Publications

The participation of citizens in public policy-making has become a key aim for national and supranational institutions across Europe, but the relative importance policy-makers actually accord citizen participation arguably varies due to the alternative administrative traditions within different countries. Using data drawn from a large-scale survey of senior public managers in France, Germany, the United…

Watch John Edwards’ plenary address at the WISERD’s Welsh and the Workplace conference, held in Bangor University on 23rd May 2016.

This chapter explores the genealogy and development of neoliberalism in its heartlands. What happens here is closely entangled with events, processes and forces elsewhere in the world market, the world of states and global society. It first considers the meaning of heartlands and note some paradoxes in its use in geopolitics, geoeconomics and critical studies…

In this report we present a technical discussion of the three year evaluation (August 2011 to August 2014). This includes an outline of the evaluation design, the methods used in the evaluation and other detailed information about the evaluation. 2. The Foundation Phase is a Welsh Government flagship policy of early years education (for 3…

To better understand why Middle Eastern states continue to languish at the bottom of world rankings on gender equality, this study presents critical discourse analysis of state and civil society organizations’ implementation of the Participative Democratic Model of gender mainstreaming. A requirement of the 1995 United Nations Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, the Participative…

A model of supply and demand is applied to UK data over the period 2001–2010 to define graduate jobs in terms of the proportion of graduates and/or the graduate earnings mark-up within occupations. Within such a framework it is found that there has been an upward shift in the likelihood of young British university graduates…

The Scottish Independence Referendum of 2014 was for many a watershed moment in the ongoing debate about youth political engagement. Against a backdrop of declining electoral turnout amongst young voters, and evidence that today’s young people are the most politically apathetic to have entered the electorate in the last century, the 85% turnout among 18-24…

The emergence of an extensive literature exploring the post-secularism in recent years has revived interest in the role of religion in society. However, such studies are overwhelmingly focussed on the urban experience, while the relationship between rurality and post-secularism remains largely unconsidered. Set against the back-drop of challenges to rural religious organization, such as redundant…

Within the context of spatial rebalancing and a Northern (metro-region) Powerhouse, this article explores the implementation of the devolution of employment and skills within the Sheffield city region. We make both an original empirical and analytical contribution by suggesting that notions of governance and metagovernance failure are important for analyzing the development, tensions and contradictions…

Different sources of data provide a generally consistent picture of downward trends in rates of trade union density, presence and coverage. Analysis however raises cause for concern regarding official estimates derived from the Labour Force Survey which underestimate the true extent to which unions are both present in the workplace and recognised by employers in…