Abstract Post-war electoral dynamics were framed by a two-party system that usually provided single party governments with a legislative majority. These conditions promoted a pendulum-like swing of votes between two parties that alternated in office. The electorate responded ‘thermostatically’ to governments by moving in the opposite direction to policy and imposed the ‘costs of ruling.’ The major parties competed by moderating their positions and building reputations for competence. They vacated the centre in the 1970s and suffered a loss of their reputations for competence, leading to an increase in the centre-party vote. When the Liberal Democrat vote collapsed after 2010, niche parties, such as Reform UK, the Greens, and the Scottish National Party, picked up support. These developments have produced increasingly complicated dynamics. The major parties now risk losing votes to parties on their flanks. This reduces the appeal of moderation and causes uncertainty about strategy. Governments still suffer from thermostatic effects and the costs of ruling, creating opportunities for a wider range of opposition parties. These dynamics will produce volatility that the plurality electoral system will amplify to produce even more astonishing electoral turnarounds, and complicate strategic decision-making for parties.

Claims that there was a lack of accountability had been part of the backdrop to campaigns for a Scottish Parliament. Accountability had been one of the four principles that informed the Consultative Steering Group, set up by the UK Government to draw up procedures and working practices for the Scottish Parliament. After a discussion of different types of accountability, the paper considers the extent to which greater accountability has been achieved with particular reference to fiscal matters. It does so by considering the situation that prevailed before devolution and in the period from 1999–2016 then the period since 2016, the last involved greater fiscal responsibility. It maintains that whilst there has been greater fiscal accountability, there remain weaknesses in the system of governance. Using primary data, including archival sources, interviews with key participants, as well as public papers, we argue that vertical accountability has improved significantly with devolution but are more equivocal about horizontal accountability and that diagonal accountability has been only partially improved though largely due to developments beyond the competence of devolved institutions.

Abstract This article examines how public inquiries come into being through a detailed analysis of the pre-inquiry phase of the UK COVID-19 Inquiry. We focus on two key points of contestation—around the timing of the inquiry and its terms of reference—and suggest that what is at stake during the pre-stage of an inquiry is its ontological and epistemological orientation. Our analysis traces the emergence of two distinct positions during this phase: a grassroots position (conceiving of the inquiry as a response to the experience of collective grief) and an official position (conceiving of the inquiry as a means of learning lessons). Particular attention is given to the latter position and what it reveals about the rhetorical function of transparency in confirming a political commitment to institutional accountability, at the same time as working towards a particular conception of the inquiry as a practical task, expansive in remit, and future oriented.

Debates about England’s geographic inequalities and the extent to which the problem is intertwined with the ‘Westminster system’ of government are often light on historical perspective. Few recall that “levelling up” was a New Labour slogan before it was a Conservative one. Making use of recently released archival material and interviews with former ministers and officials, this article explores a project that aimed to tackle England’s geographic inequalities through strategic and unapologetically undemocratic bodies at the regional level, the Regional Development Agencies (1998–2012). This vison of ‘levelling up’ was accompanied by an alternative understanding of how England’s spatial economic divergences relate to wider economic challenges. The project gave new powers and spending to regionally based public bodies despite simultaneously reinforcing political centralisation, demonstrating the ongoing relevance of key aspects of the ‘Westminster Model’ while underlining the need for nuance when employing the framework. Concerning contemporary policy debates, the article invites us to reconsider economic regionalism as a pragmatic means to counter economic disparities while complex political questions and arrangements are worked through.

This article seeks to contribute to our understanding of media influence on political behaviour by investigating the ways in which people with different personality types react to candidates’ conflicting rhetoric in televised debates during election campaigns. It analyses responses along three reaction types: evaluations of candidate character, debate performance, and voting intentions in two debate clips from the 2019 UK general election and 2022 Australian federal election. The study uses semi-structured interviews with respondents in the UK and relies on deductive, flexible thematic analysis. The findings show that respondents’ personality traits are associated with different reactions to conflict in televised debates, which are sometimes mediated by the nature of attack, partisanship and preconceptions about candidates especially in the UK debate.

Over the last three decades, there has been a significant growth in media control policies in the UK. Nonetheless, academic literature has so far failed to examine British political elites’ understandings of the relationship between the media and political violence. This article makes an original contribution by conducting a historical comparison of political elites’ discourses on terrorism, the media, and audiences through the analysis of key parliamentary debates in which British MPs discussed the introduction of far-reaching media control measures (i.e. the 1988 Broadcasting Ban and the 2019 Counter-terrorism and Border Security Act). Employing the concept of the “imagined audience”, the analysis, based on a discourse-historical approach (DHA), demonstrates significant differences in how MPs constructed media audiences in these discussions. In 1988, British MPs consistently invoked rational, well-informed, and responsible audiences, whilst thirty years later, constructions of unknowledgeable and easily influenced audiences were discursively deployed by MPs in support of highly restrictive media control measures. The article suggests that this transformation is based on a resurgence of the media “contagion theory” and Islamophobic notions that construct certain sections of the population as vulnerable, irrational, and highly susceptible, in contrast to the intelligent and sensible audiences envisioned by MPs in 1988.

In this article, the author name Maria Rost Rublee was incorrectly written as Marie Rost Rublee. The original article has been corrected.