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Between 2010 and 2015, the UK’s Coalition Government introduced directly-elected Police and Crime Commissioners to oversee English and Welsh police forces, and also required every force to publish a range of performance and financial information online. Together with the fact that front-line policing services have not been outsourced or privatised, this suggests that strong ‘downwards’ mechanisms exist through which residents can hold their local force to account. However, the new arrangements are significantly more complex than their predecessors, because many more actors are involved – several of which assume the role of both ‘principal’ and ‘agent’ in different accountability relationships. As a result, there is a substantial risk that the public do not have a clear understanding of roles and responsibilities, which makes it more difficult to hold officials to account for their actions. Such findings highlight how direct elections do not necessarily make public officials more accountable, and therefore have implications for other jurisdictions and sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a new and innovative framework to help analyse policy-making and depoliticisation within subnational governance arrangements. By focusing on thecapacity(not the autonomy) of subnational governments to achieve their political objectives, and incorporating external actors along both theverticalandhorizontaldimensions, it provides a dynamic tool to understand the extent to which municipal governments influence local policy-making processes. Furthermore, it stresses that greater ‘localism’ (orindependence) between vertical tiers of government is likely to weaken subnational bodies and result in them becoming moreinterdependent with (or evendependent on) horizontal non-state actors within the locality. This would weaken their position in local governance arrangements and exacerbate the depoliticised nature of decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the author focuses on the Brexit referendum and its impact on freedom, power and capacity in Great Briatin. It mentions that Brexit could reduce the ability of the Great Britain's government to achieve its objectives, and states that Brexit will affect administrative capacity. It also mentions the book "Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought" by Nikolas Rose that depict the power and resistance.