Ballots & Bullets

That’s it from Ballots & Bullets for 2012. It’s been a great year here on the blog.

We had updates from a number of elections, including the Tawain elections, guest posts on the French elections from Prof Jocelyn Evans and Dr Gilles Ivaldi of 500 Signatures, and posts on the Russian elections.

We’ve had posts from Philip Cowley…

In Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale, the king’s son Mamillius is asked what story he would like. He replies:

A sad tale’s best for winter: I have one
Of sprites and goblins.

For me, Dickens is best for winter, so when I was asked to choose and defend my favourite book at the East Midlands Salon Balloon Debate, it had …

Parliamentary Affairs, which was established in 1948, is a peer-reviewed academic quarterly covering all aspects of government and political representation directly or indirectly connected with Parliament and parliamentary systems in Britain and throughout the world. 

It is co-edited by Professor Philip Cowley and Professor Jonathan Tonge and is published by Oxford University Press in partnership with the Hansard Society.

In the …

John Bercow is possibly the most famous Speaker of the House of Commons in modern  history, and he’s not even half way through his self imposed nine year term. His shifting political positions, high profile confrontations, outspoken wife, short stature, verbose oratory, all make John Bercow a recognisable and easily caricatured figure.

I am currently researching the effect of Bercow’s …

Do we need statutory regulation of the press?  Perhaps the press should be regulated, but in a non-statutory way?  Or maybe we need statutory under-pinning of any regulation?  As the row about Lord Justice Leveson’s report has raged, I’ve wondered about another question: do the public even know what ‘statutory’ means? Let alone statutory under-pinning, which, as Matthew Parris noted, …

The Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies is now an institutional columnist for the Global Policy Journal. The first in this series of posts comes from Dr Andrew Mumford who has written about the increasing amount of indirect assistance the West is giving to rebel movements in the ‘Arab Spring’. Stemming from research done for his forthcoming book Proxy Warfare (to be …

Last week, I was absolutely delighted to learn that my book Revolution and State in Modern Mexico: The Political Economy of Uneven Development (Rowman & Littlefield) was the winner of the 2012 International Political Economy Group (IPEG) Book Prize of the British International Studies Association (BISA). In recent years this has become a prestigious prize within and beyond debates in …

The annual Transparency International (TI) evaluation of corruption across the world, the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), was released on 5 December amidst much fanfare and media attention.  Interactive links on the TI website, designed to help interpret the findings, allowed reporters to explore the core question posed in the CPI brochure: ‘How does your country measure up?’.  In …

This is the twentieth in a series of posts that report on the state of the parties as measured by opinion polls. By pooling together all the available polling evidence we can reduce the impact of the random variation each individual survey inevitably produces. Most of the short term advances and setbacks in party polling fortunes are nothing more than …

As a politics student I was enthused at the prospect of participating in an active discussion with leading political figures such as Harriet Harman MP and the animated Nigel Farage MEP, especially as it was to be held in my home constituency of Corby and East Northamptonshire. Therefore I applied for …