MPs' Expenditure and General Election Campaigns: Do Incumbents Benefit from Contacting their Constituents?

Most studies of the impact of local campaign expenditure on British election results have found that expenditure by incumbents has less of an effect on the outcome than does that by challengers. Some argue that this, in part, reflects an underestimate of how much is spent by incumbents because it excludes their expenditure under various parliamentary allowances which facilitates contacts between MPs and their constituents. Data on spending under those allowances are now available and are used here to evaluate its impact at the 2005 general election in England. The analyses show that only expenditure by Conservative MPs had any impact on their re-election chances.     

Social impact assessment of regional plans: a review of methods and issues and a recommended process

Social impact assessment (SIA) is defined and related to other policy analysis techniques. Conceptual problems in conducting SIA are reviewed. Various SIA methods are identified and evaluated for their probable effectiveness in assessing regional plans. Regional planning conditions are identified and constraints to, and demands on, SIA are examined. A strategy for SIA is proposed which uses public inputs during cyclical planning iterations for efficiently identifying and assessing the most important social impacts.This article is primarily based on earlier work funded by the Kellogg Grant to the University of California at Davis (Kellogg-SRAPC Project). An earlier version of this paper was published by the Sacramento Regional Area Planning Commission (Sacramento, CA) in 1977.     

Changing biases in the operation of the UK's electoral system, 1950–97

The biased outcomes of recent British general elections, whereby the two main parties (Conservative and Labour) would have achieved different percentages of the seats in the House of Commons for the same percentages of the votes cast, are explored, using a method of bias decomposition developed by a New Zealand political scientist. Overall, the situation changed markedly between 1950 and 1997: the biases in the system strongly favoured the Conservatives in the 1950s and early 1960s, but Labour in 1992 and 1997. Examination of the seven components of the bias measure shows that most of these moved in Labour's favour over the 50-year period, with a major shift between 1992 and 1997 because of the greater geographical efficiency of the Labour party's vote at the latter date: reasons for this are suggested.     

TRAUMATIZED CHILDREN IN SUPERVISED VISITATION

This article reviews the range of trauma experienced by many children in supervised visitation services and describes common themes in the development of their personalities from clinical and research findings. It then proposes a series of ways to structure supervised access services in order to help children feel psychologically safe in the relationship with the visited parent.     

The Geography of Insurgent Organization and its Consequences for Civil Wars: Evidence from Liberia and Sierra Leone

This article investigates the determinants of armed group organization and the downstream effects of organization on civil wars. It demonstrates that the interaction between geographical and technological factors influences the types of hierarchical organizations that armed groups develop. It then argues that variations in the types of hierarchies developed by armed groups have important consequences for principal-agent relations, which in turn affect groups' overall level of military effectiveness. Using evidence from field research conducted in Liberia and Sierra Leone, the model's plausibility is examined in comparative case studies of four armed groups that fought in those countries from 1989–2003.