Search

Policymakers increasingly recognise the need for regulatory intervention in the digital economy to promote competition, privacy and innovation, among other policy objectives. Much policy-focused literature presents regulation as a technical puzzle to be 'solved' through identification of the appropriate intervention in a particular context, though there is persistent disagreement among experts about what remedies are preferable in different digital markets. At the same time, many external observers emphasise the sheer multiplicity of public policy objectives that regulatory interventions might fulfil, claiming that conflicts between these objectives are inevitable and thus require political rather than technocratic solutions. This article attempts to bridge the gap between these perspectives through a novel theoretical analysis of digital markets characterised by strong network effects, conceptualising different markets in terms of common underlying structural characteristics. The resulting framework helps policymakers to anticipate which remedies will safeguard competition, privacy and innovation/efficiency under what circumstances, both in well-established digital markets and with respect to emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence. In so doing, it also highlights limits to the technocratic governance of digital markets, identifying circumstances in which conflicts between competing public values cannot be neatly resolved through technocratic regulatory intervention alone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The UK has spent the last fifteen years locked in a low-investment, low-growth holding pattern of its own making. Since the 2019 election, changes in the national and global economic environment have rendered it increasingly difficult to break out of this self-inflicted stagnation. But these constraints are ultimately political, rather than economic: the new Labour government will be able to change course, if it has the political appetite to do so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Essay-based examinations form a cornerstone of the public assessment system in the UK, but comparatively little research has been conducted into the processes involved in designing, answering and appraising essay-based questions/responses. This study explores the idea of examination validity through a qualitative review of these processes, based on materials sourced from the June 2002 OCR Politics AS/A2 module 2596 (Politics of the UK). Through a detailed analysis of question papers and candidate scripts (informed by mark schemes, curricula and examiner reports), a model of current processes is advanced. Issues related to question design are highlighted, and a methodology for future quality assurance in essay-based examinations is derived from philosophical considerations such as "fairness" and "validity". This paper resulted from research conducted as part of the University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate's ongoing work to develop a system of procedural guidelines and example questions to facilitate robust question design.

In UK welfare debates, equality and economic growth are often treated as opposites: one inevitably comes at the expense of the other. But evidence that more equal societies are more innovative suggests a need to rethink the assumption that redistributive welfare policies and progressive taxation disincentivise innovation and entrepreneurship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the local impact of various forms of fiscal and monetary support for UK-based companies in the context of disruption caused by COVID-19 and associated public health restrictions, including support for household incomes (and therefore private consumption) via the 'furlough' scheme, the Covid Corporate Financing Facility and various national and local business support schemes. It shows that the economic crisis associated with the pandemic has been construed to justify interventions that preserve the spatially uneven status quo of the UK's model of economic development, protecting business from harms arising, apparently, from the public's reaction to the pandemic. To some extent, COVID-19 has been treated as a localised phenomenon that the national economy requires protection from. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theories of 'growth models' explain capitalist diversity by reference to shifting drivers of aggregate demand in different national economies. This article expands the growth models framework beyond its conventional focus on debt-driven and export-driven demand, through an ideational analysis of Thatcher's vision of a property-owning democracy, and Blair's knowledge-driven growth agenda. Drawing on policymakers' statements, it shows how these hypothetical growth models differed from the debt-driven growth model that ultimately prevailed. Using data on the distribution of wealth and wages, it highlights how both approaches failed to generate sustainable demand; in Thatcher's case, because of an insufficiently broad distribution of capital ownership, in Blair's case, because of an insufficiently broad distribution of lucrative knowledge work. This indicates that explanations of dysfunctional growth models need to consider not just the split of national income between labour and capital, but also the distribution of both labour income and capital income between households. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses political issues in the United Kingdom (UK), particularly the need for the New Labour party to create a vision of the future to recover and win power. Also cited are how the results of the May 2022 local elections showed a decline of the Conservative party amidst sex and insider dealing scandals, and the factors that hindered Labour's return to power like the lack of charisma of its leaders.

In the 1990s, the 'knowledge economy' was hailed as a key driver of future prosperity by progressive policymakers in developed democracies. According to its proponents, in the knowledge economy, companies and countries alike would succeed by cultivating workers' knowledge – as opposed to traditional forms of capital such as plant and machinery. This had radical implications for public policy, implying that education reform and other supply-side interventions could deliver inclusivity as well as prosperity. Today, however, this benevolent vision of the social and economic impacts of technological progress has been superseded by an altogether more dystopian view, associated with automation and the rise of artificial intelligence, as well as transformations in the digital economy and the evolving nature of globalisation. This paper analyses that transition. It charts the key assumptions of the knowledge economy concept, through an intellectual history that focuses on how these ideas manifested themselves in the rhetoric of the UK Government under Tony Blair. It then shows how evolving understandings of the digital economy, technological progress and globalisation challenge these assumptions, and the policy agenda that was premised on them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many political theorists today appeal to, or assume the existence of, a political culture in which the public values of Western liberal democracies are embedded - a political culture that is necessary to render their ideas plausible and their proposals feasible. This article contrasts this approach with the more ambitious arguments advanced by Jürgen Habermas in his original account of discourse ethics - a moral theory to which, he supposed, all human beings were demonstrably and ineluctably bound by the communicative constitution of collective life. Although these arguments have been largely discredited, I argue that Habermas' analysis can be enlisted in defence of a weaker claim: namely, that principled commitment to discussion is not always necessary for genuine deliberative engagement to occur. As a result, there may be hope for democratic deliberation in contexts where a liberal democratic political culture is lacking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]