Assessing the rise of issue voting in British elections since 1964

Measuring the extent to which issues determine electoral choice requires a suitable causal model that takes into account the tact that party identification may colour issue perceptions as well as being partially determined by them. In this paper several possible models are evaluated before settling on one considered to be plausible. This one shows issue-based voting choice to have increased in recent British elections, more or less in step with the decline of class voting documented in previous research. The possibility that this rise in issue voting might be a spurious concomitant of increasing milieu influences is considered and rejected. It is tentatively concluded that the rise of issue voting was due to a decline in the class structuring of British electoral choice.     

After pension reform: Navigating the “Third Rail” in China

Studies of pension reform in developing and transition economies tend to take for granted the capacity of states to implement ambitious and complicated new schemes for the provision of old-age income to pensioners. This article explains the fragmented, decentralized pattern of pension administration in China as an unintended consequence of pension reform. Policy legacies from the command-economy period, principal-agent problems in the reform period, and the threat of pension protests left urban governments largely in control of pension administration. The central government thus succeeded in its policy goals of pension reform but failed to gain administrative control over pension funds. Mark W. Frazier is assistant professor of political science and the Luce Assistant Professor of East Asian Political Economy at Lawrence University. He is the author ofThe Making of the Chinese Industrial Workplace: State, Revolution, and Labor Management (Cambridge University Press, 2002). His current research focuses on how central and local governments in China compete over pension reform. The author gratefully acknowledges helpful comments from Mary E. Gallagher, William Hurst, Dorothy Solinger, Jaeyoun Won, and two anonymous reviewers fromStudies in Comparative International Development. Funds for this research were provided by the Luce Foundation, the University of Louisville, and Lawrence University.     

Do Industrial Tax Abatements Spur Property Value Growth?

Despite ongoing debate regarding the effectiveness of tax abatements, Michigan's Industrial Facilities Tax (IFT) abatement program has been widely and extensively used to boost local economic development. In this article, we estimate the effects of industrial property tax abatements on industrial, residential, and commercial property value growth in the context of regional competition for a panel of 152 communities in the five counties surrounding Detroit from 1983 through 2002. We find that: (1) offering tax abatements yields statistically significant positive impacts on industrial property value growth; (2) the impacts are larger in high tax than in low tax communities; (3) there are positive spillover effects of industrial tax abatements on residential and commercial property value growth; (4) tax abatements offered in competitor communities do not appear to influence own industrial property value growth; and (5) changes in the own as well as competitor property tax rates are important determinants of industrial property value growth. However, the fiscal benefits of tax abatements are quite small as compared with the costs of offering abatements even when spillover benefits to residential and commercial properties are considered.     

Public Value Management: A Case Study of Transitional Change in Disability Sector Reform in Western Australia

This paper contributes to the study of public value management (PVM). PVM is distinguished from other approaches to public administration in its focus on establishing community networks and collaborative capacity building for the creation of public value. We explore PVM through a case study of a public–community sector partnership strategy called the positive behaviour framework (PBF), a state government initiative designed to transform services for people with disabilities. The development and implementation of the PBF is analysed via a transitional change or ‘sector awareness’ model. Each phase of the model is illustrated through ‘positive stories’ that depict key moments in the change process and in the activities that public sector managers employed to raise awareness, build capacity, and promote collaboration. We discuss the implications of the study for disability sector change management and for the further study of the PVM approach to public sector administration.     

“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.     

Quantification of Maxillary Dental Arcade Curvature and the Estimation of Biological Ancestry in Forensic Anthropology

Previous studies suggest that palate shape is a useful indicator of biological ancestry in human remains. This study evaluates interobserver error in ancestry estimation using palate shape and explores palate shape variation in Gullah (descendants of West Africans) and Seminole (Indigenous American) population samples using geometric morphometric analysis. Ten participants were asked to ascribe biological ancestry and shape to 28 dental casts based on a classification scheme employed in previous studies. The mean correct classification was 42.0%, indicating that the likelihood of assigning the correct ancestry is very poor and not significantly different from random assignment (p = 0.12). The accuracy analysis based on categorical classification of the casts was complemented by geometric morphometric analysis of nine 3D landmarks reflecting palate shape of 158 casts. Principal component analysis results show no difference between populations regarding palate shape, and cross‐validated discriminant function analysis correctly classified only 62.0% of the specimens. Combined, these results show that previous methods to estimate ancestry are inaccurate and that this inaccuracy is probably due to a lack of palate shape differences between groups, rather than limitation of the analytical method per se. Therefore, we recommend caution should be used when choosing to apply the analysis of palate shape in forensically relevant contexts.