denied either of two more familiar federal alliances--center-right (CDU/CSU-Liberal) or center-left (SPD-Green)--a clear parliamentary majority. There is thus widespread and mounting speculation that Germany's next national election will produce a wholly new governing constellation, one based on multiple parties, perhaps one crossing all traditional bloc divisions, or possibly one drawn entirely from the left; Germany might conceivably even enter a phase of minority government. While to be sure all such scenarios remain hypothetical, the Federal Republic does seem poised on the edge of a new political era.

This article reviews evidence bearing upon the question of political orders and eras in recent French politics. It places this evidence against the legacy of revolutionary republicanism, with its idealized version of political identity and citizenship. Looking at social cleavages, intermediary organizations, and political institutions, the article finds that there has been a constant evolution over the course of the Fifth Republic. At the level of fundamental policy debate, there has also been an evolution, although rather more mitigated. The article concludes by considering the opportunities for a new political direction afforded to the incoming president elected in May 2007, Nicholas Sarkozy. It argues that the diminution of the power of the central state, coupled with a new sense of political competition at all levels, means that the possibility of a neoliberal era is very real.

Following Converse's advice that ideology is the product of a ``creative synthesis," conducted by a narrow group of intellectuals, this paper reports on attempts to study ideology at its point of creation. I develop a measure of ideology expressed among pundits, based on coded opinion pieces in magazines and newspapers from 1830 to 1990. I use this measure to test the impact of ideas on party coalitions. I argue that ideologies, as created by intellectuals, strongly influence the coalitions that party leaders advance. In three cases – the realignment on slavery before the Civil War, the Civil Rights realignment in the mid-20th century, and the party change on abortion more recently – there is evidence that intellectuals reorganize the issues before parties realign around them. This evidence suggests that the patterns of ``what goes with what" that intellectuals design have an impact on the nature of political cleavages.

Pundits, journalists, and citizens alike often bristle at the idea of politicians ``staying on message," believing that the practice undermines democracy. Scholars have had little to say with respect to whether the issue frames the news media report politicians using to characterize public questions affect how individuals view political battles between Republicans and Democrats over time. In this paper, I explore how the consistency with which partisan political elites frame issues influences whether individuals see important differences between the two major parties. Examinations of content analysis of Newsweek's coverage of three issues (abortion, tax, and energy policies) from 1975-2000 suggest that as the two parties provide increasingly internally homogenous, but externally competitive issue frames, individuals are more likely to believe there is more than the proverbial ``dime's worth of difference" between the two major parties. The evidence supports Sniderman and Bullock's(2004) theory of ``menu dependence" in American politics.

See Government Grow, Gareth Davies' rich history of federal education policy, demonstrates that the 1970s and American political institutions are not nearly as conservative as we usually assume.

This article reviews Gareth Davies, See Government Grow: Education Politics from Johnson to Reagan (Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 2007). The commentary focuses on the author's discussion of federalism and ideological change in the nation's education politics.

A book review of Gary Jacobson's A Divider, Not a Uniter.

Gary Jacobson's A Divider, Not a Uniter: George W. Bush and the American People: The 2006 Election and Beyond provides a clear and concise analysis of extensive polling data about the Bush presidency over the last six years, which shows the existence of a deep partisan divide among the electorate. This division is the culmination of three decades of changes in the political parties, but the presidency of George W. Bush deepened and widened that ideological distance between the parties to an unprecedented degree. Based on public opinion polling, Bush is the most polarizing president in the fifty years in which such data has been available. Contributing factors to this polarization include historical trends, uncontrollable events, Bush's leadership style and choice of policies and governing strategies, but, mostly, his decision to go to war in Iraq has become the issue that most strikingly illustrates the diametrically opposing political coalitions of Democrats and most independents, on one side, against a base of core Republican supporters, owing much to the steadfast loyalty of religious conservatives, on the other. These divisions are solidly entrenched, with no sign of diminishing in the near future.

This review of Who Really Cares challenges its central findings about the ideological character of personal contributions of time and money to charitable causes. The analysis is fundamentally flawed in claiming that conservatives give and care more than liberals because it hinges on a definition of caring that excludes collective action efforts through government that liberals tend to support. The review also raises concerns about how the author defines liberalism, and argues that the book misses an opportunity to explore the different ways in which Americans conceive of expressing their concern and why those differences exist.