TOP‐DOWN AND BOTTOM‐UP: INSTITUTIONAL EFFECTS ON DEBT AND GRANTS AT THE ENGLISH AND GERMAN LOCAL LEVEL

This article investigates the impact of institutional factors on the relationship between grant funding and local debt in England and Germany. Using a panel dataset covering the period 2005–12, the research identifies a positive relationship between grants and local debt. The positive relationship between grants and debt is reduced due to the impact of political and administrative variables. The findings demonstrate three shortcomings of the current literature. First, in contrast to the dominant portrayal of German local administration as predominantly legalistic, partisan dynamics affect the allocation of grants to the German local level. Second, institutional variables operate differently depending upon grant type, providing a rationale against the scholarly practice of using aggregate grants. Third, grant mechanisms provide a promising key to unlock institutional dynamics in systems of multilevel governance, but only when scholars integrate institutional differences more explicitly in their research design than hitherto accounted for by political economy.     

Children Exposed to Domestic Violence: Making Trauma‐Informed Custody and Visitation Decisions

This article explores the risks for young children and the challenges for courts that emerge when parents who are victims or perpetrators of intimate partner violence seek court decisions on child visitation or custody matters. We focus particularly on children age five and younger, a group that is disproportionately represented in families affected by intimate partner violence, and especially vulnerable to its traumatic impact. We examine the literature on children's response to violence between their parents and the literature on parental alienation, a counter‐charge that may arise when one parent alleges violence as a reason to limit the other parent's access to the children. We look at challenges faced by both mental health professionals and courts involved in custody determinations and make policy recommendations to help courts make trauma‐informed decisions that best serve children.     

Friends,Enemies, or Strangers? On Relationships between Public and Private Sector Service Providers in Hybrid Forms of Governance

Hybrid forms of governance receive special attention in literature on regulatory reforms. It is often assumed that a combination of public and private sector involvement in a regulatory regime is superior to “pure public” or “pure private” regimes. By paying close attention to such hybrids, this article finds that hybrids have two key dimensions: first, the “amount” of public and private sector involvement in a hybrid, and second, the relationship between these sectors. Contrary to the former dimension, the latter hardly receives any attention in scholarship. This article addresses that knowledge gap. It introduces a typology of hybrids based on these two dimensions. A brief case study is introduced to discuss the value of the focus on relationships between public and private sector service providers.     

Candidates,Votes, Outcomes: A Method for Evaluating Nomination Strategies in MMD/SNTV Electoral Systems

While characterized by disagreement, all scholarly work on multimember district electoral systems in which each voter casts a single, nontransferable vote (MMD/SNTV) is alike in one way: it evaluates party nominations under the assumption that votes are invariant under alternative strategies. But party votes may, in fact, vary with different nomination strategies. Moreover, depending on how much party votes vary under alternative nomination strategies, a method that considers such changes may evaluate nominations differently than previous studies in the literature have. In this article, I address party‐vote variance, proposing a method that estimates how much a party's obtained votes change under alternative nomination strategies and using this method to reevaluate the nominating behavior of Japan's Liberal Democratic Party.