This chapter proposes an explorative frame-building model for referendum campaigns to help explain how the media cover referendums in particular media systems. It compares insights from the previous chapters with those from other framing studies in different contexts and discusses the extent to which certain frames may be expected to emerge in the coverage of referendum campaigns in general, as a broader category of political event. Comparisons are drawn to research focusing on the 1980 Quebec independence referendum, the 2000 Euro referendum in Denmark and the 2008 Swiss direct-democratic consultation on immigration, which are the other case studies where media framing studies have been carried out. The chapter identifies connections between the similarities these cases share and the characteristics of the media systems where they are located. These similarities form the basis of the original analytical model proposed here.

This chapter focuses on the 'crisis of formal democracy' at the local level. It considers the decline of political parties in terms of membership, activism, resources and public regard. The chapter concentrates on the perceived problem of declining electoral turnout at the local level, together with a focus on potential remedies. It includes the introduction of proportional representation, all-postal ballots and electronic voting, together with other policy initiatives. The chapter focuses on the potential for directly elected mayors to reinvigorate local politics and democracy. The political party has the potential capacity to shape and invigorate local democracy. The chapter analyses the broader role of local authorities and councillors in shaping the agenda at the local level and supporting and facilitating civic engagement. Councillors were genuine community activists who could act as an important link between the needs and demands of local neighbourhoods and the broader responsibilities of the town hall.

By focusing mainly on Sheridan Le Fanu, this chapter deals with a Victorian novelist of Irish birth and French background who utilised English, Welsh and Irish settings in his fiction. Le Fanu has been persistently aligned with a so-called Irish gothic tradition, inaugurated by Charles Robert Maturin and rendered notorious by Bram Stoker whose Dracula successfully transferred to the twentieth century and the snuff movie. The chapter also discusses the historical forces inscribed in Le Fanu's distinctive non-affiliation to the doubtful gothic tradition. In Le Fanu's recurrent character, Richard Marston, there is perhaps a nervous impersonation of Vautrin. Le Fanu's relation to his distinguished French contemporary raises far more engaging problems than those of a merely convenient tradition of Irish Gothicism.

The New Localism has been fostered and encouraged by central government as part of its strategy to reinvigorate local democracy and boost civic engagement and empowerment. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Conservative governments promoted public participation in relation to the delivery and shaping of local public services. This chapter looks at the democratic developments beyond the formal realm of elections, political parties and local political institutions. It presents the analysis of three local initiatives beyond the ballot, namely citizens' panels, local referenda and participatory budgeting. The chapter focuses on the growing trend towards neighbourhood governance at the local level over the last decade, and the town and parish councils. It considers the potential of utilising technology such as high-speed community broadband, in enhancing civic engagement, building communities and developing social capital. The chapter also presents the examination of what one could term the new forms of democracy.

This chapter illustrates some of the ways in which stained glass fitted into the mid-Victorian world. Although there was quite a lot of interconnection between the leading members of the Gothic Revival in Europe, it is difficult to find any direct European influences on the English stained glass market. Ecclesiology undoubtedly stimulated the market for stained glass, but it also created problems for aspiring glass-painters. From 1845, a small but steady stream of monographs concerned with stained glass began to appear. The influences contributing to the revival of stained glass were social, religious and economic. Church-building was clearly a major influence on the revival of stained glass but cannot explain it alone: it is of course quite possible to erect a church with plain glass. The Oxford Movement was a theological renaissance that reinterpreted the identity of the Church of England in terms of its pre-Reformation roots.

This chapter contains a collection of gothic texts between 1776 and 1801 connected with Gothic and Revolution. As the minutes make clear, radical opinion interpreted the events of 1789 in terms of the Glorious Revolution of 1688. For many historically minded commentators, a key aspect of Gothic writing was the mirroring of the Glorious and French Revolutions where the balance of similarities and differences found itself repeatedly disturbed by stubborn anxieties. Gothic imagery is used to evoke the immanence of the past within the present, for instance in the description of the French constitution as a ruined castle, or of the state 'grasped as in a kind of mortmain for ever'. Ann Radcliffe's husband was editor and proprietor of the Whig newspaper, the English Chronicle. The newspaper enthusiastically welcomed the French Revolution, while Radcliffe's own family had links with the same Dissenting culture that included Priestley and Price.

This chapter examines the reciprocal relationship between the living and the dead in Scottish towns by considering how the dead were thought to intervene in the world of the living both by making material claims and also by providing supernatural intercession. The dead, whether sainted or not, maintained a physical and a metaphysical presence in Scottish towns. Their bodies lay under and immediately around the main centres of religious activity, and their names – for a price – were remembered from year to year through commemorative masses, charters, and even inscriptions on church furnishings. Through both burial and remembrance the dead remained present in Scottish towns, enmeshed still within networks of kin, class, and occupation, as they had been during life. Of these networks, the most important for many people was that of their kin. The bond of kinship brought the responsibility of remembrance, since it was kin to whom the dead called, through their religious foundations, for help in the afterlife.