What will public management be like in Britain for the next five years? - Perri 6, Professor in Public Management, School of Business and Management at Queen Mary

Christopher Devereux - License: CC BY 2.0

If the voters will believe you, then a good way to get elected is to promise them that your government will spend less of their money and, at the same time, provide the people with more generous services. It is hardly a novel approach. But, provided the voters are not convinced by any alternatives they are offered, it can work. And in May 2015 at least in England although not in the rest of the United Kingdom, it did.

Having promised both things, how is the trick actually going to be done? And what will public management in Britain be like for those running our public services over the next five or even ten years?

The Politics of Austerity and Public Policy Reform in the EU - A symposium edited by Dr Stella Ladi (Queen Mary University of London) and Dr Dimitris Tsarouhas (Bilkent University) in Political Studies Review

In the introductory article it is argued that the EU is at a critical juncture that will either trigger further political and economic unity or reinforce the voices that instead call for intergovernmental co-operation in place of formal union.  The spread of market pressure from Ireland, Greece and Portugal to Spain, Italy and Cyprus and also beyond has demonstrated that the sovereign debt crisis needs to be dealt with at the European and not just the national level.  Up to now the “politics of extreme austerity” has been the mainstream recipe promoted to and adopted by member states.  The measures are tougher in those countries where there has been external financial assistance from the EU and the IMF (i.e. Greece, Portugal and Ireland) but the rest of Europe is following suit (e.g. Italy and the UK).