The Retrenchment Hypothesis and the Extension of the Franchise in England and Wales

Does an extension of the voting franchise increase public spending or can it be a source of retrenchment? We study this question in the context of public spending on health-related urban amenities in a panel of 75 municipal boroughs in England and Wales in 1868, 1871 and 1886. We \u85nd evidence of a U-shaped relationship between spending on urban amenities and the extension of the local voting franchise. We argue that this retrenchment e¤ect arose because middle class taxpayers were unwilling to pay the cost of poor sanitation and the urban elites, elected on a narrow franchise, were instrumental for sanitary improvements. Our model of taxpayer democracy suggests that the retrenchment e¤ect is related to enfranchisement of the middle class through nation-wide reforms

Law, politics and the governance of English and Scottish joint-stock companies 1600-1850

This article examines the impact of law on corporate governance by means of a case study of joint-stock enterprise in England and Scotland before 1850. Based on a dataset of over 450 company constitutions together with qualitative information on governance practice, it finds little evidence to support the hypothesis that common-law regimes such as England were more supportive of economic growth than civil-law jurisdictions such as Scotland: indeed, levels of shareholder protection were slightly stronger in the civil-law zone. Other factors, such as local political institutions, played a bigger role in shaping organisational forms and business practice

Banking from Leeds, not London: regional strategy and structure at the Yorkshire Bank, 1859–1952

Industrial philanthropist Edward Akroyd created the Yorkshire Penny Savings Bank in 1859. Despite competition from the Post Office Savings Bank after 1861 and a serious reserve problem in 1911, it sustained his overall strategy to become a successful regional bank. Using archival and contemporary sources to build on recent scholarship illustrating how savings banks were integrated into local economies and the complementary roles of philanthropy and paternalism, we analyse an English regional bank's strategy, including an assessment of strategic innovation, ownership changes and management structure. This will demonstrate that the founder's vision continued, even though the 1911 crisis radically altered both strategy and structure

The first legal mortgagor: a consumer without adequate protection?

This article contends that the UK government’s attempt to create a well-functioning consumer credit market will be undermined if it fails to reform the private law framework relating to the first legal mortgage. Such agreements are governed by two distinct regulatory regimes that are founded upon very different conceptions of the mortgagor. The first, the regulation of financial services overseen by the Financial Conduct Authority, derives from public law and is founded upon a conception of the mortgagor as “consumer”. The other is land law, private law regulation implemented by the judiciary and underpinned by a conception of the mortgagor as “landowner”. Evidence suggests that the operation of these two regimes prevents mortgagors from receiving fair and consistent treatment. The current reform of financial services regulation therefore will change only one part of this governance regime and will leave mortgagors heavily reliant upon a regulator that still has to prove itself. What this article argues is that reform of the rules of private law must also be undertaken with the aim of initiating a paradigm shift in the conception of the mortgagor from “landowner” to “consumer”. Cultural shifts of this kind take time but the hope is that this conceptual transformation will occur in time to deter the predicted rise in mortgage possessions

The difference that tenure makes

This paper argues that housing tenures cannot be reduced to either production relations or consumption relations. Instead, they need to be understood as modes of housing distribution, and as having complex and dynamic relations with social classes. Building on a critique of both the productionist and the consumptionist literature, as well as of formalist accounts of the relations between tenure and class, the paper attempts to lay the foundations for a new theory of housing tenure. In order to do this, a new theory of class is articulated, which is then used to throw new light on the nature of class-tenure relations

Social Rented Housing in the (Dis)United Kingdom:Can different social housing regime types exist within the same nation state?

Welfare and housing regime literature has treated nation states as being uniform regime types. However, there is growing interest in the possible development of distinct regimes below the level of nation states. This article applies regime theory though a robust analytical framework to the devolution of social housing policy to the Scottish Parliament and Welsh and Northern Ireland Assemblies within the UK. We establish that prior to devolution, the UK’s social housing regime was firmly located within a residual model, but one that operated as a ‘safety net’. Particularly since the adoption of austerity by the UK Government in 2010 and divergence in political outlook between UK and devolved administrations, England’s social housing regime is beginning to morph into an ‘ambulance service’, whilst the ‘safety net’ model is being maintained in Northern Ireland and Wales, and strengthened in Scotland. However, with few powers with which to influence the ‘wider welfare regime’, high levels of poverty mean that the ‘boundaries of possibilities’ for the devolved administrations to create more than this distinctive regime sub-type – and so to move to a ‘social market’ performing a ‘wider affordability’ role – are limited. The theoretical and analytical framework developed in this article is capable of being applied to sub-nation state jurisdictions in other countries, and so enrichen comparative analysis