Winning the Peace: The British in Occupied Germany, 1945-1948
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The British Popular Press and the Early Cold War
Britain's role during the early years of the cold war has come under intense scrutiny in the past decade. As a result, it is now known that London rather than Washington played the leading part in forcing the pace towards confrontation with the Soviet Union in the late 1940s. However, relatively little is known still about the British public's reaction to this policy. By examining arguably the chief public opinion former during this period, the ‘popular’ press, this paper hopes to shed new light on the roots and development of cold war values in Britain. The attitudes of the main newspapers to certain key events overseas between 1945 and 1949 are outlined, as is the relationship between Attlee's Labour government and the press in relation to foreign affairs. Ultimately, the chief purpose of the article is to assess the part played by the ‘popular’ press in the emergence, or orchestration, of a cold war ‘consensus’ in Britain by the beginning of the 1950s.
Deliberative Democracy and the Resource Curse: A Nationwide Experiment in Tanzania
Oil and gas discoveries in developing countries are often associated with short-sighted economic policies and, in response, calls to insulate resource management from populist impulses. We report on a randomized experiment testing methods to overcome this apparent tension between sound resource governance and democratic politics. Soon after Tanzania’s discovery of major natural gas reserves, we invited a nationally representative sample of voters to an intensive public deliberation of policy options featuring nationally recognized experts and small-group discussions. Democratic deliberation reinforced the public’s strong preference for rapid spending of gas revenues, but also increased support for various prudential and economically orthodox measures, including independent oversight of gas revenues, limits on government borrowing, and selling gas abroad rather than subsidizing fuel at home. These effects were driven by deliberation per se, rather than a pure information treatment, and show no evidence of contamination by facilitatoror peer-effects in group deliberations. www.cgdev.org Justin Sandefur, Nancy Birdsall, James Fishkin, and Mujobu Moyo