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The paper considers if house price movements in the United Kingdom (UK) can be linked to the political cycle as governments realise homeowners represent a large portion of the voter base and their voting decisions could be influenced by the magnitude and direction of house price changes. Specifically, this paper aims to investigate whether house prices behave differently before and after elections and under different political regimes.

The paper analyses quarterly house price data from 1960 to 2018 together with data on UK parliamentary elections for the same period. Descriptive statistics and significance tests are used to analyse the impact of the political cycle on house price movements in the UK.

While there is no evidence that house prices in the UK performed significantly differently under different political parties, the authors observed that house prices performed much better in the last year before an election compared to the first year after an election. On average, house prices increased by 5.3% per annum in the last year before an election compared to 1.3% per annum in the first year following an election.

The study highlights significant variations in the performance of UK house prices around election times.

It is imperative that the political cycle is given adequate consideration when making residential property investment decisions.

House buyers and investors in the residential property market could include the election timings as part of their decision-making process.

This paper represents a unique systematic examination of the influence of the political cycle on residential houses prices in the UK.

The scientific literature evidences that the quality of care must be improved. However, little research has focused on investigating how health care managers – who are responsible for the implementation of quality interventions – define good and poor quality. The purpose of this paper is to develop an empirically informed taxonomy of quality care as perceived by US managers – named the Integrative Quality Care Assessment Tool (INQUAT) – that is grounded in Donabedian’s structure, process and outcome model.

A revised version of the critical incident technique was used to collect 135 written narratives of good and poor quality care from 74 health care managers in the USA. The episodes were thematically analyzed.

In total, 804 units were coded under the 135 written narratives of care. They were grouped under structure (9 percent, n=69), including organizational, staff and facility resources; process (52 percent, n=419), entailing communication, professional diligence, timeliness, errors, and continuity of care; outcomes (32 percent, n=257), embedding process- and short-term outcomes; and context (7 percent, n=59), involving clinical and patient factors. Process-related categories tended to be described in relation to good quality (65 percent), while structure-related categories tended to be associated with poor quality (67 percent). Furthermore, the data suggested that managers did not consider their actions as important factors influencing quality, but rather tended to attribute the responsibility for quality care to front-line practitioners.

The INQUAT provides a theoretically grounded, evidence-based framework to guide health care managers in the assessment of all the components involved with the quality of care within their institutions.