The Diminishing Returns to Trade Policy in the European Union

The notion that the EU is a trade power is central to studies of the Union’s international presence. Credible threats to withhold access to Europe’s markets are said to provide the Union with leverage in respect of other trade partners. This paper queries the continuing ability of the European Union to act effectively this way. The current Doha malaise is a symptom of deeper changes in the international trade system. As emerging markets become more affluent and participate in foreign direct investment, their interest in market access per se become less important relative to other areas of regulation.

'Robes on Tight Ropes: The Judicialisation of Politics in Nigeria'

This account of judicialised politics in the Nigerian transition experience examines the regulation of the judiciary of the political space, through the resolution of intergovernmental contestations in a dysfunctional federation. It analyses the judicialisation of elite power disputes which have resonance for due process and the rule of law in particular and governance in general. A study of the role of the judiciary in stabilising the country, itself a pivot in the West Africa region in particular and Africa in general, is important. This is especially in view of its classification as a ‘weak state,’ despite its enormous human and natural resources. The analyses here suggest the Supreme Court has taken a strategic position in the task of democratic institutional building and the reinstitution of the rule of law in the country. This strategic measure has received the acclaim of the public. However, the account also discloses that the judiciary, in the course of its numerous interventions, has been drawn into overly political disputes that overreach its jurisprudential preferences. Of even more significance, it demonstrates that the judiciary is itself still challenged by institutional dysfunctions constituting part of the legacies of the authoritarian era. The situation leads back to the need for closer scrutiny of the judicial function in transitional societies.

The Open Method of Coordination on Health Care After the Lisbon Strategy II: Towards a Neoliberal Framing?

This paper undertakes a content analysis of the discourse on the Open Method of Coordination on Health Care (OMC/HC) in order to show how equity and solidarity are increasingly linked to optimisation and, as such, how neoliberalism increasingly frames health care. Some of the side-effects of this reframing for politics are highlighted: legitimating and extending EU governance, reducing the space for oppositional formations and limited citizenship. The analysis begins by interrogating the broader context of the Lisbon Strategy II, after which the techniques of the OMC/HC and its substantive outputs are analysed.

Journal article: Children and Religion under Article 14 UNCRC: A Critical Analysis

This article examines the text of Article 14 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child 1989 and the work of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child. It considers the text of the article and its travaux préparatoires; it then provides an analysis of the issues considered by the Committee: the concept of the evolving capacities of the child, freedom of religious choice, freedom of manifestation, and education. It also highlights the problems that have emerged in the Committee’s work, in the light of a theoretical framework of the right of the child to religious freedom in international law. It concludes that the Committee fails children in relation to their religion and suggests some positive steps to be taken by the Committee.

A framework for assessing the vulnerability of food systems to future shocks

Modem society depends on complex agro-ecological and trading systems to provide food for urban residents, yet there are few tools available to assess whether these systems are vulnerable to future disturbances. We propose a preliminary framework to assess the vulnerability of food systems to future shocks based on landscape ecology's 'Panarchy Framework'. According to Panarchy, ecosystem vulnerability is determined by three generic characteristics: (1) the wealth available in the system, (2) how connected the system is, and (3) how much diversity exists in the system. In this framework, wealthy, non-diverse, tightly connected systems are highly vulnerable. The wealth of food systems can be measured using the approach pioneered by development economists to assess how poverty affects food security. Diversity can be measured using the tools investors use to measure the diversity of investment portfolios to assess financial risk. The connectivity of a system can be evaluated with the tools chemists use to assess the pathways chemicals use to flow through the environment. This approach can lead to better tools for creating policy designed to reduce vulnerability, and can help urban or regional planners identify where food systems are vulnerable to shocks and disturbances that may occur in the future. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The construction of images of people and place: Labelling Liverpool and stereotyping Scousers.

On 28th August 1207, King John created the Borough of Liverpool by granting its first charter. During the ensuing 800 years Liverpool has experienced a complex and changing social, economic and political history resulting in powerful images of the city and its people. This paper examines the labelling of Liverpool and stereotypes of Scousers. It explains how historical and contemporary events, and their coverage in various arms of the media, construct social and spatial imaginations of the city. This involves a more systematic contribution to the how and why dimensions of negative place imagery and social stereotypes, and enhances our understanding of the processes and issues affecting our interpretations of people and place. The analysis is both historical and contemporaneous in teasing out how previous and current events shape the perceptions of insiders and outsiders. This paper reveals that despite concerted efforts to re-brand Liverpool the city continues to face difficult challenges with ongoing bad publicity and negative place imagery.

Housing Rural Communities: Connecting Rural Dwellings to Rural Development in Ireland

This paper explores the interaction between rural development policy and spatial planning policies for rural housing within the context of the island of Ireland. It draws on research commissioned by the Northern Ireland Housing Executive for a high level review of its rural housing policy. The paper highlights issues of wider relevance comprising a strained relationship between rural communities and rural planning, and argues for the adoption of cultural, environmental and community values within the rural planning policy arena.

The Macroeconomic Factors Conditioning the Impact of Identity on Attitudes towards the EU

Factors relating to identity and to economics have been shown to be important predictors of attitudes towards the European Union (EU). In this article, we show that the impact of identity is conditional on economic context. First, living in a member state that receives relatively high levels of EU funding acts as a 'buffer', diluting the impact of an exclusive national identity on Euroscepticism. Second, living in a relatively wealthy member state, with its associated attractiveness for economic migrants, increases the salience of economic xenophobia as a driver of sceptical attitudes. These results highlight the importance of seeing theories of attitude formation (such as economic and identity theories) not as competitors but rather as complementary, with the predictive strength of one theoretical approach (identity) being a function of system-level variation in factors relating to the other theoretical approach (macro-level economic conditions).

Perceptions and reality: Economic voting at the 2004 European Parliament elections

One of the most influential explanations of voting behaviour is based on economic factors: when the economy is doing well, voters reward the incumbent government and when the economy is doing badly, voters punish the incumbent. This reward-punishment model is thought to be particularly appropriate at second order contests such as European Parliament elections. Yet operationalising this economic voting model using citizens' perceptions of economic performance may suffer from endogeneity problems if citizens' perceptions are in fact a function of their party preferences rather than being a cause of their party preferences. Thus, this article models a 'strict' version of economic voting in which they purge citizens' economic perceptions of partisan effects and only use as a predictor of voting that portion of citizens' economic perceptions that is caused by the real world economy. Using data on voting at the 2004 European Parliament elections for 23 European Union electorates, the article finds some, but limited, evidence for economic voting that is dependent on both voter sophistication and clarity of responsibility for the economy within any country. First, only politically sophisticated voters' subjective economic assessments are in fact grounded in economic reality. Second, the portion of subjective economic assessments that is a function of the real world economy is a significant predictor of voting only in single party government contexts where there can be a clear attribution of responsibility. For coalition government contexts, the article finds essentially no impact of the real economy via economic perceptions on vote choice, at least at European Parliament elections.