The Future of Cohesion Policy in England : Local Government Responses to Brexit and the Future of Regional Funding

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Getting our country back : the UK press on the eve of the EU referendum

This paper investigates a critical discourse analysis the author has conducted of UK mainstream newspaper coverage on the eve of the EU referendum. Immigration became a key issue in the closing days. The paper will explore the possibility that the discourse moved from persuasion to prejudice and xenophobia. The paper will also argue that in the age of populist post-truth politics, some of the newspapers also employed such emotive rhetoric, designed to influence and compel the audience to draw certain conclusions – to get their country back. In so doing, it is argued some of the UK media also pose a serious threat to democracy and journalism – rather than holding those in power to account and maintaining high journalistic standards. The notion that that some of the UK media played on public perceptions and a collective memory that has created, propagated and embedded many myths about the EU for decades, is explored. The possibility this swayed many – despite limited or a lack of substantiation, is explored, a discourse of ellipsis, if you will

First Amendment (Un)Exceptionalism: A Comparative Taxonomy of Campaign Finance Reform Proposals in the United States and United Kingdom

There is an urgent conversation happening among the world’s democracies about how to respond to the combined threat of online electioneering and foreign interference in domestic elections. Despite the shadow such activities cast over the 2016 presidential election in the United States, the US has been largely absent from comparative discussions about how to tackle the problem. This is not just because of a recalcitrant president. The assumption that America’s “First Amendment Exceptionalism” – the idea that American freedom of expression law is simply too much of an outlier to warrant useful comparative consideration – is strong on both sides of the Atlantic. This is especially true in regard to the regulation of political campaigns.This article challenges that assumption, and argues that America’s more libertarian approach to the legal regulation of political speech does not pose a barrier to fruitful comparative work in this area. It does so by comparing the law of the US to that of the UK. Specifically, it organizes reform proposals being considered in the US and UK into a common taxonomy, and sets out the legal standard governing each type of proposal in each country. Considering each country’s law through this organizational structure allows us to see that the legal differences between the US and UK, while significant, rarely bar the types of changes being considered in either nation. Indeed, the two countries have much to learn from each other’s efforts in this area, and lawmakers, regulators, and scholars should not hesitate to engage with the experiences of their transatlantic peers.In reaching this conclusion, the paper makes three distinct contributions. First, by clustering reform proposals into a taxonomy, it provides a structure for comparative work that will be useful not just in the US and UK, but in all countries working to bring their election laws fully into the internet era. Second, by providing an in-depth yet accessible guide to the legal structures undergirding election law in the US and UK, it provides a useful tool for scholars attempting to understand these systems. The US system in particular is often quickly dismissed by other nations, but without a deeper understanding of how and why US law has ended up as it has those nations risk inadvertently following in its footsteps. Finally, it identifies several concrete areas where the US and UK can benefit from each other’s expertise, thereby providing a roadmap for regulators, lawmakers, and reform advocates in both countries

Scottish exceptionalism? Normative codes of Scottish nationalism in the British and EU crises

Scotland has thus far proved immune to the appeal of right-wing populism present in many European neoliberal democracies. This paper argues that changing tension balances in the crises facing the UK as a union state cannot be reduced to an understanding of the supposedly internal challenge of Scottish sub-state nationalism. Instead sub-state nationalism needs to be situated in the shifting long-term, inter-state power balances of Britain as a union state and a rising and falling world power. Such an approach builds on the promise offered by the historical sociology of Norbert Elias to account for the over-functioning of the normative humanist we-ideals of Scottish civic nationalism in the British and EU crises

The interrupted world: Surrealist disruption and altered escapes from reality

Following Breton’s writings on surreality, we outline how unexpected challenges to consumers’ assumptive worlds have the potential to alter how their escape from reality is experienced. We introduce the concept of ‘surrealist disruption’ to describe ontological discontinuities that disrupt the common-sense frameworks normally used by consumers and that impact upon their ability to suspend their disbeliefs and experience self-loss. To facilitate our theorization, we draw upon interviews with consumers about their changing experiences as viewers of the realist political TV drama House of Cards against a backdrop of disruptive real-world political events. Our analyses reveal that, when faced with a radically altered external environment, escape from reality changes from a restorative, playful experience to an uneasy, earnest one characterized by hysteretic angst, intersubjective sense-making and epistemological community-building. This reconceptualizes escapism as more emotionally multivalenced than previously considered in marketing theory and reveals consumers’ subject position to an aggregative social fabric beyond their control

THE MFF PROPOSAL: WHAT’S NEW, WHAT’S OLD, WHAT’S NEXT? Bertelsmann Stiftung Policy Brief 21 May 2018

On 2 May 2018, the European Commission released its proposal for the next Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF), covering the years 2021-27. In its own words, the Commission tabled ‘a new, modern long-term budget, tightly geared to the political priorities of the Union at 27’. This article analyses how much change and how much continuity the current proposal truly contains and discusses the next steps and possible negotiation dynamics

The Daily Texan

Texas Student Medi