The House of Lords: The Working of the Electoral Process in the 1999 Act of Parliament

This article investigates the working of the 1999 Act of Parliament in relation to the electoral process. One of the more controversial measures in the 1999 Act was the preservation of the representation of the hereditary element in the House of Lords. In the 2007-2008 session of Parliament, Lord Avebury introduced the House of Lords (Amendment) Bill, to repeal this electoral process, and Lord (David) Steel of Aikwood introduced the House of Lords Bill, which had provisions to the same effect as Lord Avebury's Bill. The working of this electoral process is therefore likely to be a topic of debate in the 2008-2009 session of the House of Lords. We suggest that there are three possible options to deal with the likely future issues for this electoral process. These we present as a contribution to a wider debate on the way forward for this constitutional issue.     

‘LEADERISM’: AN EVOLUTION OF MANAGERIALISM IN UK PUBLIC SERVICE REFORM

This paper argues that ‘leaderism’– as an emerging set of beliefs that frames and justifies certain innovatory changes in contemporary organizational and managerial practice – is a development of managerialism that has been utilized and applied within the policy discourse of public service reform in the UK. The paper suggests that ‘leaderism’ is an evolution of entrepreneurial and cultural management ideologies and practices. An analysis of the articulation of leaderism with public service reform in the UK is presented. The paper problematizes the construals of leadership contained within these texts and reflects on their promotion of leadership as a social and organizational technology. ‘Leaderism’ is argued to be a complementary set of discourses, metaphors and practices to those of managerialism, which is being utilized in support of the evolution of NPM and new public governance approaches in the re‐orientation of the public services towards the consumer‐citizen.     

THE SOCIAL STRUCTURE OF VENGEANCE: A TEST OF BLACK'S MODEL*

The current research tests Black's (1990) model of vengeance through interviews with prison inmates. Drawing on a case‐control method, each respondent describes a matched pair of conflicts: the crime of vengeance and a similar nonviolent conflict from the same time period. The quantitative data are used to estimate the impact of conflict structure on conflict management. Conditional logistic regression models offer mixed support: relational distance and functional independence increase the odds of vengeance, but the remaining theoretical variables do not. The qualitative data are used to illustrate the quantitative patterns and unearth parallels between premodern and modern violence.