Employment of the Fighter Command in Home Defence

In the avalanche of literature on the Battle of Britain little recognition has been given to the notable prescience of Air Chief Marshall Sir Hugh C. T. Dowding in his advance planning for it

The Bidding Game: Competitive Funding Regimes and the Political Targeting of Urban Programme Schemes

Public bodies adopt procedures for the competitive bidding for funds in the belief that they improve public welfare, while critics regard such practices as a waste of resources and open to political manipulation. We test the operation of a competitive bidding regime through Tobit models of data drawn from successful and unsuccessful bids in four years of the Single Regeneration Budget programme in England. We derive hypotheses from a model of competitive bidding, the official evaluation of the programme and the pork-barrel literature. Our data and statistical models show that successive rounds did not greatly improve the quality of the bids, did not systematically reward needy communities and diverted resources to ministers' parliamentary seats in some regions

?Moves on a Chess Board?: A Spatial Model of British Prime Ministers' Powers over Cabinet Formation

We use an institutional rational choice approach to help us understand how prime ministers in the UK make cabinet appointments and the implications for prime ministerial power. Assuming that prime ministers attempt to form a cabinet so as to get an overall package of policies as close as possible to their ideal, we show why the trade-offs they face are so complex, why apparently common-sense rules for making appointments might not always work well and why apparently strange choices made by prime ministers might actually be rational. Acknowledging the power prime ministers derive from their ability to appoint, we argue that the literature commonly fails to distinguish between power and luck, where lucky prime ministers get their way because they happen to agree with colleagues