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The criminal justice system (CJS) in England and Wales went through extensive reform under the Coalition Government of 2010-2015. In this paper, and through the lens of policing, prisons and probation, the authors set out to identify the direction and qualities of these reforms. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The authors review key policy documents produced by the Coalition Government as well as relevant critiques. The authors concentrate on policing, prisons and probation on the basis that interrogation of these major aspects of the CJS should enable the principles underpinning the Coalition’s approach to the CJS to be discerned.

The authors identify key themes, and their contradictions, that emerged in the Coalition Government’s approach to the CJS, these being: devolution and centralism; marketization with a growing emphasis on payment by results; politicisation and de-politicisation; and, evidence-based policy.

This is a review of recent government policy and as such some of the implications and outcomes resulting from that policy are not yet clear.

This paper will be of particular use to those working in or studying UK criminal justice policy. Given that the majority partner in the Coalition went on to form the current government policy trends from the recent Coalition are likely to have some relevance to current government policy making in the CJS.

To date there have only been limited attempts to identify key policy trends emerging from the Coalition Government.

In many developing countries and some developed countries, government by coalition is the rule. In the Indian central government for the last two or three decades, there was a coalition of the left or right: on the right, the BJP and like-minded party; and on the left, the secular Congress party, like-minded parties, and the Communist party. This coalition of government politics is very much guided by both domestic and international situations. For example, Congress, the major party in the ruling coalition, is in favour of the USA–India nuclear deal. It was not finalized due to the opposition of its coalition partners, particularly the Communist party. As a result, the deal is almost dead. There are many examples in economic policies that are greatly influenced by coalition politics. The same situation exists in state politics. There is considerable scope in using the material in coalition theory literature to determine when and what type of coalition will form and break the pay off, etc. The subject discussed below of such a situation is based on a grossly outdated scenario. We hope a more up-to-date and sophisticated study will be available not only for India, but also for other countries.

This chapter focusses on whether women heads of states and governments use their powers of selection to empower women. Compared to their male counterparts, do they appoint greater quantities of women to cabinet positions and to more prestigious posts? Examining Germany and Brazil, two countries constituting diverse cultural and institutional settings, this chapter provides in-depth analysis of cabinet appointments and regional breadth. It confirms that women executives do indeed promote more women to their cabinets overall and to higher powered portfolios. This stands in contrast with prevailing findings from within the global literature but generally reinforces those derived from single country and regional explorations.

This article examines the effect of party composition of government on the centralization of budgeting institutions in Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Bulgaria in 1989-1999, and assesses the impact of the centralization of budgeting institutions on the capacity of these countries to meet the fiscal deficit requirement for the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) membership. The article finds that centralization of budgeting institutions through delegation to a strong finance minister and/or prime minister is likely to occur in one-party governments or coalition governments composed of parties which expect to fight repeated elections together, with effective punishment mechanisms. The article finds that countries with centralized budgeting institutions are likely to be more capable of meeting the EMU deficit requirement than countries with decentralized institutions.

With the UK Conservative-Liberal Democrat Government reaching its mid-term point, this paper examines its austerity measures and public expenditure reductions in family support and children's services, and its revisions of family support, family intervention, child poverty, child well-being and children's services reform policies in contrast to the former Labour governments.

The paper is informed by policy analysis and research reviews.

The analysis focuses on three dimensions of policy change: first, reductions in income support for children and families and central government funding for children's services; second, refocusing child poverty, child well-being and family policies around the Conservative's “Broken Britain” campaign and the Liberal Democrats targeted social mobility initiatives; and finally, broader children's services reforms. The paper recognises some progressive developments but charts the social welfare implications of reduced welfare entitlements for families and the pressures on support services for families from children's services reforms.

The paper combines reflections on the aims, achievements and limitations of Labour reforms to family support and children's services with a broader analysis of welfare state retrenchment and restructuring under the Coalition. It places current changes in family support and children's services within the context of the ideological influences on the Coalition's social policies and the primacy of its austerity programme and welfare state reform agendas.

Minority governments are more common in Denmark than in any other parliamentary democracy. Internationally, the literature associates minority governments with short-lived, inefficient governments. Yet this is not the case in Denmark. Here, successive governments have served full terms in recent decades and managed to pass large numbers of substantive reforms. This chapter considers how Danish minority governments manage to cope so well and whether polarisation and populism may challenge the solutions to this apparent paradox. The legislative bargaining and agreements (politiske forlig) between government and opposition parties are highly institutionalised, giving opposition parties policy influence and procedural privileges almost akin to cabinet parties – but only on the items on which agreement has been reached. The government is therefore able to maintain flexibility. Danish governments have also increased their hierarchical coordination, both in the form of policy through coalition agreements and internally in the form of cabinet committees and a strengthened Prime Minister's Office. The argument here is that these changes make it easier for a government to negotiate as a coherent unit, and the fact that the parties on the respective ideological wings of the Folketing are also included in negotiations and agreements means that polarisation does not seem to affect minority government performance.

It is often said that we live in a time of crisis for social democracy. Many of the West European centre-left parties that seemed the natural parties of government in the second half of the twentieth century are in decline. The most common long-term explanations centre on a shrinking working class, a widening gap between the party elite and their core voters, and the challenges from new populist parties and/or greens. Short-term policy factors include the failure to address the recent financial and refugee crises. None of these factors carry much explanatory weight for developments in Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic in the three decades since the transition from communism. We find that much of the explanation for the rise and the fall of the five social democratic parties in these countries lies in the dynamics of party competition and party system change. All parties face dilemmas of policy, electoral appeal and coalition-building. The Central European cases suggest that it is how social democrats handle such challenges and make difficult choices about strategy and tactics that ultimately shapes their long-term fate. Centre-left parties are stronger masters of their fortunes than much of the literature on the decline of social democracy suggests. Consequently, seeking a common structural explanation for the rise and decline of social democratic parties might be a double fallacy: both empirically misleading and a poor base for policy advice.