Taking one for the team : Partisan alignment and planning outcomes in England

Does partisan alignment affect sub-national political units’ performance? When testing for a partisan alignment effect local authority planning processes represent a ‘hard case’, given procedural insulation against politicisation, and a disjuncture between national party commitments to expand house-building versus pressure on local councillors from residents opposing new developments. I find that, in general, partisan alignment brings an increased propensity to approve large residential planning applications. This suggests councillors’ willingness to ‘take one for the team’ by prioritising national over local interests. Consistent with ‘party politics of housing’ insights, inter-party variation sees an altered effect in left-wing constellations, which display lowered approval propensities. In addition to these substantive extensions to scholarship on partisan alignment effects, the insights presented into the drivers of variation in local authority planning outcomes contribute to the pressing tasks of understanding and addressing the chronic under-supply of new housing within the English housing system

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

In the Loop : Multilevel Feedback and the Politics of Change at the World Bank and IMF

How can we integrate the agential influence of state preferences and the structural influence of social environments in models of change within international organisations? Through an analysis of the central aspects of the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) initiative, this article argues that in isolation neither of the two dominant accounts of international organisations — the principal-agent (PA) and constructivist approaches — is able to adequately capture the progression of the initiative. Rather, I show that the evolution of the PRSP initiative is best conceptualised as an Archerian morphogenic cycle, whose unfolding can be understood by synthesising elements of the PA and constructivist approaches. The morphogenic approach provides an analytic framework capable of tracking the process of multilevel feedback from state socialisation through to policy operationalisation, and for the input of creditors, the International Financial Institutions (IFIs), and borrowing countries to be mapped

Economic geography and the regulatory state : Asymmetric marketization of social housing in England

The 2011 Affordable Homes Programme (AHP) introduced dramatic reductions in the level of government grant for new-build construction by Housing Associations, with an expectation that Associations’ rents would rise towards market rates to compensate. Through this paper, I explore London-based Associations’ use of cross-subsidy from commercial sale and rental operations to ameliorate the push towards higher rents for social housing. I characterise the spatially-variegated response to the as AHP ‘asymmetric marketisation’. The case illustrates the value of bridging between Economic Geography literatures that acknowledge spatial variation in state-market constellations but offers less developed insights on modes of marketisation, and Political Science literature on the regulatory state that offers a useful framework for disaggregating between modes of marketization but which has overlooked the issue of spatial variation. The significance of this asymmetric marketization is heightened by ongoing concerns over the sustainability of London-based Housing Associations’ commercial activities, and by the possible extension of commercial-to-social cross-subsidisation across other national housing systems

Party politics and the effectiveness of local climate change policy frameworks : Green influence from the sidelines

Are national-level party political drivers of climate change performance reproduced locally? Here, I explore whether Greens’ ability to influence climate commitment nationally via legislative presence and coalition partnership is translated into English local government, using Climate Emergency gradings of local authority policy frameworks as the focus of comparative analysis. Scholarship on English local authority policy-making and performance suggests that, on balance, we should expect to see the Green legislative presence and governing coalition effects translate to this level of government. While the finding of a positive Green legislative presence effect adds weight to the characterisation of local climate governance in England as a relatively collaborative process, the null finding on the coalition effect raises questions over the ability of junior coalition partners to realise preferences rapidly. Given the importance of sub-national politics to successful climate change transformation, it is vital that the factors associated with strengthened commitment be further explored

The local political economy of the regulatory state : Governing affordable housing in England

Regulatory governance involves the use of heterogeneous mechanisms to extract welfare gains from market-based processes. While often viewed as a depoliticisation mechanism, we here explore a distinctly political manifestation of regulatory governance. Our study focuses on the governance of affordable housing in England, specifically on local authorities’ use of ‘Section 106’ (S106) powers to compel private developers to include affordable housing in new developments. We show that, following the financial crisis, the governance of affordable housing shifted from a partisan to a valence issue. As the crisis increased the issue salience of affordable housing, left-wing authorities’ hitherto higher tendency to intervene eroded in the midst of a broad-based increase in S106 deployment. In addition to extending insights into the political economy of regulatory state intervention, our findings shed valuable light on the undersupply of affordable housing in England

Privileging privatisation : Accounting practices and state transformation in the UK

How do accounting practices interact with processes of state transformation? Focusing on the privatisation of social housing in the UK, we clarify an important mechanism through which accounting practices served to constitute material incentives in favour of privatisation. Our archival research demonstrates that the UK government’s atypical practice of including public corporations’ liabilities in its own debt calculations shaped discussions and decisions over the transfer of public housing stock to non-state Housing Associations in the 1980s. By unpacking the constitutive relationship between accounting practices and material incentives, we advance and bring together scholarship on state transformation and the politics of accounting

Green electoral performance and national climate change commitment : The conditional effect of EU membership

Does Green party electoral success lead to increased climate change commitment, and if so how? Drawing on a new OECD database on climate change outlays, we probe indirect influence from Green electoral success as mediated by inter-party competition, and direct mechanisms of influence from elected Green representatives. Our headline finding is that EU membership functions as a contextual catalyst for inter-party competition, with EU governing parties responding to Greens’ strong electoral performance by increasing climate change outlays to appeal to environmentally motivated voters. We also find evidence that, both across the OECD cohort and the EU sub-grouping, Green coalition presence is associated with increase climate spending over a political cycle. While direct Green influence through coalition presence is widespread, indirect influence mediated by inter-party competition is conditional on EU membership. Findings fit with literature highlighting systematic difference between EU members’ climate performance, and that of other advanced-industrialised states

Ill-gotten gains : Partisan alignment, politicised grant flows, and English local election outcomes

Are grant flows from the Westminster government to local authorities influenced by political dynamics, and if so do these politicised transfers influence local election outcomes? John and Ward (2001) suggested that, through the 1980s and 1990s, Conservative central governments favoured politically aligned local authorities. We demonstrate the continuation of this trend across the cohort of Labour, coalition, and Conservative governments from 2007-19, and also establish evidence of inter-party variation in the type of grant manipulation in existence. We also more substantively extend John and Ward’s work by demonstrating that electoral ‘ill-gotten gains’ follow from these politicised flows, with higher resource transfers being associated with marginally stronger incumbent electoral performance. Given the importance of central grants to subnational government in the UK, these findings are of significant contemporary policy relevance