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Sociologists have long been interested in the meaning workers derive from their jobs. The issue has garnered increasing academic and policy attention in recent years with the concept of "meaningful work," yet little is known about how social stratification relates to access to it. This paper addresses this issue by exploring how the meaningfulness of jobs—as rated by their incumbents—is stratified across classes and occupations in a national survey of 14,000 working adults in the United Kingdom. It finds modest differentials between classes, with those in routine and manual occupations reporting the lowest levels of meaningfulness and those in managerial and professional occupations and small employers and own account workers reporting the highest levels. Detailed job attributes (e.g., job complexity and development opportunities) explain much of the differences in meaningfulness between classes and occupations, and much of the overall variance in meaningfulness. The main exception is the specific case of how useful workers perceive their jobs to be for society: A handful of occupations relating to health, social care, and protective services which cut across classes stand out from all other occupations. The paper concludes that the modest stratification between classes and occupations in meaningful work is largely due to disparities in underlying job complexity and development opportunities. The extent to which these aspects of work can be improved, and so meaningfulness, especially in routine and manual occupations, is an open, yet urgent, question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Circular economy (CE) has emerged as a sustainable alternative to the current "take, make, waste" linear approach. Although prior studies have highlighted the salience of collaborative efforts between start‐ups and incumbents, little is known about the mechanisms behind collaboration in a CE context. This study enhances our understanding of the topic by drawing on six cases of circular start‐ups (CSUs) operating in the United Kingdom's business‐to‐business market and investigating the mechanisms by which start‐ups collaborate with incumbents. Using the Context, Intervention, Mechanism, Outcome framework, the paper's findings demonstrate that CE does not necessitate high‐risk and expensive changes and show that CSUs can collaborate with incumbents in low‐risk ways by outsourcing and developing service contracts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship (KSTE) seeks to explain the mechanisms of how uncommercialized knowledge can be turned into new to market products. This paper uses a large unbalanced panel of 16,542 UK firms constructed from six consecutive waves of a community innovation survey and annual business registry survey during 2002–2014 to test the differences in the returns to knowledge spillover for innovation between start-ups and incumbent firms. The theoretical, managerial, and policy implications of the study are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unexplained Wealth Orders, introduced in the United Kingdom in 2017, were designed to tackle the problem of transnational kleptocracy. However, our research on real estate purchases in the UK by elites from post-Soviet kleptocracies demonstrates that incumbent elites are invulnerable to attempts to question the legality of their wealth while exiles from these states often lose their property. From our original dataset of properties, we take a single exemplary case: one of incumbents Dariga Nazarbayeva and Nurali Aliyev, the daughter and grandson of Kazakhstan's first president, Nursultan Nazarbayev who were subject to one of the few UWOs issued and thereby had their properties frozen. In a close analysis of the legal documents from this case, this paper analyses how the properties were purchased and how the sources of wealth were subsequently explained as legitimate. We elaborate an exemplary case of transnational kleptocracy revealing how British legal services actively, passively, and structurally enable specific acts of money laundering. We further expose how they effectively explain kleptocratic wealth and why they are likely to continue to do so despite recent changes to laws and regulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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What are the political consequences of rising household debt in the context of fiscal austerity? I argue that cuts in welfare benefits privatize social obligations as voters address ensuing financial shortfalls by borrowing money. Debt re‐commodifies individuals and shifts their electoral support from incumbents to opposition and anti‐establishment parties by provoking feelings of political neglect, economic vulnerability, and strong emotional responses. I examine this argument by leveraging spatial and temporal variation in the rollout of Universal Credit (UC), a large‐scale welfare reform in the United Kingdom. Using fine‐grained administrative data on unsecured debt, I demonstrate that fiscal austerity generated an increase in indebtedness, which lowered support for the incumbent Conservatives and strengthened support for Labour and the UK Independence Party (UKIP). I then use individual‐level survey data to explore the mechanisms that link debt and political behavior. The results suggest that rising indebtedness increases the political costs of welfare retrenchment and creates new political cleavages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do politicians' track records and campaign messaging interact and affect voters' welfare? We analyze this question theoretically and experimentally. In the theoretical model, which we implement in the experiment, politicians choose how much of an economy's resources to allocate to the citizenry—keeping the remainder for themselves—and then face reelection against a challenger. Both incumbents and challengers have private information about their own quality that determines the economy's level of resources. We vary whether candidates can send campaign messages and the level of variability in candidates' quality. We observe that both higher‐quality variability and allowing campaigning benefit citizens by allowing them to better select and hold accountable higher‐quality officials. Also, when incumbents have performed poorly or when quality variability is high, challengers' negative campaigning (criticizing the incumbent) increases and incumbents' positive campaigning (emphasizing their own strengths) decreases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Community-owned energy projects are viewed as compelling contributors towards renewable energy targets. They contribute to curtailing the use of carbon intensive energy sources, consequently aiding mitigation of climate change, and can contribute towards a sustainable, localised economy. The success and expansion of the sector varies. However, there is a lack of knowledge regarding the development of the sector between sub-state nations. This qualitative, comparative study looks at the sector in the sub-state, devolved nations of Wales and Scotland within the UK. Through a series of in-depth interviews with community energy practitioners in four case study sites in Scotland and Wales, this study shows how policy and governance practices can influence the sector and those working at grassroots level. The study shows a disparity in confidence and outlook for the sector, based on the perceived (in)effective governance in each devolved nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of studies have shown significant relationships between the votes cast for individual parties and the amount spent on their constituency campaigns at British general elections. Most have indicated that the party in power before an election gets a smaller return on its local spending than does its main challenger, but this has not been subject to detailed comparative study. Because of the modelling strategies adopted, these studies have also not directly evaluated the cost of a vote - or the yield in votes for any given level of expenditure - and in addition those strategies have rarely tackled some of the technical issues faced in such studies. This paper deploys an analytical strategy which allows evaluation of the cost of a vote and by comparing two elections - one in which Labour was mounting a strong challenge to a Conservative government and the other, eight years later, when the positions were reversed - can assess the relative impact of spending by incumbents and challengers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We study incumbent entry modes and entry timing in the diffusion phase of sustainability transitions using the case of plant-based meat alternatives in the UK, NL, and US. • We find that incumbents engaged in the niche in the absence of any regulatory pressures and entry timing is influenced by market demand and 'bandwagon' effects. • We find that entry modes differ across firm types and distinguish two entry mode patterns. • We suggest it is beneficial to differentiate between high and low commitment entry modes when analyzing incumbent engagement in sustainable niches. While literature on sustainability transitions has generally portrayed incumbent firms as reluctant to engage in sustainable niches and primarily employing strategies that aim to limit niche growth, practice offers many examples that contradict this. In this paper, we mobilize insights from organizational literature, and particularly the concept of entry modes and entry timing from the international business and strategy literature, to investigate incumbent firms' engagement in sustainable niches through the introduction of new products, collaborative efforts with new entrants, the introduction of new brands, mergers & acquisitions, and investments. We focus on entry modes of incumbent firms, including food firms, meat processors, retailers, and food service firms, in meat substitute markets in the United States (US), the Netherlands (NL), and the United Kingdom (UK). We identify distinct entry mode patterns for the four firm types and that the entry modes of different types of incumbent firms vary in their timing and commitment towards the plant-based meat substitute niche. Contrary to the general consensus stemming from previous literature on incumbent engagement in transitions, our case shows that incumbents proactively engaged with niche products incentivized by economic opportunities stemming from changing consumption patterns, which preceded any regulatory action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parliamentary candidates face choices about the extent to which they personalise their election campaigns. They must strike a balance between promoting their party's message and their own personal appeal, and they must decide how much effort to invest in developing personalised campaign activities. These decisions determine the nature of the campaigns that candidates run, and therefore, voters' experience during elections. In this article, we use individual-level survey data from the British Representation Study to explore the extent to which candidates personalise their election campaigns in terms of messaging focus and activities. We find that candidates who live in the area they seek to represent, and those who are more positive about their electoral chances, run more personalised campaigns, in terms of focus and activities. Incumbents' campaigns, meanwhile, are more personalised in their focus only, while candidates who have held national party office tend to use a greater range of personalised campaign activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a votes-to-seats nowcast model using individual level data from the British Election Study Internet panel to model the flow of the vote between 2010 and 2015. Transition matrices for each constituency are calculated using multinomial models of flows between 2010 origins and 2015 destinations. Respondents are reweighted to the polling average for England, Scotland and Wales and are further reweighted using predicted turnout to downweight respondents who are less likely to vote. The forecast performed poorly in 2015 because of polling errors and because the "Ashcroft" constituency vote intention question overestimated the Liberal Democrat incumbency effect. Without these errors, the forecast would have come much closer to the result but would still have underestimated the Conservatives' seats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The UK government is responsible for meeting legally binding decarbonisation objectives, but it is not on track to meet its next Climate Change Act targets or the goal of Net Zero by 2050. The IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report is a stark reminder of the importance of all countries, particularly those historically responsible for greenhouse gas emissions, devising and implementing the innovative and just policy solutions required to lower emissions. Within this context, this article explores the UK's sustainable energy policy making, and why it is not on course to meet targets, through the lens of government‐business relations. It analyses government policy capacity, incumbent energy company influence, and how complex relations and dependencies have affected sustainable policy (non‐)decisions and outcomes. It reveals that an over‐reliance on incumbent energy companies in UK energy politics, although understandable given the need to provide affordable and secure energy, has contributed towards insufficient space for cheaper and more just clean energy solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Students of economic voting have recently made substantial progress in their understanding of when the economy is and is not likely to impact election outcomes. Our knowledge of the lower level dynamics that drive these aggregate results remains fairly murky. In this paper we test competing theoretical claims about how individual level orientations toward political economy lead to observed aggregate trends in support for incumbent politicians. We do this with models of support for the Labour Party in the United Kingdom before and during the recent global economic turndown. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Recent studies suggest that Uber and other tech start‐ups disrupt markets through regulatory entrepreneurship. This practice describes how such companies operate outside of regulation or in legal gray areas before mobilizing their customers in support of regulatory change. Financial technology (FinTech) is sometimes called the "Uber of banking," but banking reveals different political dynamics than the car‐for‐hire sector. Exploring the rise of online‐only banks in the UK and Germany, this article finds that start‐ups such as Starling, Monzo, and N26 challenged incumbents without breaking or remaking regulation. The regulatory entrepreneurship approach, which sees FinTech as a difficult case, and the state world of regulatory innovation, which views policy‐makers as seizing the opportunity created by new technology to reassess their relationship with incumbents, help to explain these findings. Its conclusions have relevance for wider debates about the governance of health care and legal services and the politics of disruption more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For incumbents to be accountable for their issue stances, voters must sanction incumbents whose positions are "out of step" with their own. We test the electoral accountability of British legislators for their stance on Brexit. We find that there is very limited issue accountability. Individuals who disagreed with their representative's stance on Brexit were 3 percentage points less likely to vote for them. The aggregate consequences of these individual effects are limited. A one-standard-deviation increase in the proportion of constituents agreeing with their incumbent's Brexit stance is associated with an increase of 0.53 percentage points in incumbent vote share. These effects are one and a half times larger when the main challenger has a different Brexit stance to the incumbent. A follow-up survey of Members of Parliament (MPs) shows that MPs' estimates of the effects of congruence are similar in magnitude. Our findings suggest that issue accountability is conditional in nature and limited in magnitude even for an issue such as Brexit, which should be maximally amenable to such effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tax and spending are central to democratic politics in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, but psephologists have paid surprisingly little attention to the practice of manifesto costings or the ways in which fiscal promises shape voting behaviour. This article uses qualitative research to trace how British parties have used manifesto costings to frame prospective choices for voters since the 1950s and develops a theoretical framework for understanding why warnings about 'tax bombshells' and 'black holes' in parties' spending plans seem to be so powerful in Britain. The article suggests that the emphasis which governments have placed on budgetary constraints since the 1976 International Monetary Fund (IMF) crisis may help explain the long electoral cycles the United Kingdom has experienced in recent decades. Whereas retrospective economic evaluations can be difficult for governments to control, forward-looking fiscal debates are structurally weighed towards incumbent parties and offer a powerful way for incumbents to offset the 'costs of governing'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can fixing the parliamentary term be expected to reduce electoral incumbency advantages? The United Kingdom’s 2011 Fixed-term Parliaments Act aims to prevent incumbents from scheduling early elections for political benefit. Yet, the view that flexible election timing gives incumbents an unfair advantage remains contested. The literature on opportunistic election calling—including the signalling effects of this strategy and the competence of governments that select it—lends support to both sides in the debate. This article examines how far the divergent arguments apply in the United Kingdom. Using observed outcomes and a potential outcomes approach, we investigate to what effect incumbents have used election timing. Our results suggest that governments can improve their re-election chances when they have discretion to time elections to favourable circumstances instead of facing voters at set intervals when conditions may not be advantageous. Fixed parliamentary terms are likely to reduce that incumbency advantage significantly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parties' local campaign efforts can yield electoral dividends in plurality elections; in general, the harder they campaign, the more votes they receive. However, this is not invariably the case. Different parties' campaigns can have different effects. What is more, the particular status of a candidacy can also influence how effective the local campaign might be. Analyses of constituency campaigning at the 2015 UK General Election reveal inter-party variations in campaign effectiveness. But looking more closely at how a party was placed tactically in a seat prior to the election, and at whether sitting MPs stood again for their party or retired, reveals distinct variations in what parties stand to gain from their local campaigns in different circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous researchers have speculated that incumbency effects are larger when voters have weaker partisan preferences, but evidence for this relationship is surprisingly weak. We offer a fresh look at the question by examining the United Kingdom's multiparty system. In general, the electoral value of incumbency should depend on the proportion of voters who are nearly indifferent between the parties competing for incumbency; in a multiparty system, that proportion may differ across constituencies depending on which parties are locally competitive. After first showing that UK voters in recent decades have stronger preferences between Conservatives and Labour than between Conservatives and Liberals, we show that incumbency effects are larger in close contests between Conservatives and Liberals than in close contests between Conservatives and Labour. By documenting how partisanship influences incumbency effects, our analysis shows that the comparative study of incumbency effects offers broader insights into electoral accountability across political systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many studies have shown that incumbent candidates have an electoral advantage over nonincumbents under single-member-district systems, but less is known about whether incumbents enjoy the same electoral bonus under other electoral rules. This article focuses on multimember-district systems that allow intraparty competition and contends that incumbents may have little advantage or even a disadvantage over nonincumbents of the same party under these systems, although the incentives to cultivate a personal vote-one of the main sources of incumbency advantage-are greater in these systems. I demonstrate my argument using electoral data from Japan during 1958-93 when the country used the single nontransferable vote system. Having applied an estimation of incumbency advantage immune to endogeneity bias due to strategic retirement, I find supportive evidence to my argument. The results suggest that there is an important variation in incumbency advantage across electoral systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider the impact of a regulatory process forcing an incumbent telecom operator to make its local broadband network available to other companies (local loop unbundling, or LLU). Entrants are then able to upgrade their individual lines and offer Internet services directly to customers. Employing a very detailed data set covering the whole of the United Kingdom, we find that, over the course of time, many entrants have begun to take advantage of unbundling. LLU entry only had a positive effect on broadband penetration in the early years, and no longer in the recent years as the market reached maturity. In contrast, LLU entry continues to have a positive impact on the quality of the service provided, as entrants differentiate their products upwards compared to the incumbent. We also assess the impact of competition from an alternative form of technology (cable) which is not subject to regulation, and what we discover is that inter-platform competition has a positive impact on both penetration and quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The introduction of competition has frequently been found to cause costs to fall. There has, however, been a question as to whether this was partly achieved at the cost of quality. Auction theory predicts prices would fall more the greater the competition to provide the service. There has been some debate about whether the smaller budgets would make contract compliance more difficult. Evidence is found in support of this hypothesis. We also find some evidence that the better recorded performance of the in-house direct service organisations (DSOs) during this period was due to the information advantage they had from being incumbents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most studies of the impact of local campaign expenditure on British election results have found that expenditure by incumbents has less of an effect on the outcome than does that by challengers. Some argue that this, in part, reflects an underestimate of how much is spent by incumbents because it excludes their expenditure under various parliamentary allowances which facilitates contacts between MPs and their constituents. Data on spending under those allowances are now available and are used here to evaluate its impact at the 2005 general election in England. The analyses show that only expenditure by Conservative MPs had any impact on their re-election chances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Publishing performance information about local public services, an increasing trend in many Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, matters politically because it has an effect on incumbent local governments' electoral support. Voters are able to use performance information to punish or reward incumbents in the elections that follow their publication, which may fill a gap in the chain of accountability between voters and governments. We model the introduction of published Comprehensive Performance Assessments of Iocal authorities in England, which make summary information about performance available to voters, as a "shock" to the relationship between voters and incumbents. Controlling for an unpublicized measure of performance change over time, change in the local tax level, change in local economic conditions, and whether the local incumbent is the party of the incumbent government at the national level, we find negativity bias. Incumbents in local authorities in the "poor" performance category experience a substantial reduction in aggregate vote share at the election following publication, but there is no similarly sized reward for those in the highest performance category. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the authors' comments on the effects of candidate gender on voting for local office in Great Britain. Their analysis focused on the point that few women are selected by political parties to run for local office. According to the authors, once incumbency is achieved, women are as hard to dislodge as men, whatever party they represent. They emphasize that parties and socio-economic characteristics are two features in the political culture in the country.