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English Local Government (english + local_government)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Business, Economics, Finance and Accounting75%

Selected Abstracts

FACILITATING CHOICE IN ENGLISH LOCAL GOVERNMENT

ECONOMIC AFFAIRS, Issue 1 2006
Stephen J. Bailey
This paper examines recent policies to enhance the scope for choice by the users of local government services in England. It questions whether they can offset the progressively increasing restriction of local democratic choices that have resulted from the trend towards increasing centralisation of local finance and statutory controls over service standards. [source]

Path Dependency and the Reform of English Local Government

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION, Issue 1 2005
Francesca Gains
This paper uses the concept of path dependency to examine the changes to the political management structures of English local government. We note how the possible experience of decreasing returns among some local authority actors combined with the powerful intervention of politicians within New Labour at the national level led to a significant break from past policy and the imposition of measures to establish a separate executive that was claimed as a radical step forward for local democracy. Using survey data from the Evaluating Local Governance research team (http://www.elgnce.org.uk), we explore the establishment of a separate political executive in all major local authorities and map out the style of decision-making that is emerging. We find that some established institutional patterns reasserted themselves in the process of implementation, but that increasing returns are not as great as some theorists of path dependency would suggest and they may be a force for system change as well as for stability. [source]

Political manipulation in a majoritarian democracy: central government targeting of public funds to English subnational government, in space and across time

BRITISH JOURNAL OF POLITICS & INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, Issue 3 2001
Peter John
This article argues that it is rational for the executive to target resources in space and through time if it seeks to maximise its chances of electoral success. In majoritarian democracies such as the United Kingdom, there are particularly strong incentives to target resources to marginal legislative constituencies, although similar opportunies exist in other political systems. The benefits of such a practice could be growing, because the costs of forms of temporal targeting predicted by theories of the political business cycle have increased, owing to the effect of the global economy. In the United Kingdom one channel through which resources can be targeted is central grants to local authorities. This model is tested with pooled cross-section data on the central finance of English local government between 1981/1982,1995/1996. The article confirms that central government spatially targeted marginals after 1988/1989 while it continued to allocate greater funds near national elections, conditional on its opinion-poll ratings. Hypotheses from the literature on distributional politics are also tested, finding evidence for the temporal allocation of resources to win local elections. [source]