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Document Cited in Related
Vincent
Date01 December 2013
DOI10.1111/1467-9248.12099
Published date01 December 2013
Subject MatterArticle
This Issue
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P O L I T I C A L S T U D I E S : 2 0 1 3 VO L 6 1 , 7 0 7 – 7 0 8
doi: 10.1111/1467-9248.12099
This Issue
The opening paper in this issue of Political Studies by Graham Smith, Peter John and Patrick
Sturgis takes a topical turn, analysing the effect of participation in an online asynchronous
discussion forum on the direction and magnitude of opinion change and policy preferences
relating to youth anti-social behaviour. While the authors find that engagement in online
discussion forums can lead to modest shifts in preferences amongst those who choose to
contribute to the discussion, questions remain about the utility of online discussion fora as
an effective means of engaging citizens to generate informed inputs into the policy process.
Taking the question of opinion formation into the realm of global politics, in the next paper
Kyle Murray and Owen Worth re-examine Gramsci’s concept of hegemony and consider
the role of global evangelical religious groups in fashioning hegemonic consent across
diverse parts of civil society.This is followed by Jon Mansell and Sara Motta’s study of the
crisis of representation in Third Way politics, using Britain and Chile as case studies and
discussing the ways in which the Third Way acted to re-present a de-mobilised working class
subject as part of a wider model of a consensual and de-antagonised politics.
The next four papers each challenge in their own way some of the current traditions
within political theory and philosophy. Michelle Clarke presents the notion that Quentin
Skinner’s contextualism should be regarded as an unsuccessful attempt to develop a truly
methodical approach to textual interpretation, claiming that Skinnerian contextualism
proceeds from the assumption that we cannot help but make faulty judgements when
confronted with historical materials, given the nature of human cognition. Craig Smith
then engages with some of the recent literature on Adam Smith which has sought to
distance the ‘father of economics’ from his...

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