THE WHITEHALL PROGRAMME AND AFTER: RESEARCHING GOVERNMENT IN TIME OF GOVERNANCE

This article revisits the Whitehall Programme and Rod Rhodes' crucial role in setting it up. It examines the research commissioned for the Programme and how research in this field has changed since the mid 1990s. It confirms that research on Whitehall has become more diverse and specialist – reflecting its apparent hollowing‐out – but that research employing a longer historical perspective does not support an interpretation that government in the UK was ever strongly filled‐in. It also suggests that the study of Whitehall now demonstrates more theoretical ambition than hitherto, and, in the light of the dominance of qualitative research in this field, calls for a more sophisticated methodological debate about qualitative approaches to the study of government and especially their potential contribution to theory‐building.     

Regulatory Reform: Creating Gaps and Making Markets

This article argues that dispute processing reform, such as regulatory negotiation, plays a role in constructing a "crisis" in regulatory litigation and defining a new partnership between regulated interests and the state. Unlike traditional studies of regulatory reform, which tend to evaluate the behavioral impact of legal reform on policy, I argue that reforms themselves play a constitutive role in politics. The article examines the ideology of regulatory negotiation and presents empirical data on federal regulatory litigation in the U.S. Courts of Appeals (1940–1985), to demonstrate that this legal reform is part of a general drive toward a minimalist state.     

When politics prevails: Parties,elections and loyalty in the European Parliament

In many political systems, legislators serve multiple principals who compete for their loyalty in legislative votes. This article explores the political conditions under which legislators choose between their competing principals in multilevel systems, with a focus on how election proximity shapes legislative behaviour across democratic arenas. Empirically, the effect of electoral cycles on national party delegations’ ‘collective disloyalty’ with their political groups in the European Parliament (EP) is analysed. It is argued that election proximity changes the time horizons, political incentives and risk perceptions of both delegations and their principals, ‘punctuating’ cost‐benefit calculations around defection as well as around controlling, sanctioning and accommodating. Under the shadow of elections, national delegations’ collective disloyalty with their transnational groups should, therefore, increase. Using a new dataset with roll‐call votes cast under legislative codecision by delegations between July 1999 and July 2014, the article shows that the proximity of planned national and European elections drives up disloyalty in the EP, particularly by delegations from member states with party‐centred electoral rules. The results also support a ‘politicisation’ effect: overall, delegations become more loyal over time, but the impact of election proximity as a driver of disloyalty is strongest in the latest parliament analysed (i.e., 2009–2014). Furthermore, disloyalty is more likely in votes on contested and salient legislation, and under conditions of Euroscepticism; by contrast, disloyalty is less likely in votes on codification files, when a delegation holds the rapporteurship and when the national party participates in government. The analysis sheds new light on electoral politics as a determinant of legislative choice under competing principals, and on the conditions under which politics ‘travels’ across democratic arenas in the European Union's multilevel polity.     

PATHWAYS TO SEX-BASED DIFFERENTIATION IN CRIMINAL COURT SENTENCING

Using a matched sampling method, this research examined the process of sex-based differentiation in sentencing outcomes for 194 men and 194 women, sentenced over a seven-year period in Christchurch, New Zealand. Consistent with past research, our results showed that judicial processing treated women more leniently than men. Path analyses revealed that judges were less likely to sentence women than men to imprisonment terms because of gendered information and decisions made earlier in the judicial process, such as criminal history, length of custodial remands, and pre-sentence recommendations by probation officers. In contrast, judges exercised considerable leniency towards women (compared with men) in setting the length of prison terms, even after statistically controlling for all sex-differentiated factors such as criminal history. Explanations and implications are discussed.     

SYMPOSIUM ON CHANGING MODES OF GOVERNANCE IN PUBLIC SECTOR ORGANIZATIONS: ACTION AND RHETORIC

This symposium grew out of the sub‐theme, ‘New Modes of Governance in Public Sector Organizations’, of the European Group for Organizational Studies (EGOS) Conference held in Ljubljana in July 2004. Our aim was to provide a forum to discuss the policy and practice and the space between in public sector management and governance within Europe.