Ballots & Bullets

‘. . . we begin to recognise the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled’ Walter Benjamin

This epigraph from the critical theorist Walter Benjamin prompts a number of reflections about the role of monumental architecture in shaping state-led projects of modernism. Architecture, after all, is a way of defining the ideas of an epoch as …

The question of voters’ reactions to the personal wealth of politicians is increasingly topical. Even in the United States, where money is generally equated with success, Mitt Romney’s vast fortune (and low tax rate) was used against him in the Republican primaries. In Britain there has been a public debate as to whether politicians should have to publish their tax …

The results of the first round of the French presidential elections conformed entirely to expectations. There were no surprises, only minor adjustments. We would therefore fully expect François Hollande to enter the Elysée in a fortnight’s time.

These seem like shocking claims given the coverage of the results. According to the media, and a number of independent commentators, there were …

Now that the official results of the first round are known, it is time to reflect on how accurate voting intention polls have been — both in an absolute sense and as compared with their performances in 2007. Did pollsters do better or worse than in 2007?

Five years ago, the horse race polls conducted in the final days of the …

In the second and final part of his essay entitled ‘Los límites del neoliberalism’ in the Mexican weekly magazine Proceso (14 April), the historian Enrique Semo has delivered an excoriating critique of the iniquities of capitalism.

As detailed in my earlier blog entry, Semo has crafted the rise of neoliberalism in Mexico as the latest in a series of …

…

As we explained in a post last week, over the coming weeks and months we are going to be digging through the NottsPolitics vault and publishing short ’60 second guides’ to key concepts, approaches and thinkers in the study of politics. Here, Professor Philip Cowley takes up the 60 second challenge and chooses as his subject the concept of …

Last summer, 32 year-old Anders Behring Breivik committed the worst atrocity in post-war Norway when he murdered over 80 of his fellow Norwegians. Though Breivik was quickly branded a ‘lone wolf’, the reality was that he was well embedded within a much broader European far right milieu that spanned from his earlier participation in the radical right-wing Norwegian Progress …

The renowned historian Enrique Semo recently published an intriguing essay in the Mexican magazine Proceso entitled ‘Los límites del neoliberalism’ (8 April 2012). The text is a summary of a conference presentation he delivered on 27 March 2012 organised by the National Regeneration Movement (MORENA), led by Andrés Manual López Obrador who is also the 2012 Mexican presidential candidate …