Giving consumers of British public services more choice: what can be learned from recent history?

British Prime Minister Tony Blair announced in the autumn of 2001 that he wanted to extend individual consumer choice in the public services (Blair, 2001). What do we know from recent experience about the conditions under which such policies can be sustained? In this article, the experience of individual consumer choice over the last ten, and in some cases, fifteen years, is compared across nine fields of British public services. The article identifies the policy goals for introducing choice, considers how far they were typically achieved, and identifies problems and unintended side-effects, including distributional problems, inefficiencies and one type of political risk. This provisional evaluation is based on a widely ranging review of literature spanning several disciplines. The principal products of the argument are two detailed tables, setting out, respectively, the degree to which the goals seem to have been achieved for each choice programme, as far as the available literature can tell us, and how far distributional, efficiency and political risk problems have dogged consumer choice in each field. In the discussion section, trends and variations are summarised. Finally, some lessons are drawn from the comparisons, for policy makers who may be considering the further extension of consumer choice in public services

Can policy making be evidence-based?

Ministers are always calling for more evidence-based interventions. Do they apply the same criterion to their own work of making policy? Perhaps surprisingly, policy making is not an evidence-free zone. However, it is important to understand the ways in which policy makers in different situations will use information differently, count different kinds of information as evidence, and so exercise different styles of judgment

It's America, where you stand up to be accountable

This is an extract from The next phase: rewiring local decision making for political judgement, published by the New Local Government Network

Volunteering for all? Explaining patterns of volunteering and identifying strategies to promote it

In policy terms in the UK, as elsewhere, volunteering has become increasingly associated with training for the workplace; a view which offers little to individuals ‘beyond’ the labour market because of age, disability or care commitments. Applying a neo-Durkheimian framework to a study of volunteers we examine how far the patterns of volunteering can be explained by the underlying institutional factors of strong and weak social regulation and social integration. This framework can offer insights into a range of possible policy levers for individuals rather than a ‘one size fits all’ emphasis on volunteering for personal gain for the workplace

Opportunistic decision-making in government: concept formation, variety and explanation

The notion of opportunism is too often used loosely in policy and administrative research on executive decision-making: its various meanings are too rarely clearly distinguished. To make it useful for explanation, this article presents fresh concept formation work, clarifying the concept to recognize different kinds and degrees of opportunism. To illustrate the use of the refined concept, the article examines key decisions by British cabinets and core executives between 1945 and 1990. It proposes that neo-Durkheimian institutional theory can help to explain why different kinds of opportunism are cultivated in differently ordered administrations, so providing new insight into decision-making.This work was supported by the Leverhulme Trust (grant number: F01374I

Elementary forms and their dynamics: revisiting Mary Douglas

Mary Douglas's oeuvre furnishes the social sciences with one of the most profound and ambitious bodies of social theory ever to emerge from within anthropology. This article uses the occasion of the publication of Fardon's two volumes of her previously uncollected papers to restate her core arguments about the limited plurality of elementary forms of social organisation, about the institutional dynamics of conflict, and about conflict attenuation. In reviewing these two volumes, the article considers what those anthropologists who have been sceptical either of Douglas's importance or of the Durkheimian traditions generally, will want from these books to convince them to look afresh at her work. It concludes that the two collections will provide open-minded anthropologists with enough evidence of the creativity and significance of her achievement to encourage them to reopen her major theoretical works. An internal critique of some aspects of Douglas's handling of her arguments is offered, before the conclusion identifies the wider significance of her arguments for the social science

Observation of the TeV gamma-ray source MGRO J1908+06 with ARGO-YBJ

The extended gamma ray source MGRO J1908+06, discovered by the Milagro air shower detector in 2007, has been observed for about 4 years by the ARGO-YBJ experiment at TeV energies, with a statistical significance of 6.2 standard deviations. The peak of the signal is found at a position consistent with the pulsar PSR J1907+0602. Parametrizing the source shape with a two-dimensional Gauss function we estimate an extension \sigma = 0.49 \pm 0.22 degrees, consistent with a previous measurement by the Cherenkov Array H.E.S.S.. The observed energy spectrum is dN/dE = 6.1 \pm 1.4 \times 10^-13 (E/4 TeV)^{-2.54 \pm 0.36} photons cm^-2 s^-1 TeV^-1, in the energy range 1-20 TeV. The measured gamma ray flux is consistent with the results of the Milagro detector, but is 2-3 times larger than the flux previously derived by H.E.S.S. at energies of a few TeV. The continuity of the Milagro and ARGO-YBJ observations and the stable excess rate observed by ARGO-YBJ along 4 years of data taking support the identification of MGRO J1908+06 as the steady powerful TeV pulsar wind nebula of PSR J1907+0602, with an integrated luminosity above 1 TeV about 1.8 times the Crab Nebula luminosity.Comment: 6 pages, accepted for pubblication by ApJ. Replaced to correct the author lis