Joint care and joint funding

One of the most important possible sources of conflict of interest between central and local governments is difference in political preferences with respect to, for example, income redistribution. If local governments are of a different political composition than the central government, they may be inclined to reinforce or weaken the redistribution policies as pursued by the central government. We empirically test whether local governments in the Netherlands do pursue income redistribution policies over and above the central government's redistribution policy and we find that the distribution of the local tax burden over the various household types differs according to the political composition of the local council.     

Europe and local government

The Care in the Community initiative has resulted in a renewed interest in collaboration between local and health authorities. The focus of such collaboration is commonly on the transfer of long‐stay patients from psychiatric and mental handicap hospitals that are due to close, though the extent of local authority involvement in closure programmes varies considerably.

Joint planning typically involves a number of local authority departments: social services, housing, chief executives’ offices and legal services. It sometimes also involves education, recreation and leisure departments. Joint planning can be very time‐consuming and can call for considerable effort. It frequently gives rise to a good deal of conflict between the participating agencies. The pay‐offs, on the other hand, often appear to be small. Such plans as are finally implemented tend to be small‐scale: attempts at broader strategic planning almost invariably come to grief. The question then has to be asked, whether joint planning is worth all the effort. In the end, the primary justification for such planning has to lie in its ability to produce more appropriate services for service‐users.

This paper examines one local authority's experience of joint planning in relation to the closure of a large psychiatric hospital. Despite several setbacks, joint plans were eventually agreed and a number of former long‐stay patients were able to move into the community. The paper considers both the achievements and the shortcomings of the authority's collaboration with the health service.     

Terrorism: An Identity Theory Perspective

The present article outlines the role of personal, social, and cultural identity in religiously and ethnically motivated terrorism. It is proposed that terrorism represents the confluence of a cultural identity strongly based in collectivism and in fundamentalist adherence to religious or cultural principles, a social identity based in sharp contrasts between one's own group and groups perceived as threats, and a foreclosed and authoritarian sense of personal identity or, less often, a diffused and aimless personal identity. Examples from religious-extremist and ethnic conflicts in which terrorism has been employed are used to illustrate the tenets advanced here. Recommendations for addressing and preventing the threat of terrorism are discussed.     

Why Hungary and Poland differed in 1989: The role of medium-term frames in explaining the outcomes of democratic transition

This article has two goals. First, it seeks to enhance our understanding of the factors underlying the divergent outcomes of the round-table negotiations that accompanied transition from communism in Hungary and Poland. It argues that existing explanations emphasizing aspects of the immediate negotiating context should be supplemented by a medium-term perspective focusing on the frames through which actors conceived the options available. The second goal is to argue for an understanding of democratization as the outcome of complex, contingent and prolonged processes of interaction among actors and between actors and context. This does not imply that parsimonious modelling is not useful in democratization studies. But to understand democratization processes fully, modelling approaches need to be combined with more configurative study of historical processes.     

Localism in Practice: Investigating Citizen Participation and Good Governance in Local Government Standards of Conduct

This article examines how, against a background of localism endorsed by the 2010 coalition government in the United Kingdom, a key component of local integrity and governance was fundamentally altered. The Localism Act 2011 abolished the English local integrity framework, which relied on the participation of local citizens in the policy making and implementation of local government standards of conduct. The article utilizes Henrik Bang's concepts of “expert citizen” and “everyday maker” to explore citizen participation in local standards committees. Using a case study approach, the article demonstrates how standards committees shaped processes and practices in the local governance of integrity. The authors argue that standards committees were crucial in promoting local participation and enhancing good governance.