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The London Passenger Transport Board (LPTB) was a unique hybrid public body accountable only to a small number of stakeholders, yet it delivered substantial improvements in public services and provided good working conditions for its employees at the cost of its investors. London Transport: A Hybrid in History 1905-48 innovatively combines a revisionist historical narrative with a systematic analysis of quantitative and qualitative research to explore how and why the LPTB achieved rare popularity amongst its customers. Divided into three sections, the book explores the financial operations of the Board, the Board as a system of governance and the leadership and management within the LPTB. Using the extensive Transport for London archives, James Fowler conducts a timely assessment of the public network utility that once made London transport domestically popular and internationally admired. With debates about British transport policy ongoing, this book is an illuminating read for scholars and students researching within the areas of business management history, transport and public sector governance and administration.

This paper responds to calls for new theoretical frameworks within which to examine transport history and bring it into contact with other disciplines with a view to overcoming some of its alleged previous preoccupations with Anglocentric economic data. It offers three interconnected ideas from other fields, historical institutionalism, hybridity and institutional logics and it proposes that these tools can assist historians in making sense of the qualitative material from archival records. The paper also suggests that by explicitly framing the history of public transport as a political process, historians can engage with a wider social ecology of interest groups than those represented by economic interests. Whilst recognising the assumptions inherent in an institutional approach and the limitations of the scope of the author's own research, the paper argues that these frameworks can nevertheless be used widely and effectively.

I develop a theory of dynamic responsiveness that suggests that parties that win elections choose candidates who are more extreme and parties that lose elections choose candidates who are more moderate. Moreover, the size of past victories matters. Close elections yield little change, but landslides yield larger changes in the candidates offered by both parties. I test this theory by analyzing the relationship between Republican vote share in U.S. Senate elections and the ideology of candidates offered in the subsequent election. The results show that Republican (Democratic) victories in past elections yield candidates who are more (less) conservative in subsequent elections, and the effect is proportional to the margin of victory. This suggests that parties or candidates pay attention to past election returns. One major implication is that parties may remain polarized in spite of their responsiveness to the median voter.

Der Artikel analysiert die Rolle der USA bei der Demokratisierung Südkoreas. Die innenpolitische Lage Südkoreas nach der Systemtransformation und einem politischen Wandel ist noch nicht stabil. Der außenpolitische Druck der USA auf die südkoreanische Regierung spielt laut Autor eine kritische Rolle bezüglich des Zeitpunkts des politischen Wandels (SWP-Drh)

Stephen Colbert hosts a comedy television program called The Colbert
Report (the t at the end is silent—both of them!) in which he
parodies personality-based news shows like The O'Reilly Factor that have
become popular during the last 10 years. In an effort to make fun of these (usually
conservative) personalities who engage in non-stop self-promotion, Colbert frequently trades
outlandish claims for laughs. Among these is the claim that anyone who comes on the
Report receives the "Colbert bump," immediately vaulting the guest to
stardom, fame, and fortune. Like Midas turning everything he touches to gold, Stephen
Colbert can turn losers into winners, just by interviewing them on his show (but, ahem, he
would never actually interview a loser now would he?).