Age Discrimination, Redundancy Payments and Length of Service

This note discusses three cases which have considered objective justification for the apparent contradiction between rewarding age and length of service in redundancy payments and the need not to discriminate on the grounds of age. It considers the relevance of cases from the European Court of Justice about whether there can be a general exception to the need to justify using the criterion of length of service, or seniority, in equal pay cases.     

The origins of penal populism

Five years ago after 46 years of daily deadlines – the last 38 on The Guardian – I retired to explore, with the help of Joseph Rowntree Foundation and Nuffield College Oxford fellowships, just how much influence was played by the media in the policy making process. The exercise was prompted by rising public concern over the ever widening power of the media. Onora O'Neill, the philosopher, in her Reith lectures in 2002 on trust in public institutions, noted with irony that the main champion of transparency and accountability – the media – were themselves the least transparent and accountable group in democracy. Anthony Sampson, a distinguished journalist, in his fourth edition of Anatomy of Britain in 2004, documented just how entrenched this perception was.     

The Dynamics of Party Preference Change in Britain, 1991–1996

The paper examines individual-level data from the first six waves of the British Household Panel Survey, 1991–96. The analysis shows that changes in party support in this period were significantly affected by two sets of factors that have traditionally been regarded as important sources of changes in voters' political preferences: ideology and personal economic experiences. Ideological change is demonstrated to have much stronger direct effects on party preference than economic factors. However, both objective economic conditions and subjective economic perceptions are shown to have significant effects on ideological change itself, implying that economic factors also exert important indirect effects on voters' partisan preferences. These individual-level findings provide important corroboration for the results of aggregate-level studies, which have consistently found that economic factors—and in particular economic perceptions—play a major role in determining patterns of partisan support.     

Does Participation Lead to Ongoing Infrastructure Maintenance? Evidence from Caribbean Landslide Mitigation Projects

Donor-funded infrastructure projects may focus on construction and neglect longer-term sustainability. Engaging local communities has been proposed as way of inducing ongoing maintenance by facilitating coordination and a sense of ownership, but there is little evidence on its effectiveness in practice. We analyse data from inspections of 103 landslide hazard mitigation drains in Saint Lucia several years after construction. We conclude that community participation at the beginning of the project, by accessing local knowledge, is associated with improved construction quality, but appears to have no impact on subsequent maintenance, suggesting that contractual provision for maintenance may be required.