Access students and widening participation

This article has been written by Sue Owen, Access to Higher Education tutor and Wendy Toy, mature Law undergraduate and former Access Student. It looks at the issue of widening ‐participation for Access Students in Higher Education, including Law degrees from the perspective of both a tutor and a student.     

Law From Below: Women's Human Rights and Social Movements in New York City

Despite the ambivalent history of the domestic application of human rights in the United States, human rights increasingly offer important resources for American grassroots activists. Within the constraints of U.S. policy toward human rights, they provide social movements a kind of global law "from below": a form of cosmopolitan law that subalterns can use to challenge their subordinate position. Using a case study from New York City, we argue that in certain contexts, human rights can provide important political resources to U.S. social movements. However, they do so in a diffuse way far from the formal system of human rights law. Instead, activists adopt some of the broader social justice ideas and strategies embedded within human rights practice.     

The ‘fairness’ of the standard spending assessments underlying the community charge

In this paper average domestic rate levels per adult for 1989/90 are correlated with standard measures of the socio‐economic status of English local authority districts, derived from the 1981 Census. These correlations show that rate levels tend to be higher in areas of social disadvantage and lower in more socially advantaged areas. When introducing the provisional figures for the new Community Charge for 1990/91 the Secretary of State stressed that this new charge would be fairer than the system of domestic rates. If the community charge were fairer than rates, this paper argues, the charge would not depend upon the socio‐economic status of the area in the same way. However, it is shown that, quite to the contrary, the community charge is even more strongly related to the socio‐economic status of the local authority than are rates. By using alternative cost assumptions, from consultative documents submitted to the Government by the Local Authority Associations, it is shown that community charge levels are crucially dependent on the assumptions underlying the Standard Spending Assessments, the Government's assessment of what it costs to provide a standard level of service.     

Regionalism in the Asia‐Pacific — a response to Kanishka Jayasuriya

This paper is a response to the debate generated in the special issue of The Pacific Review on ‘Ideas, policy networks and international policy coordination in the Asia‐Pacific’. It suggests that an understanding of the discourses and practices of regionalism in the Asia‐Pacific has to be based on a broader account of societal discourses and a sharper delineation of the policy process specific to the region.     

‘“Keeping Tabs” on Coalition Partners’: a Theoretically Salient Case Study of Lithuanian Coalitional Governments

Portfolio allocation raises the potential for de facto abdication on a broad range of policy issues among coalition partners. Recent scholarship has addressed how parties in governing coalitions ‘keep tabs’ on each other in order to avoid such abdication. Two mechanisms have been identified: junior ministerial appointments and chairs of parliamentary oversight committees. We argue that the former is the most common method for intra-coalitional oversight in the Lithuanian parliament and that a combination of the two appears to be employed for monitoring the activities of the most important ministries. We conjecture that dependence on junior ministerial oversight is more likely among coalition partners in less institutionalised parliaments.     

Netzwerke und Koppelgeschäfte in der europäischen Elektrizitätspolitik

Within the field of political science package deals have come to be well known as a strategy to overcome decision blockades within the European Council. However, the following essay argues that besides the Member States’ Heads of State or of Government the European Commission and large firms can agree on package deals within negotiations at European level as well. By means of the example of the liberalisation of the electricity market this article shows that networks of European electricity policy constitute the institutional framework in which options for package deals between the two actors may arise. In addition, three main dimensions are examined to demonstrate the plausibility of package deals empirically. Firstly, the formal powers of the EC Commission and the exchange resources of large electricity firms respectively, secondly, the divergence of interests as well as, thirdly, the short-termed change in preferences of the Commissions’ and firms’ actors involved in an exemplary elucidated merger decision.