Newsletter - Spring 2011
Based in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham, the Centre for British Politics entered its third year of existence in 2011. In that short time the Centre has established the University Nottingham as one of the leading places to study - and seek clear analysis about - British politics.
This newsletter reviews the main achievements of the Centre’s members and of its growing PhD community during 2010 and looks forward to activities planned for 2011.
Full details and updates are available at the Centre website; or you can contact Professor Steven Fielding, the Centre Director.
New Staff
2010 saw three significant additions to the Centre’s range of experts.
Professor Vivien Lowndes has conducted major research projects on citizen participation, partnership governance and local political leadership for bodies including the Home Office and the Audit Commission. She has recently undertaken work on faith engagement in public policy and local governance.
Dr Matthew Goodwin is an expert in political behaviour and extremism, and has a strong interest in the BNP and UKIP. He is well known for his work on the drivers of support for extremism and its implications for public policy.
Dr Mark Pickup is a specialist in comparative politics, with a particular interest in public opinion and democratic representation, which has involved him undertaking extensive work on Britain. His research is wide-ranging but focuses on political information, public opinion, the media, election campaigns and electoral institutions.
2010 General Election Blog
The Centre made a distinctive contribution to furthering understanding of what proved to be a unique general election campaign.
Members edited and contributed to an
election blog, which was quoted by leading political journalists and influential sites such as ConservativeHome. Blog entries led to Professors
Philip Cowley and
Steven Fielding being interviewed on the BBC and Sky News and for newspapers such as the Guardian, Evening Standard, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today, among many others.
All told, the blog and related activities saw the Centre reach an estimated audience of 46m people worldwide.
The blog was so successful it was nominated for a number of national awards, winning the Some Comms Award for Best Low Budget Campaign. The British Library considered the blog so important it has been inducted into their UK Web Archive.
When the School of Politics blog is launched during the spring of 2011 Centre members will use this to further understanding of British politics, most pressingly providing analysis and comment about the forthcoming Alternative Vote referendum.
Impact
The election blog is just one instance of how Centre members seek to improve the understanding of British politics amongst practitioners, journalists and the wider public.
Professor Philip Cowley’s www.revolts.co.uk website (which he produces with the help of Dr Mark Stuart) continues to be an invaluable source of analysis on party discipline in the Commons – an especially important issue in light of the Conservative-led coalition. In fact so useful has Cowley been in helping journalists better understand the subject in May 2010 he was the subject of a Guardian editorial praising his work.
Cowley provided the analysis for Radio 4’s election night coverage, the second time he has done so. In the run-up to the campaign, together with Professor Steven Fielding, he also wrote the commentary for the British Film Institute website which highlighted the importance of television party election broadcast.
Professor Steven Fielding appeared on Radio 4 in a number of guises during 2010. In July he presented a documentary as part of the Archive Hour series, Dramatising New Labour. This looked at how the party of Blair and Brown has been depicted on the screen. For this he interviewed those responsible for making influential dramas like The Deal, A Very Social Secretary and Mo as well as former spin doctor Alastair Campbell.
During the last year Fielding has also written for the Guardian’s Comment is Free section on topics as diverse as Cleggmania and The King’s Speech; and contributed pieces to the History and Politics website of which he is now an Editorial Adviser.
Dr Matthew Goodwin has been much in demand for analysis, which he has provided for BBC1’s 6 O’ Clock News, Al Jazeera TV, Radio 4’s The Westminster Hour, Prospect, the Daily Mail, the Associated Press and ConservativeHome – amongst many others.
Goodwin has also briefed Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, co-chair of the Conservative party, and Kris Hopkins MP who chairs the All Party Parliamentary Group on Islamophobia on public attitudes to immigration, Muslims and support for extremism. He also addressed the Fabian Society 2011 annual conference on the subject. In addition to this, Goodwin has disseminated his findings to Greater Manchester Police in addition to Birmingham, Trafford, Wigan and Camden Borough councils.
In collaboration with Chatham House Goodwin has embarked on a comparative study of populist extremism in Europe. The project examines the rise and public policy implications of extremist parties, and a report will be issued later in 2011.
In December 2010 Professor Vivien Lowndes submitted evidence to the House of Common’s Political and Constitutional Reform Select Committee for its Inquiry into the Prospects for Codifying the Relationship Between Central and Local Government. Her evidence argued in favour of a new Code, one that would clarify central-local relationships, and serve to avoid arbitrary (and politically motivated) interventions by central government in the structures and processes of local government.
Professor Lowndes has, with Sheffield First Partnership, begun research into ‘collaborative working’ in the city. She is working with key partners in the public, business and community sectors to build the capacity of the multi-agency Sheffield Executive Board to respond to current challenges in public service delivery and city leadership. Lowndes is also working with Derby Community Safety Partnership in an evaluation of local strategy and activities under the ‘Preventing Violent Extremism’ agenda. The project builds on her previous research in the city on capacity building with Muslim communities, and approaches to neighbourhood governance.
Professors Cowley and Fielding as well as Dr Goodwin also share their insights on Twitter – together we have 2,000 followers.
Publications
Professor Cowley wrote the very well received The British General Election of 2010 (Palgrave, 2010) with Dennis Kavanagh, the eighteenth in the prestigious Nuffield General Election series. Drawing on hundreds of confidential interviews with all the key players, it offered a compelling insider’s guide to the election's background, campaign and results, including a detailed account of what really happened in the formation of the coalition government
Professor Alex Danchev’s 100 Artists’ Manifestos (Penguin, 2011) has recently been published to much acclaim while the paperback version of his On Art and the War on Terror (Edinburgh University Press, 2011) is about to be published.
Dr Andrew Denham is co-author of From Crisis to Coalition: the Conservative Party, 1997-2010 (Palgrave, 2011), which will be published in May 2011. This book explores, among other questions, why it took the Conservatives so long to recover from their landslide defeat in the 1997 and why David Cameron failed to win a Commons majority in 2010.
Professor Fielding contributed an account of Labour’s campaign to Britain Votes 2010 (Oxford University Press, 2010), edited by Andrew Geddes and Jonathan Tonge, something he has done since 1997. Fielding also edited a special edition of Parliamentary Affairs, which will be published in April 2011, and is based on the Centre’s 2009 annual conference which took British Politics and Fiction as it’s theme. By the end of 2011 he will have completed a monograph on that very subject for Bloomsbury.
Dr Goodwin is co-editor of The New Extremism in 21st Century Britain (Routledge, 2010) and New British Fascism: the Rise of the British National Party (Routledge, 2011). In 2010, he also published research in the European Journal of Political Research, Political Studies, and the Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties, among others. In 2011 he will complete a co-written book, Voting for Extremists, for Routledge.
Professor Lowndes is co-editor of Faith in the Public Realm (Policy Press, 2010), which explores the resurgence of ‘public faith’ in Britain, and considers the role of faith groups in policy areas including education, urban regeneration and community cohesion. The book probes the opportunities, but also the conflicts and dilemmas, involved in recent developments, and includes an edited ‘policy conversation’ between leading practitioners in the field. Lowndes introduced the themes of the book in a keynote address to the ESRC/AHRC-sponsored conference on ‘Faith and Policy’ at the British Library in June 2010.
Members of the Centre were involved in Nottingham’s successful bid to edit Political Studies, the flagship journal of the Political Studies Association, and a key arena for debate on British politics. Nottingham’s tenure begins in August 2011. Professor Fielding currently co-edits Parliamentary Affairs and is in the sixth and final year of his term.
Conferences and Seminars
In June 2010 the Centre hosted a
special workshop of leading academics in the field wanting to make sense of what was the most extraordinary general election in recent history. Paddy Tipping, the former Labour MP also reflected on the campaign.
In September 2010 the Centre co-hosted the ESRC-funded interdisciplinary seminar series ‘Rhetorics of Moderation’ in which Dr Denham played a leading part. The series aims to explore the nature of political ‘moderation’ – something to which politicians of all parties claim their adhere - from a variety of different perspectives
In December 2010 we held our third annual conference on Governance and Public Policy in the United Kingdom, convened by Dr Denham. Speakers - including Professors Tim Bale, Martin Smith and Gerry Stoker - helped explain and assess recent and current developments in UK governance and public policy. They examined both institutional reforms and changes in key areas of public policy under ‘New Labour’ and the present Conservative-led coalition government. Full Conference Report...
In 2010 our annual seminar series attracted politicians such as Ken Clarke and Lord David Owen as well as leading academics, notably Professor Gerry Stoker and Dr Nigel Copsey. This year the seminar series has the 2010 general election as its theme and includes the likes of MPs Vernon Coaker, Anna Soubry, Lilian Greenwood, former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith and Independent columnist Steve Richards. Download Schedule for Spring 2011
Professor Danchev has recently won funds to run an AHRC Biography Network, together with academics from Edinburgh and Southampton universities. The network brings together different kinds of biographers in an interdisciplinary project under the theme of ‘Challenges to Biography’ in the 21st century. The Centre includes members who have written biographies – like Drs Andrew Denham and Stuart as well as Professor Danchev - and others like Professor Fielding who have written about them. There will be various activities during 2011-13, including a symposium at Nottingham on ‘challenges to biography in the era of digital revolution, economic downturn and intellectual audit’.
Postgraduate Community
Matthew Bailey is in the first year of a PhD on the Labour party and fiction but is already the author of ‘Uses and Abuses of British Political Fiction. Or how I learned to stop worrying and love Malcolm Tucker’, Parliamentary Affairs, 64:2 (2011). He has also delivered a paper, ‘Tory Stories: The portrayal of Conservative Party leaders on stage and screen’, to the ‘Acting with Facts’ conference, held at the University of Reading in September 2010.
Christopher Burgess, in his second year of a PhD on posters in British politics, won the postgraduate prize at the 2010 Political Studies Association/International Political Studies Association conference on political communication for his paper on 'Political Communication in the Visual Election'. The paper will appear as a chapter in Dominic Wring et al (eds), Political Communication in Britain. TV Debates, the Media and the Election (Palgrave, 2011).
Chris was also awarded the Andrew Hendry Postgraduate Prize by the University of Nottingham for the quality of his research. Chris appeared on BBC TV during the general election campaign as part of the build up to the third and final leaders debate. He was also one of a team of postgraduates who have received funding from the AHRC to train arts and humanities postgraduate researchers in using new media such as YouTube, Twitter, and blogging as platforms for the dissemination of research.
Matthew Francis is in the third year of a PhD on the market and party politics. His ‘The “bland leading the bland”: electing the Liberal Democrat leader, 1988-2007 was published in Representation 46:1 (2010).
The BBC History Magazine interviewed Matthew for an article on co-operation. He convened a panel at the 2010 Political Studies Association conference, whose members included Professor Andrew Gamble. Matthew is convening a day conference on the market and party politics to be held in the late spring of 2011.