Incentives in Third‐Party Governance: Management Practices and Accountability Implications

Contract incentives are designed to motivate contractor performance and to provide public managers with a powerful tool to achieve contract accountability. Our knowledge of contract incentives is rooted in contract design, yet as we move beyond contract specification and further into the contract lifecycle, we know little about why and how managers implement incentives. This study assesses public managers’ use of contract incentives in practice and advances theory development. A typology of contract incentives is constructed to capture a comprehensive range of formal and informal incentives, and the factors that influence managerial use of incentives are identified. The findings shed light on the complexities of maintaining accountability in third‐party governance structures and the management techniques aimed at improving the performance of public agencies.     

The 2017 General Election,Brexit and the Return to Two‐Party Politics: An Aggregate‐Level Analysis of the Result

The outcome of the 2017 general election—a hung parliament—defied most predictions. In this article, we draw on aggregate‐level data to conduct an initial exploration of the vote. What was the impact of Brexit on the 2017 general election result? What difference did the collapse of UKIP make? And what was the relative importance of factors such as turnout, education, age and ethnic diversity on support for the two main parties? First, we find that turnout was generally higher in more pro‐remain areas, and places with high concentrations of young people, ethnic minorities and university graduates. Second, we find that the Conservatives made gains in the sort of places that had previously backed Brexit and previously voted for UKIP . But, third, we find that the gains the Conservatives made from the electoral decline of UKIP were offset by losses in the sort of places that had previously supported the Conservatives, particularly areas in southern England with larger numbers of graduates. The implication of these findings is that while a Brexit effect contributed to a ‘realignment on the right’, with the Conservative strategy appealing to people in places that had previously voted for UKIP , this strategy was not without an electoral cost, and appears to have hurt the party in more middle class areas.     

The Party Faithful: Partisan Images,Candidate Religion,and the Electoral Impact of Party Identification

We argue that the factors shaping the impact of partisanship on vote choice—“partisan voting”—depend on the nature of party identification. Because party identification is partly based on images of the social group characteristics of the parties, the social profiles of political candidates should affect levels of partisan voting. A candidate's religious affiliation enables a test of this hypothesis. Using survey experiments which vary a hypothetical candidate's religious affiliation, we find strong evidence that candidates’ religions can affect partisan voting. Identifying a candidate as an evangelical (a group viewed as Republican) increases Republican support for, and Democratic opposition to, the candidate, while identifying the candidate as a Catholic (a group lacking a clear partisan profile) has no bearing on partisan voting. Importantly, the conditional effect of candidate religion on partisan voting requires the group to have a salient partisan image and holds with controls for respondents’ own religious affiliations and ideologies.     

Federalism and Institutional Design: The Perils and Politics of a Triple-E Senate in Canada

Since the proposal was put forward by a subcommittee of theAlberta legislature, most western Canadian political leadershave advocated a U.S.-style Triple-E (elected, effective, andequal) Senate. Superficially compatible with western Canada'sstated constitutional and public policy agenda, the Triple-Eproposal has broad elite and popular appeal in the West. However,such an institution will be unlikely to satisfy western demandsfor more effective representation in the federal Parliament,and will prove antithetical to another key western objective:significant reduction of public spending in Ottawa. Insteadof pursuing a Triple-E Senate, the West's constitutional andpolicy objectives could focus on seeking greater devolutionof power to the provinces. Such a strategy would have the addedadvantage of facilitating a constitutional alliance with theprovince of Quebec, thereby enhancing the likelihood of success.     

Ideological Party Cohesion in Macro‐comparative Politics: The Nordic Social Democratic Parties from a Comparative Perspective

‘Party cohesion’ is a central concept in the analysis of agenda‐setting, veto players and coalition‐building as well as in the analysis of policy efficiency and party responsiveness. However, there is no indicator to measure party cohesion in a systematic manner over time and across parties. As a consequence, most established studies treat political parties as unitary actors although from an analytical point of view they should be considered collective actors. In order to overcome this deficiency, in this article a time‐variant and party‐specific index of party cohesion is developed which can be used in macro‐comparative statistical analysis. The concept of ‘ideological cohesion’ is developed along the Left–Right dimension. This index is applied in order to compare the party cohesion of Nordic social democratic parties (SDs) with their counterparts in 17 additional countries. The results show that the myth of the cohesion of Nordic SDs is only true for the golden age of the welfare state. Currently, most of the Nordic SDs actually have a lower party cohesion than their counterparts in many other countries.     

The Electoral Basis of the Icelandic Independence Party, 1929–1944*

This article deals with the electoral basis of the largest political party in Iceland, the Independence Party (IP), in its formation period. Almost all capitalists and white collar workers supported the IP, as well as a little less than half of farmers and a minority of manual workers. Women also favoured the party more than males. The article seeks to explain the IP's electoral support with reference to structural features of Icelandic society, ideology, and the heritage of Iceland's struggle for independence from Denmark.
The IP is furthest to the right on the socioeconomic spectrum of Icelandic politics; in its heterogeneous voting support and ideology of nationalism and class unity, the IP resembles such political parties as the Christian Democratic Union in West Germany and the Conservative Party in Britain rather than the Liberal and Conservative parties in Scandinavia.