Are there electoral consequences or benefits for legislators who deviate from the party line? We answer this question with data from individual-level vote choice and constituency-level electoral results in the UK for the last two decades. Exploring the variations in voting patterns over time with a panel-regression approach, we find results that are most compatible with the null hypothesis, that is, that dissent by legislators is neither rewarded nor punished in elections. These results call into question the degree to which voters know and/or care about legislative dissent in parliament.

Housing allowances within the UK’s welfare system help protect low-income households from eviction. Universal Credit (UC) has faced criticism for threatening this with its long wait periods, increased conditionality and monthly direct payments. However, there is currently a lack of robust, national-level quantitative analysis on UC’s housing security impacts. This article addresses this, exploiting cross-area variation in the timing of UC rollout to assess its impact on landlord repossession rates within 323 English local authorities. A fixed-effects panel design was used, linking data from UC’s rollout schedule with Ministry of Justice data on legal repossession actions from 2012 Q1 - 2019 Q1. Results suggest that UC ‘Full Service’ rollout, on average, led to an increase of 1.74 landlord repossession claims, 1.42 landlord repossession orders and 0.70 landlord repossession warrants within local authorities (per 10,000 rented dwellings). This corresponds to a 4–5 percent increase on pre-rollout rates. UC’s impact tended to increase the longer it had been rolled out. Where ‘Full Service’ had been rolled out for 12+ months, it led to an increase of 2.60 landlord repossession claims, 2.89 landlord repossession orders and 1.09 landlord repossession warrants (per 10,000 rented dwellings), corresponding to a 6–10 percent increase on pre-rollout rates.

This paper uses microlevel data from the Agricultural Resource Management Survey to examine the changes in the distributions of household wealth and to assess the role farm subsidies play, among other factors, in affecting these distributions. The empirical analysis relies on the concept of the adjusted Gini coefficient and on fixed-effect regression procedures. Coefficients from fixed-effects estimation indicate a negative correlation between government payments and wealth dispersion, with the effect shifting toward more of a positive relation when government payments were allowed to interact with regional dummies.