Search Results

This chapter begins by discussing the reasons for the prevailing historiographical neglect of rural politics. It clarifies several points regarding the relationship between the rural voters and the Liberal party, and the differences between the semi-official political culture of the late Victorian Liberal party and the more informal, but no less strongly ingrained, political culture of the radical rural electorate. It also focuses the discussion on case studies in North Essex, South Oxfordshire, and the Holmfirth division of the West Riding of Yorkshire by taking a look at their economic, political, demographic, and religious conditions. It notes that this study relied heavily on sources such as rural press; the private papers of three Liberal politicians: Herbert Samuel, Joseph Albert Pease, and Henry Joseph Wilson; and the sparse official party records on rural Liberalism.

This chapter explains the coverage of this book, which is about the Labour government's rural policy in Great Britain since 1997. The book is divided into three parts. The first part addresses the broad themes and features of New Labour's rural policy; the second focuses on the key issues that have defined New Labour's engagement with rural politics including the Foot and Mouth crisis, hunting, housing development, the ‘right to roam’, and agricultural-policy reform; and the third examines the treatment of rural issues within broader policy arenas. The book also analyses the position of rural-policy reforms in Britain since 1997 within a broader context, drawing on wider analytical frameworks and exploring links to larger-scale political agendas and processes of restructuring.

This chapter discusses the culmination of the Labour government's historic campaign for a ‘right to roam’ in the 2000 Countryside and Rights of Way Act (CRoW). It provides a brief commentary and policy history on the issue of countryside access in terms of rural politics. The chapter argues that the issue of accessibility has not been sufficiently addressed by complicated, managerial legislative provisions for open access.

Chapter 6 provides an overview of the studies on new media’s role for political activism and then examines how mobile phones mediate political action by exploring activists’ use of mobile phones for their daily political work in rural West Bengal. The ethnographic fieldwork was carried out during the rise of the opposition, the Trinamul Congress Party, in West Bengal; consequently, the chapter also highlights the factors that helped bring the Trinamul Congress Party to power after decades of the Left Front Government’s rule of the state. This chapter illustrates how phone use builds on earlier political patterns and meanings, but has made politics faster, more heterogeneous, and translocal. Incidents that appear to be spontaneous reactions to the ruling party’s misdeeds often originate in communication between different levels of party hierarchies, followed by the horizontal spreading of information both within and outside the party.

The analysis presented in this chapter indicates that indigenous voters are disproportionately targeted as clients in vote-buying schemes, which is why the distribution of patronage has become a necessary vote-maximizing strategy for ethnic-party candidates to utilize to earn votes. This finding gives further credence to the argument that ethnic-party candidates must compete using the tactics employed by mainstream candidates to win votes. As such, it was unfair to expect that ethnic-party candidates could ever be more consistently policy-focused, given the expectations of patronage that indigenous constituents have during campaign season. To demonstrate the power of clientelism as a technique to attract indigenous supporters, this chapter analyzes AmericasBarometer survey data from fifteen countries across Latin America. The results show that not only are indigenous voters more likely to be targeted for clientelism, but ethnic-party supporters specifically are also more likely to be approached to sell their votes. These findings therefore provide evidence of the generalizability of the argument that ethnic-party candidates face strong incentives to engage in the clientelist behavior of mainstream parties in order to win votes across Latin America.

Chapter five focuses on instances of activism in the two villages to challenge the dominant understanding of rural politics in East and West as mirror images. It demonstrates that the remodelling of localities in postwar Germany provided the framework for a new kind of give-and-take politics which relied on a mutually beneficial partnership between citizens and the state. In the liberal democracy of the West as well as the socialist dictatorship of the East, dynamic local politicians created spaces for participation which were readily seized upon by local residents. Locals became more willing to volunteer their time and energy towards the remodelling of their locality, often partnering with, or at least expecting support from, state authorities. In return, they increasingly defended their own interests and held the welfare state to its promises. The localities of the divided Germany thus became the site of a new kind of give-and-take between citizens and state. Within the confines of the very different social and political systems, a parallel transformation of local politics in East and West occurred in the 1960s and 1970s.