Small and medium-sized enterprise policy: Designed to fail?

Significant doubts persist over the effectiveness of government policy to increase the numbers or performance of small and medium-sized enterprises in the UK economy. We analyse UK political manifestoes from 1964-2015 to examine the development of SME policy in political discourse. We do this by analysing how the broadly-defined category of ‘SME’ has been characterised in the manifestoes and assess these characterisations in relation to the empirical evidence base. We highlight three consistent themes in UK political manifestoes during 1964-2015 where SMEs have been characterised as having the potential for growth, struggling to access finance and being over-burdened by regulation. We argue that homogenising the broad range of businesses represented by the SME category and characterising them in these terms misrepresents them, undermining policies developed in relation to this mischaracterisation

Honesty above all else? Expectations and perceptions of political conduct in three established democracies

The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from the ESRC (grant number RES-000-22-3459) and British Academy (grant numbers SG-101785 and SG-52322). They would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions

Yardstick competition and the political costs of raising taxes: An empirical analysis of Spanish municipalities

We test the ‘yardstick competition’ hypothesis by examining the effects of property tax increases, both in a given municipality and in other neighbouring jurisdictions, on the incumbents’ vote. In order to obtain unbiased estimates of the effects of raising taxes on voting patterns, we take into account national political shocks, the ideological preferences of the citizenship and government traits, and apply Instrumental Variables. The vote equation is estimated using a large database containing nearly 3,000 Spanish municipalities, and we analyse three local election results (1995, 1999 and 2003). Our results suggest that property tax increases, both at the municipal and neighbourhood level, have a non-negligible impact on the incumbent’s share of the vote. Copyright Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2007Yardstick competition, Voting, Local government, Taxes,

Unfulfilled mandate? Exploring the electoral discourse of international development aid in UK Westminster elections 1945-2010

Insufficient research attention has been paid to the way that electoral politics shape public policy on overseas development aid. Accordingly, this study makes an original contribution by examining party politicisation, issue-salience and the policy discourse of international aid in the principal parties’ manifestos in post-war UK state-wide elections. The findings show that over the past five decades a trend of increasing issue-salience has been accompanied by inter-party differences in policy framing, with the parties of the Left attaching greater priority to promoting international equality, articulating aid as an entitlement linked to rights and the elimination of poverty, and employing tropes such as humanitarianism, democracy and good governance. Crucially, comparison of manifesto discourse and subsequent government policy raises questions over parties’ accountability, for, having secured a mandate on specific aid proposals, a key disconnect is seen to operate between the rhetoric of aid and policy delivery