Publications

Using mixed methods this paper explores issue salience and the policy framing associated with the substantive representation of ethnic minorities. Its focus is party programmes in Westminster (1964–2010) and Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish elections (1998–2011). The analysis reveals a significant increase in issue salience driven by parties of the Left. This applies to both…

This paper explores the ways in which managers of organizations delivering services to the public in Wales talk about and conceptualize the publics using these services. Topics covered in interviews with these stakeholders include: local democracy; responsibility; behavioural shifts; citizen participation; local specificities; responses to devolution. The themes are analysed in the context of neoliberal…

The interpretation of graduate mismatch manifested either as over‐education or as over‐skilling remains problematical. This article analyses the relationship of educational and skills mismatch with pay, job satisfaction and job mobility using unique data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey. Over‐education and over‐skilling are found to be distinct phenomena and…

This paper is about the twenty-four hour city and analyses this phenomenon with the assistance of a case study dispersed across (temporally and spatially) twenty-four hours spent moving in, around and with the city centre of Cardiff, UK. Reporting from a continuous twenty-four hour period of fieldwork the paper describes the round-the-clock work of a…

The purpose of this paper is to examine the welfare participation of immigrant groups in the UK, which has experienced a large growth in its immigrant flows and population levels in recent years, especially following EU enlargement in 2004. The analysis particularly focuses on the types of benefits that immigrants tend to claim, as well…

This paper focuses on the policy discourse of the Commonwealth in Wales, UK general election manifestos 1945–2010. It reveals party politicization in the immediate post-war period underpinned by contrasts in policy framing and a Left–Right cleavage spanning a range of issues including immigration and development. A significant post-1970 decline in salience is shown to be…

There has been a longstanding interest in the impacts of socio-spatial variations in accessibility to public and private services in both urban and rural contexts. Previous studies have found that rural communities are often disproportionately impacted in accessibility terms by changes in service configuration. The aim of this study is to examine such claims in…

In recent years, there has been growing recognition of a need for a general, non-language-specific assessment tool that could be used to evaluate general speech and language abilities in children, especially to assist in identifying atypical development in bilingual children who speak a language unfamiliar to the assessor. It has been suggested that a non-word…

The important role which older people play in rural community development through their various activities has become a substantive area of interest across social science disciplines, including gerontology, sociology, psychology and human geography. Reflecting the demographic shift of an ageing countryside within many parts of the global north, the future of rural social policy initiatives…

Over recent decades there has been an international shift towards multi-level governance. Against this backdrop, many comparative welfare studies take government policy outputs as the starting point for their analysis. However, the associated pluralization of electoral systems in unitary states means that welfare choices are no longer exclusively informed by single state-wide ballots. Accordingly, this…