What about Financial Sustainability of Local Government!—A Critical Review of Accountability,Transparency, and Public Assurance Arrangements in England during Austerity

Austerity strained the financial sustainability of governments and ability of policy-makers to address policy challenges, and so having appropriate accountability and transparency arrangements to assure the public they were getting value for money took on renewed urgency. Comparing and contrasting findings from a critical review of policy developments in English Local Government during the Conservative led coalition central government 2010–2015 with those from related studies on accountability and transparency more generally, the article offers key themes for practitioners and policy-makers seeking to build stronger democratic systems of governance that go well beyond the UK jurisdiction.     

Huan Xiang

It has become common to regard consociational democracy as a method of managing conflict in ethnically divided societies but little attention has been paid to its applicability to societies where the primary political cleavage is between secular and religious forces. This article seeks to redress this imbalance by examining the applicability of consociationalism to the case of the Palestinian Territory. We argue that, while Palestinian society is characterised by ‘pillarisation’ along a secularist/Islamist cleavage, formal power-sharing between the representatives of the two main Palestinian factions, namely Fatah and Hamas, has proved elusive. However, rather than seeking to explain the seeming inability of the factions to share power by reference to the nature of the cleavage, as other authors have done, we instead highlight the contextual factors that have made power sharing difficult to achieve, namely the difficulties Hamas and Fatah face in accepting each other as political partners, and opposition from external actors.     

The Wedding Planners: Lord Aberdeen,Henry Bulwer,and the Spanish Marriages, 1841–1846

This article uses the largely neglected papers of Sir Henry Bulwer, British minister at Madrid between 1843 and 1848, as a prism through which to view the fourth Earl of Aberdeen's handling of Anglo–French relations, in general, and in Spain over the marriages of Queen Isabella and her younger sister the Infanta Luisa Fernanda, in particular, during a critical period. It highlights the fact that developments in the historiograhical context and the recent availability of important private papers have created an opportunity for a detailed and much-needed re-examination of Aberdeen's foreign policy, Conservative foreign policy, and British policy towards Spain in the 1840s.     

An elusive transition: The slow motion demise of authoritarian dominant party rule in Mexico

Mexico's authoritarian dominant party regime is a curious hybrid.¹ The 1917 Constitution is an advanced liberal charter and some basic rules of political procedure ‐ such as the fixed timetable for federal elections and the no re‐election rule ‐ are strongly institutionalised. Yet for over 60 years the regime was also clearly authoritarian, deriving its legitimacy from the revolution rather than the electorate. This article analyses the sui generis nature of the Mexican authoritarian regime, tracing the way formal constitutional rules were supplemented (or displaced) by a coherent and relatively flexible set of informal understandings perpetuating one party dominance. It counterposes these country‐specific characteristics to comparative accounts of how authoritarian regimes ‘break down’, or introduce a ‘political liberalization’ which perhaps opens the way to a ‘transition’ to democracy. Under each of these headings Mexican reality demands significant adaptations to the standard account. During 1994 Mexico underwent severe upheavals without a ‘breakdown’ of the regime. Instead the 1994 presidential election provided a reasonably authentic electoral mandate to the current administration ‐ and yet the process of ‘transition’ to democracy in Mexico remains elusive. This article uses the current Mexican process to probe the scope and limitations of the comparative democratization literature.     

‘Reasonable’ perceptions of stalking: the influence of conduct severity and the perpetrator–target relationship

Abstract

This study sought to examine the state of police interviews with children in Norway set against the various models that have been developed in the United Kingdom. UK models attempt to accord with psychological principles that lead to effective interviewing and so, if appropriately followed, should enhance the elicitation of accurate material. Set against these principles of best practice, an analysis of 11 police interviews indicated that a number of insppropriate and ineffective strategies appear to be used in police interviews in Norway. These included a preponderance of closed questions, a large number of instructions, paraphrasing and not giving the child enough time to talk. Results suggest that the Norwegian system needs to be made more aware of the psychological vulnerabilities that can lead to suggestibility in children.