“If You've Got Friends and Neighbours”: Constituency Voting Patterns for the UK Labour Party Leader in 2010

Most attention in British electoral studies has been paid to the pattern of voting for parties, with relatively little to that for individual candidates. In intra-party elections, however, candidates may perform better in some areas than others, illustrating V. O. Key's well-known “friends and neighbours” effect. This paper explores whether that was so at the election for the leader of the UK Labour party in 2010, expecting each of the five candidates to perform better in their own constituency and its environs and also with those constituency parties whose MPs supported their candidature. The results are in line with the expectations, especially for one of the candidates who ran an explicitly geographical campaign.     

Capacity as Philosophy: A Review of Richard Lippke’s, The Ethics of Plea Bargaining

Plea bargaining is a response to capacity overload in the criminal justice system. It both preserves and belies the right to trial, making possible its glorious display but only by denying it in most cases. While plea bargaining has been documented and analysed copiously in historical, sociological and legal terms, its ethical status as an institutional practice are hazy. Richard Lippke offers an account of plea bargaining that draws on the normative debates over responsibility, culpability and desert, in aid of a holistic proposal for a morally defensible system of pre-trial adjudication. In proposing an ethical system of plea bargaining, and working through the normative challenges to this, two bigger questions become visible. These are: what are the implications of developing, in essence, an ethics of efficiency, and, how should the criminal justice system be held to account for the inequalities (and iniquities) that exist before and outside it? In this review essay, I show how these questions are constructed in the book and make some attempt at analysing them, thus engaging with the more urgent and general issue of the complicated relationship of the ideal to the real when it comes to penal practice.     

Development and Initial Findings of an Implementation Process Measure for Child Welfare System Change

This article describes a new measure designed to examine the process of implementation of child welfare systems change. The measure was developed to document the status of the interventions and strategies that are being implemented and the drivers that are being installed to achieve sustainable changes in systems. The measure was used in a Children's Bureau-supported national effort to assess the ongoing implementation of 24 systems-change projects in child welfare jurisdictions across the country. The article describes the process for measure development, method of administration and data collection, and quantitative and qualitative findings.     

Local Political Leadership and the Modernisation of Local Government

Political leadership has been a key element of central government's attempts to ‘modernise’ local government over the past decade, within a discourse that emphasised ‘strong’ and ‘visible’ leadership and the role of leaders and leadership in driving change within local authorities. In the context of such an approach, and also taking account of academic discourse, this article draws upon interviews with nearly thirty individuals in leadership positions in local authorities in England, Scotland and Wales to assess their experiences of leadership and their views of some aspects of the role and work of councils. It suggests that whilst there is broad convergence between the aspirations of government and the narratives that emerge from these leaders on some aspects of local political leadership, there are also differences, perhaps most notably over the relationship between changes to decision-making structures and the loci of political power.     

Minor Parties and Independents in Times of Change: Scottish Local Elections 1974 to 2007

This article explores the electoral performance of minor party and Independent candidates in Scottish local elections from 1974 to 2007. This is a period which began with a major restructuring of local government and ended with a change in the electoral system from first-past-the-post to the single transferable vote. It encompasses a second restructuring in the 1990s, the consolidation of the Scottish National Party as an electoral force, and the creation of the Scottish Parliament. Throughout the period, while there have been ebbs and flows, Independents and minor parties have remained significant players in local electoral politics in Scotland.     

Modernisation or Backward Step? Women Councillors and New Decision-Making Structures in Local Government

Following the 1997 general election New Labour took power with a commitment to ‘modernising’ government, including local government. This modernisation was based upon a variety of approaches including the introduction of new decision-making structures, improving local democracy, improving local financial accountability, creating a new ethical framework for councillors and council employees and improving local services. It is with the first two of these and their potential impact upon women councillors that this article is concerned. It analyses past evidence on women's participation in local government in the UK and examines the impact of the new political structures on progression to senior posts in local government.     

Rethinking the restorative–retributive dichotomy: is reconciliation possible?

While the use of restorative justice within Western criminal justice systems continues to grow, its philosophical foundations remain uncertain. This inconclusiveness impacts directly upon the theoretical discussion of restorative justice and its relationship with existing paradigms of punishment, precipitating debate regarding its ability to integrate within justice systems governed by retributive paradigms. Specifically, this ambiguity of definition renders debate regarding the extent to which restorative justice philosophy exists as an alternative punishment or an alternative to punishment, and its existence as complementary or axiomatic to retributive justice unresolved. The philosophy of restorative justice, identifying its central features and addressing those previous attempts of contrasting restorative justice with the prevailing paradigm of retribution is explored here. However, it is suggested that aspirations of reconciling restorative justice philosophy with the retributive paradigm will be ultimately unsuccessful, due to the persistent latent ambiguity regarding the central foundation upon which restorative justice philosophy is built. Such concerns are also present when seeking to affirm the continued opposition of retributive and restorative justice.     

Opportunity,responsibility and the market: interrogating liberal equality

This article scrutinizes the claim that liberal egalitarians are now the last real torchbearers for the principles of egalitarian reform. This claim might appear eccentric on the surface, but is increasingly common in leftist circles following the recent abandonment of such principles by formerly socialist parties. Programmes of 'social inclusion', for instance, are now widely criticized for substituting a desire to tackle economic inequalities with an incitement for us to become obedient, productive citizens. Focusing here on the claim that liberal egalitarians pose a radical alternative to this kind of discourse, I show that the real deficiencies of much liberal egalitarianism not only resemble but in many ways actually provide the sort of discourse within which parties like New Labour operate.