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External Peer Challenge in Local Government: The Role of Spatial Spillover and Past Performance

  • Tim Jäkel ORCID logo EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: January 21, 2021
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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.


Corresponding author: Dr. Tim Jäkel, School of Politics and Governance, National Research University Higher School of Economics, 20 Myasnitskaya Street, Office M20-214, 101000 Moscow, Russian Federation, E-mail:

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.

  1. 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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Received: 2020-03-31
Accepted: 2021-01-04
Published Online: 2021-01-21
Published in Print: 2021-06-25

© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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