Abstract
Voluntary assessments by a team of critical friends (external peer challenges) among local governments became established as popular complement to compulsory and centralized audits and inspections. This study empirically investigates the decision of English local authorities to have a voluntary peer challenge or not by taking advantage of an original dataset about participation in the Local Government Association’s Peer Challenge Programme (CPC) 2010–2015. We find that the LGA’s CPC programme does not carry a risk of leaving behind authorities with performance shortcomings. Councils with poor past performance scores and those with excellent ones do not differ in their tendency to invite a team of critical friends. Spatial clusters exist in the case of small district councils but not in the case of larger unitary authorities, London boroughs and metropolitan authorities. This implies that the corporate peer challenge process seems to be more suited to small authorities delivering community based services.
Acknowledgments
Part of this work was conducted when the author served as a Research Fellow at the German Research Institute for Public Administration in Speyer, Germany. I thank my interview partners at Birmingham City Council, the Local Government Association (LGA), and the former Audit Commission, in particular Sally Hammond, for supporting my research. I am grateful that I had the opportunity to talk to and learn from professional and inspiring people. The anonymous reviewers provided substantial remarks, comments and suggestions on how to improve the previous version of the article. This article benefited from the proofreading services offered by the Academic Writing Centre (AWC) at the National Research University Higher School of Economics.
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Competing interests: The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editors’ Note
- Articles
- Debate Reaction Ideal Points: Political Ideology Measurement Using Real-Time Reaction Data
- Heuristic Synchronization of Real-Time Response Data
- Assessing the Impact of Political Involvement on the Reliability and Validity of Virtualized Real-time-response Measurement
- Tracing Policy-relevant Information in Social Media: The Case of Twitter before and during the COVID-19 Crisis
- Election and Public Administration Research
- Statistical Considerations on Political Responsivity in Italy Analyzed Over the 70-Year Time Period from 1948 to 2018
- The Results of Exit Polls in Kansas to Verify Voting Machine Counts in the November 2016 Election
- External Peer Challenge in Local Government: The Role of Spatial Spillover and Past Performance
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editors’ Note
- Articles
- Debate Reaction Ideal Points: Political Ideology Measurement Using Real-Time Reaction Data
- Heuristic Synchronization of Real-Time Response Data
- Assessing the Impact of Political Involvement on the Reliability and Validity of Virtualized Real-time-response Measurement
- Tracing Policy-relevant Information in Social Media: The Case of Twitter before and during the COVID-19 Crisis
- Election and Public Administration Research
- Statistical Considerations on Political Responsivity in Italy Analyzed Over the 70-Year Time Period from 1948 to 2018
- The Results of Exit Polls in Kansas to Verify Voting Machine Counts in the November 2016 Election
- External Peer Challenge in Local Government: The Role of Spatial Spillover and Past Performance