Policy Change, Public Benefit, and the Charities Act 2006 - A Case of the Emperor's New Clothes?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis analyses the policy-making processes leading to the Charities Act 2006 that introduced a renewed focus on the "public benefit" that charities need to provide. It addresses the empirical puzzle why a period of over 400 years of stability in the definition of charitable status ended in 2006 and what factors caused the charity reform that culminated in the 2006 Act. The discussion centres on the two most affected groups of charities, which are fee-charging education and healthcare charities. For this purpose, the thesis compares two radical change theories, i.e. punctuated equilibrium theory (Baumgartner et al., 2011) and path dependency (Pierson, 2000a), and evaluates how they perform against the alternative account of gradual transformation theory (Streeck and Thelen, 2005). Empirical evidence is presented for each of the key stakeholders, the government, the charitable sector, the legal community, and the media. Throughout, the thesis adopts an interdisciplinary multi-method research outlook, including a specifically designed survey, systematic review, statistical analysis, content analysis and archival research. These data are corroborated through in-depth elite interviews with key personalities who were involved in the charity policy reform process. The "crucial case study" (Eckstein, 2009) is then juxtaposed to the parallel Scottish charity policy reform, leading to the Charities and Trustee Investment (Scotland) Act 2005, to corroborate the findings. In the light of the evidence, the thesis concludes that policy change theories need to differentiate between the concept of legal and political change in order to provide meaningful explanations. Moreover, it finds that welfare state traditions play a key role in charity policy change and that the English Charities Act 2006 is a further instance of the increased judicialisation of politics and the politicisation of judicial bodies. On a theoretical level, the thesis introduces a classification of change at different stages of the policy process.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.022 | 0.025 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".