Decadent Conservatism: Politics and Aesthetics in The Senate

The relationship between late-Victorian Decadence and Aestheticism and politics has long been vexed. This article explores the hitherto under-explored confluence of conservatism and avant-garde literature in the period by introducing The Senate, a Tory-Decadent journal that ran from 1894-7. While Decadent authors occupied various political positions, this article argues that The Senate offers a crucial link between conservatism and Decadence The article presents the journal in its political and publishing context, outlining its editorial position on such issues as the Liberal Unionist-Conservative coalition governments, Britain's relationship with Europe and the threat of ���State Socialism���, as well as its valorisation of Bollingbroke and eighteenth-century Toryism, and its relationship to, and difference from, key Decadent journals the Yellow Book and The Savoy. It then goes on to articulate its relationship to Decadence by focussing on the presence of Paul Verlaine in its pages and its vitriolic response to the press coverage of Oscar Wilde's trials. The article concludes by exploring the surprising wake of The Senate, briefly tracing the editors' influence in the development of Modernism and links with the journal BLAST.

Ulster Says Maybe: The Restructuring of Evangelical Politics in Northern Ireland

The recent electoral triumphs of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) have stimulated debate about the role of fundamentalist or ���traditional evangelical��� Protestantism within the party and in Northern Irish politics. This paper argues that a significant restructuring of evangelical politics is taking place, one that is interest group���centred rather than DUP���centred. This process has been facilitated by changes in the structure of civil society. Traditional evangelical interest groups are ���reframing��� their political projects in surprising new ways: abandoning Calvinist conceptions of church and state, using discourses of marginalisation and discrimination, and focusing on ���moral��� issues. These subtle shifts in rhetoric constitute an acceptance of the post���Belfast Agreement order. Rather than the tired, ���Ulster Says No��� politics of the past, evangelicals are speaking out with a pragmatic ���maybe���. This move parallels and reinforces the DUP���s ideological shifts, and provides an extra���party platform for evangelicals to impact politics.

Gender and Politics in Northern Ireland: the representation gap revisited

This article examines the nature of gender politics in Northern Ireland since the 1998 Good Friday/Belfast Agreement. Taking gender justice as a normative democratic framework, the article argues that despite the promise of women's equal participation in public and political life written into the Agreement, parties have delivered varied responses to integrating women, women's interests and perspectives into politics and policy platforms. This contrasts with general patterns supporting women's increased participation in social and political life. The article discusses women's descriptive and substantive representation through electoral outcomes and party manifestos, using the demands of successive women's manifestos as a benchmark. It concludes that while parties have given less recognition and inclusion to women than one might have expected in a new political context, the push for democratic accountability will ensure that gender politics will continue to have a place on the political agenda for some time to come.

Party rules, party resources and the politics of parliamentary democracies How parties organize in the 21st century

This article introduces the first findings of the Political Party Database Project, a major survey of party organizations in parliamentary and semi-presidential democracies. The project���s first round of data covers 122 parties in 19 countries. In this article, we describe the scope of the database, then investigate what it tells us about contemporary party organization in these countries, focusing on parties��� resources, structures and internal decision-making. We examine organizational patterns by country and party family, and where possible we make temporal comparisons with older data sets. Our analyses suggest a remarkable coexistence of uniformity and diversity. In terms of the major organizational resources on which parties can draw, such as members, staff and finance, the new evidence largely confirms the continuation of trends identified in previous research: that is, declining membership, but enhanced financial resources and more paid staff. We also find remarkable uniformity regarding the core architecture of party organizations. At the same time, however, we find substantial variation between countries and party families in terms of their internal processes, with particular regard to how internally democratic they are, and the forms that this democratization takes.