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Aim: this article proposes a radical new approach to the monitoring and governance of services, and the education and training of nurses to meet ‘failure to rescue’ requirements. Background: healthcare policy in the UK that seeks to ensure safe and effective services for the acutely ill has largely failed, resulting in adult patients dying unnecessarily. Despite grand rhetoric, UK governments have distanced themselves from implementation, resulting in patchy localised developments and creating inconsistent service responses. Design and data sources: this article draws on a review of research and UK policy literature and best international practice to propose a new national framework approach that combines competency development, governance and performance monitoring to address ‘failure to rescue’ shortcomings. Implications for nursing: paramount is a nationally agreed and fit-for-purpose competency tool using simulation to assess staff in order to improve recognition of the deteriorating patient. Service improvements should include increased investment in telemedicine; service performance should be communicated through publicly available ratings and overseen by patient panels; and governance will require strengthening through enhanced Care Quality Commission/Monitor input, which should be linked to the maintenance of foundation trust status. Conclusion: health professional bodies, regulators, providers and the Government must work together to strengthen the safety and effectiveness of acute services. This will require investment in staff competency and enhancement of the governance to ensure services consistently meet public expectations and reduce unnecessary deaths. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article references the paper published by the journal in 2015 on the association between day of admission and mortality, which health secretary Jeremy Hunt apparently used in his House of Commons speech on July 16, 2015, claiming that 6,000 people die yearly because of lack of a proper seven day service in hospitals. Topics discussed include where the 6,000 figure came from, whether the Department of Health (DH) commissioned the new analysis, and whether data were shared with the DH.

This paper considers how dominant narratives of the housing crisis, since the 2008 banking crisis in England, have been created and what actions taken in its name. The paper deconstructs the term "crisis", highlighting that its meaning has evolved from a critical moment to a protracted narrative which must be understood historically. Through discourse analysis into housing and party political policy, media and think tank reports, we argue that the employment of housing crisis by the government and others perceives it as an outcome of housing supply constraints and over‐regulation—narratives that have justified subsequent policy actions aimed at propping up the housing and financial systems, opening new avenues for housing commodification, deregulation and financialisation and reproducing crisis anew. However, we note that these narratives can also break down and space can be created for the articulation of new narratives which refocus housing crises as emerging from inequality and class divisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2010 the UK government has undertaken extensive spending cuts which have manifested in significant reductions in welfare, local authority and justice system spending. The cuts have been linked with rising poverty, food bank use and serious health issues. Such extreme cuts are likely to affect how citizens view and interact with government. This paper argues that the theories of civic voluntarism, grievance and policy feedback in combination explain why austerity has provoked relatively little political participation in the UK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the British approach to the so-called refugee question within the Sovereign Base Areas (SBAs) of Cyprus. By drawing on examples from 1974-1975, 1998, and 2015, this paper will show that it is a policy of detachment that connects and defines the British response to this question in their attempt to successfully overcome the issues of precedent and responsibility that are so intertwined with refugee problems. This paper will highlight the importance of what has been termed the detached ideal: contain, manage, and remove. Each step involves balancing pain against gain, action against reaction, and if needed, one side over the other, in the pursuit of the least damaging way of solving this problem. Ultimately, what this paper shows is that in addressing the refugee question on Cyprus, the British government would much rather face criticism outside of its borders rather than issues within them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper aims to provide a critique of Shared Parental Leave (SPL) in the UK from a gender equality perspective, namely to assess whether SPL is capable of enabling more men to take leave in order to act as the main carer for their child. Leave policies in Nordic countries, where the rate of take-up by fathers is high, are also examined. It argues that SPL is open to legal challenge by fathers who do not meet the eligibility criteria, as the SPL scheme as currently drafted breaches the terms of the EU Parental Leave Directive and is also discriminatory on grounds of sex. The paper concludes that SPL is flawed as a policy. Whilst the UK government argues for a more equal division of childcare between father and mother, it seems unwilling to challenge the expectation that mothers provide the primary care for young children. Thus SPL will only be successful if the policy is reformed to include a higher rate of pay and a period of leave reserved for fathers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Abstract Political discussion networks significantly influence citizens' political behaviours and attitudes. They promote political information and facilitate mobilisation and conformity to social norms (Fowler, 2005 ; Huckfeldt and Sprague, 1995). It has been suggested that ethnicity plays an important role in shaping the composition and impact of these networks (Leighley and Matsubayashi, 2009). In this paper, we employ discussion network data to contribute to this debate and explore the relationship between co-ethnic discussants and their political characteristics, which we refer to as mobilisation value; how these relationships vary across ethnic minority/majority groups; and the implication of these phenomena for voter turnout in Britain. We find that, for White British, co-ethnic discussants have greater mobilisation value. However, overall, for Asians and other ethnic groups have higher mobilisation value than White British or Black respondents. In turn the mobilisation value of discussants has a positive effect on turnout regardless of a citizen's own ethnicity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article talks about the Working Paper published by the Modern British Studies (MBS) research centre on new ways of thinking about the transformation of British society, culture, politics and economy between 19th century and 2015. It highlights the cultures of democracy and the rising political, social and cultural change. It states that the paper can be used as a study material for understanding the state of history in present times.

Who do you think will win in your constituency? Most citizens correctly answer this question, and groups are even better at answering it. Combining individual forecasts results in the 'wisdom of crowds' explained by Condorcet's jury theorem. This paper demonstrates the accuracy of citizen forecasts in seven British General Elections between 1964 and 2010, and reports what citizens interviewed in February and March forecasted for the election in May 2015. 'Citizen forecasting' predicts vote shares and winners in constituency elections, and seat numbers and governments in national elections. The paper also introduces a new method for predicting vote shares from citizen forecasts. Citizen forecasts are direct, accurate, and comprehensible. Pollsters should collect them and communicate their results more often. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper notes the contemporary emergence of 'morality' in both sociological argument and political rhetoric, and analyses its significance in relation to ongoing UK welfare reforms. It revisits the idea of 'moral economy' and identifies two strands in its contemporary application; that all economies depend on an internal moral schema, and that some external moral evaluation is desirable. UK welfare reform is analysed as an example of the former, with reference to three distinct orientations advanced in the work of Freeden (), Laclau (), and Lockwood (). In this light, the paper then considers challenges to the reform agenda, drawn from third sector and other public sources. It outlines the forms of argument present in these challenges, based respectively on rationality, legality, and morality, which together provide a basis for evaluation of the welfare reforms and for an alternative 'moral economy'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the historical formation of the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) in the United States and argues that programme emergence depended on the ability of policy entrepreneurs to link the economic concerns of agricultural production with the ideational concern of national security. Using a historical institutionalist framework this paper stresses the critical juncture of the Second World War and the positive feedback loop created between agricultural industries and schools to understand the emergence of the NSLP. In addition, it stresses the role of frames in policy-making and focuses on the use by policy entrepreneurs of a security frame whereby child malnutrition was cast as a national security issue. The policy window of war gave policy entrepreneurs the chance to use the politically and culturally resonant frame of security, in the contexts of agricultural subsidies, to push for the creation of this programme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Devolution has become a key 'global trend' over recent decades as many states have decentralised power to sub-state governments. The UK resisted this trend until the late 1990s when devolution was enacted by the then Labour Government, taking a highly asymmetrical form in which different territories have been granted different powers and institutional arrangements. Devolution allows the devolved governments to develop policies that are tailored to the needs of their areas, encouraging policy divergence, although this is countered by pressures to ensure that devolved approaches do not contradict those of the central state, promoting convergence. This review paper aims to assess the unfolding dynamics of devolution and policy divergence in the UK, spanning different policy areas such as economic development, health and social policy. The paper emphasises that devolution has altered the institutional landscape of public policy in the UK, generating some high-profile examples of policy divergence, whilst also providing evidence of policy convergence. In addition, the passage of time underlines the nature of UK devolution as an unfolding process. Its underlying asymmetries have become more pronounced as the tendency towards greater autonomy for Scotland and Wales clashes with a highly centralised mode of policymaking in Westminster, the consequences of which have spilt over into the devolved territories in the context of the post-2007 economic crisis through public expenditure cuts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this introductory essay, we outline how recent events have generated considerable debate and discussion surrounding the future constitutional status of Scotland and the current devolutionary settlement in the UK, and how the aim of this collection of papers is to evaluate UK devolution and the policy mobilities surrounding it. We argue that there has been a tendency for scholars to concentrate on the detail of the constitutional and administrative structures and a reluctance to theorise devolution, and suggest geographers can offer a particular contribution here through an understanding of devolution as fundamentally about the interaction of politics, culture and territory. We discuss the value of considering the particular geographies of policy at work, and the role of the everyday work of civil servants in creating and sustaining the creation of new state spaces. We then briefly highlight the main findings of each of the papers in this special collection and show how, together, they add to our understanding of the geographies of devolution and of policy at a critical juncture in the devolution story. We conclude that whatever the particular future for the United Kingdom, the policy interactions between territories will continue to have an important role in their governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the opening up of parliamentary proceedings to greater public scrutiny in the two decades after the 1832 Reform Act. It examines developments in the publication of parliamentary debates, considering why proposals for an official parliamentary record were rejected in the 1830s. It also discusses two less well-studied but equally vital means of publicising parliamentary activity: the publication of official division lists and the sale to the public of parliamentary papers. It argues that the 1830s was a critical decade of change, influenced by shifting perceptions of the relationship between the reformed house of commons and those it sought to represent. This was driven, in particular, by liberal notions of the importance of parliamentary accountability to public opinion: MPs were increasingly aware of the need to keep constituents informed of their parliamentary activities, whether in the chamber, committee room or division lobby. This article also highlights the extent to which the Commons' approach to publicising its activities was constrained not only by the fact that it remained a breach of parliamentary privilege to publish reports of debates, but also by the physical space that the Commons occupied. The destruction of much of the old Palace of Westminster by fire in 1834 provided an important opportunity to remodel existing arrangements, notably with the addition of a second division lobby and the construction of a reporters' gallery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines debates about the design and provision of post-war housing within the papers and report of the Parker Morris committee. It does so to show how the models of citizens' rights and expectations which underpinned post-war welfare provision were transformed by mass affluence and the dynamic sphere of commercial consumption. Parker Morris's deliberations demonstrate that, as early as the 1950s, the citizen-subject was reimagined as a consuming individual, with requirements based on their expressive needs and consuming desires, and that this had far-reaching consequences for social democratic systems of universal welfare provision. The introduction of consumerist imperatives into publicly defined models of citizens' needs enhanced the political and cultural authority of the commercial domain, prompted a heightened role for commercial experts and market logics within public governance, and served to devalue socialized forms of provision in favour of consumer choice in the private market. The article thus engages with the growing scholarship on the politics of mass consumerism by showing how the material and emotional comforts of post-war affluence came to be constructed as critical to social democratic citizenship and selfhood. Situating this uneasy entanglement of social democratic rights with consumer satisfaction as part of a wider trajectory of political change, the piece suggests that Parker Morris marks an early but significant moment in the transition from post-war welfarism and social democracy to the consumer- and market-oriented forms of governance which came to dominate British politics and society in the latter part of the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers an empirically-based overview of changes and challenges for UK civil society in the first years of the twenty-first century. It draws together recent published research findings about volunteering and smaller civil society organizations, discerning themes in published studies by the author and other researchers. It concludes with a discussion about the inter-relationship between changes in civil society and changes in public policy, including new public governance and the marketization of the welfare state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The process of leaving the European Union (EU) will have profound consequences for health and the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK. In this paper, we use the WHO health system building blocks framework to assess the likely effects of three scenarios we term soft Brexit, hard Brexit, and failed Brexit. We conclude that each scenario poses substantial threats. The workforce of the NHS is heavily reliant on EU staff. Financing of health care for UK citizens in the EU and vice versa is threatened, as is access to some capital funds, while Brexit threatens overall economic performance. Access to pharmaceuticals, technology, blood, and organs for transplant is jeopardised. Information used for international comparisons is threatened, as is service delivery, especially in Northern Ireland. Governance concerns relate to public health, competition and trade law, and research. However, we identified a few potential opportunities for improvement in areas such as competition law and flexibility of training, should the UK Government take them. Overall, a soft version of Brexit would minimise health threats whereas failed Brexit would be the riskiest outcome. Effective parliamentary scrutiny of policy and legal changes will be essential, but the scale of the task risks overwhelming parliament and the civil service. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The image of Margaret Thatcher appearing on television dressed in a ‘peacock blue sari’ must seem rather farfetched—and yet, for a brief moment, it appeared a distinct possibility. That such an event seemed plausible reflected the growing recognition among senior Conservatives of the electoral significance of ethnic minority voters. While Conservatives had begun to experiment with measures to appeal to BAME voters as early as 1951, from the mid-1970s formal party structures dedicated to the recruitment and representation of BAME voters began to emerge. In 1976 the Party launched the Anglo Asian Conservative and the National Anglo West Indian Conservative Societies, both of which sought to address poor performance among black and Asian voters. This paper explores the development of Conservative electoral strategies targeting BAME voters in the period after 1951, and reflects on what these strategies reveal about Conservative narratives of the nation in the 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For the past six years successive UK governments in England have introduced reforms intended to usher in less aggregated, top-down, bureaucratically overloaded models of service delivery. Yet the ‘hollowing out’ of local government has not resulted in less bureaucracy on the ground or less regulation from above, nor has it diminished hierarchy as an organising principle of education governance. Monopolies and monopolistic practices dominated by powerful bureaucracies and professional groups persist, albeit realised through the involvement of new actors and organisations from business and philanthropy. In this paper I adopt a governmentality perspective to explore the political significance of large multi-academy trusts (MATs) – private sponsors contracted by central government to run publicly funded schools – to the generation of new scalar hierarchies and accountability infrastructures that assist in bringing the gaze of government to bear upon the actions of schools that are otherwise less visible under local government management. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An upsurge of historical research in this century has assessed various campaigns that promoted European Community (EC) membership to the British people. This article, concentrating on the Labour government’s approach to the 1975 referendum on the EC, uses sources such as official records at The National Archives and political papers of some of the key agents; these sources have hitherto been underused for investigating public opinion-related activities on Europe in 1975. Although acknowledging that the interpretation of a government-controlled referendum applies up to a point, the article emphasises, as its key theme, the government’s difficulties in controlling events during the campaign itself. Despite having much support from newspapers, the government often had difficult relations with the mass media as a whole, and the article challenges the belief that it was effective here. This article also contests the idea that the campaign made much impression on the public. These findings further apply to other campaigns on the EC in the 1960s and 1970s and potentially in contemporary British politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are an increasing number of articles and publications that attempt to define resilience in the face of numerous drivers of risk. Most of this work has tried to identify the values and virtues that are encompassed within a resilient approach in relation to the fragile relationships between the social, natural and built environments (including, for instance, abilities to prevent, react, transform and adapt). However, much less attention has been paid to identifying the practical implications of these values and virtues once a paradigm of resilience has been adopted. In order to address this gap, this study examines what institutions in the UK have actually done when they attempt to enhance resilience. Instead of defining what resilience is, this paper focuses on what local and national governments and other stakeholders do when something is called (or is attempted to be made) ‘resilient’. The analysis of 30 key policy documents, a review of 20 formal meetings of a Local Resilient Forum, and 11 interviews with stakeholders confirm that different (and often competing) understandings of resilience coexist; but this work also reveal that two rather different approaches to resilience dominate in the UK. The first responds to security risks, based on a protectionist approach by the State, the other responds to natural risks, and prescribes the transfer of responsibilities from the State to other stakeholders. The analysis illustrates the extent to which resilience has become a highly complex, malleable and dynamic political construct with significant implications for the ways in which policy is enacted and enforced, often with unexpected consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing upon a national database of unimplemented planning permissions and 18 in-depth case studies, this paper provides both a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the phenomenon of stalled sites in England. The practical and conceptual difficulties of classifying sites as stalled are critically reviewed. From the literature, it is suggested that planning permission may not be implemented due to lack of financial viability, strategic behaviour by landowners and house-builders, and other problems associated with the development process. Consistent with poor viability, the analysis of a national database indicates that a substantial proportion of stalled sites are high density apartment developments usually is located in low house value areas. The case studies suggest that a combination of interlinked issues may need to be resolved before a planning permission can be implemented. These include; the sale of the land to house-builders, renegotiation of the planning permission and, most importantly, improvement in housing market conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the decades since the Conference on Devolution's proceedings concluded in stalemate in April 1920, the Conference has been consigned to the margins of political and constitutional history. However, within this limited literature, one interpretation of the Conference's proceedings has been universally held: that the subject of the powers the devolved legislatures should enjoy was a rare source of consensus. This article challenges this orthodoxy, using archival evidence from the Conference to demonstrate that while a consensus on powers may have existed on paper, such agreement certainly did not exist in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines a crucial and formative decade in the life of Vladimir J. (Kaye) Kysilewsky (1896-1976), a Ukrainian-Canadian newspaper editor, lobbyist, university professor, and historian, who is most familiar to Canadian researchers as the federal civil servant responsible for liaison with ethnic groups and the ethnic press during the early years of the Cold War. It argues that the attitudes and methods (Kaye) Kysilewsky brought to his job as a liaison officer were shaped by his experience as director of the Ukrainian Bureau in London. There, during the 1930s, he met and was counselled by a number of British parliamentarians, academics, and journalists, as he attempted to bring to public attention the murderous famine in Soviet Ukraine (which was denied by the Stalinist regime) and as he tried to contend with the Bureau's obstreperous Ukrainian émigré rivals, in particular the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports findings from a study of the changing nature of the narrative contents and production formats of Party Election Broadcasts (PEBs) produced by the Labour, Conservative, and Liberal Democratic parties for UK general elections from 1979 to 2010. This analysis tracked production changes that might signal a movement on the part of the political parties toward using marketing-oriented techniques of the kind found in televised advertising. Although PEBs are not technically classified as advertisements by the broadcasting industry, but rather as programs, they nevertheless present an opportunity to political parties to promote themselves and their policies. Using content analysis, it was found that PEBs have grown progressively shorter from 1979 to 2010 and become faster paced. They have become more sophisticated as productions with wider use of dramatized documentary formats rather than talking heads, popular music, and professional performers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper outlines several methods for forecasting the next British general election on a daily basis from 20 months prior using opinion polls. It discusses their performance for previous electoral cycles and shows that the two models with the best historical record lead to substantially different predictions for 2015, but they can be averaged. The historical relationship between the polls and the vote suggests that government support rises substantially in the run up to elections, that Conservatives outperform but Labour underperform relative to the polls, and parties generally recover from low points or decline from high ones. Approximate prediction intervals and probabilities for key events are also generated. Despite the Conservatives trailing in the polls by 7 points in early October 2013, the models suggest a substantial Conservative lead at the 2015 election with a 64% chance of being the largest party and 42% chance of an overall majority. The estimated probability of a hung parliament (40%) is instructive for understanding the operation of the electoral system. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The failure of the Coalition government's attempt to reform the House of Lords has by no means taken further reform off the political agenda. The commitment to installing an elected upper chamber is still widely shared across the political spectrum, on the basis of perceptions that the House of Lords lacks democratic legitimacy. Against this view, this article considers recent literature upon non-electoral representation, deliberative democracy and bicameralism, which together highlight the possibility of an unelected second chamber playing a legitimate role within a wider (democratic) system of government. The article then considers the House of Lords from this perspective, reflecting on changes in the upper chamber since the 1999 reforms and evaluating its role within the wider political system. The paper concludes by suggesting that political debate should focus upon small-scale reforms to ensure that the Lords becomes more effective, representative and legitimate, within the constraints of its present role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political devolution in the UK has afforded opportunities for studying policy differences and similarities in relation to local-level community-based planning initiatives in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Organised around the concepts of 'lesson-drawing' and the 'filling in' of local governance, this paper critically considers aspects of policy design and development associated with community-based planning within and between the devolved UK polities. In practice, policy instruments vary with respect to their institutional, scalar and organisational rationalities. A policy mobility perspective may enable a relatively more critical understanding of how local governance arrangements are being externally and internally shaped in the respective devolved nation-regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Across Great Britain, engagement with civil society is an increasingly central component of public policy and governance rhetoric. However, attention has tended to focus on policy developments emanating from Westminster that relate to England, rather than the policy and governance 'spaces' emerging in the devolved administrations, such as Scotland and Wales. It has also tended to focus on the organisations through which voluntary participation takes place, rather than on voluntary participation itself. In this paper we examine the extent to which there are divergent governance spaces with regards to voluntarism apparent at the national levels of England, Wales and Scotland, set against a backdrop of wider debates on devolution, civil society, community, and the Big Society. Given the common driver of public service reform which emerges from our review, we then examine the emergence of sub-national 'spaces' through the example of rural Scotland, in which the delivery of public services can be particularly challenging. Overall, we contend that public policy towards volunteering and the voluntary and community sector ( VCS) in Scotland, Wales and England has been shaped by similar drivers, but the rhetoric surrounding their deployment and the distinct governance landscapes in Wales and Scotland have the capacity to influence the deployment of these goals in distinct ways. We also argue that greater attention may need to be paid to emergent 'sub-national' governances spaces of voluntarism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on the impact of parties on public policy, and on immigration policy in particular, often finds limited evidence of partisan influence. In this paper, we examine immigration policy-making in the UK coalition government. Our case provides evidence that parties in government can have more of an impact on policy than previous studies acknowledge, but this only becomes apparent when we open up the ‘black box’ between election outcomes and policy outputs. By examining how, when and why election pledges are turned into government policies, we show that partisan influence depends not only on dynamics between the coalition partners, but how these dynamics interact with interdepartmental conflicts and lobbying by organised interests. In-depth process tracing allows us to see these complex dynamics, which easily get lost in large-n comparisons of pledges and outputs, let alone outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the UK the rules governing caretaker situations have historically been underspecified. The UK's constitutional traditions, such as prime ministerial discretion to time elections and its two-party system, have in the past limited the frequency and duration of caretaker periods. However, the recently lengthened election timetable, new constraints on the executive introduced by the Fixed-term Parliaments Act (2011), and a decline in the dominance of the two largest parties are raising the risk that the UK will experience caretaker periods more often and for longer stretches of time. In this paper, we offer an analysis of the UK's current caretaker provisions and conclude that the existing conventions are insufficiently detailed and can render such periods problematic and controversy-prone. Important lessons, we suggest, can be learned from reforms in other Westminster systems, and from the caretaker rules of other countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shame has been heavily relied on as a political tool in the modern world and yet it is still a much under-historicised emotion. Using the examples of early twentieth-century Britain and Ireland, I examine how women opposed to the campaign for female suffrage used shame instrumentally in their writing. Exploring the versatility of this political device, I find that shame was used with the oppositional intentions of binding and excluding. Whereas British conservatives used it to protect an already well-established imagined community of good imperial women, Irish radicals drew on it to invite women to take part in the construction of a new nationalist sisterhood. This paper further problematizes claims that as an emotion that plays on a sense of the communal, shame has had no place in a highly individualistic modern world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Electoral Reform Society has recently published two reports putting the case for electoral reform in local government. These suggest acceptance, in the wake of defeat in the 2011 Alternative Vote referendum, that the group's ultimate goal of change to the Westminster electoral system is unlikely to be fulfilled soon and that a more gradual strategy is therefore needed. This paper examines this shift by asking three questions. First, is Westminster electoral reform really a dead letter? Second, is local electoral reform more likely-and, if so, just how much more likely? Third, would local electoral reform matter in itself? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Scottish government's white paper on independence, Scotland's future, sets out its defence blueprint following a 'yes' vote. It makes clear that its defence plans would be subject to a Strategic Defence and Security Review in 2016, as well as negotiation on the division of assets with London. However, it also provides a strong indication of how it envisages its defence posture as an independent state-a major pillar of which is founded upon strong and continued defence cooperation with the rest of the United Kingdom. Is this a realistic assumption? And, if so, how would it work in practice? Contextualized by the increased emphasis on defence cooperation which sits at the heart of NATO's Smart Defence initiative, as well as the European Defence Agency's 'pooling and sharing' programme, the article assesses the benefits and challenges that might be encountered in a defence cooperation agreement between an independent Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom in the event of a 'yes' vote in September's referendum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented to the paper "The Declining Representativeness of the British Party System, and Why It Matters," by Heinz Brandenburg and Robert Johns, which was named the Editors' Choice for this issue and which discusses representative democracy in Great Britain.