The social indicators movement has been a disappointment to its originators. By the late 1970s, at least in the US, the great hopes for social indicators to become a major influence on public policy had been tempered. The outpouring of literature using the term ‘social indicators’ dwindled. Policy scientists turned their attention to other topics or found new labels for their interests. The Social Science Research Council closed its Social Indicators Research Center in Washington, DC and stopped publishing its newsletter. And in the US no annual social report seemed likely to be institutionalized. Many observers decided the social indicators movement was a failure.

A central question in the welfare state debate has been whether or not social policies in industrialized countries converge. Originally linked to the logic of industrialism perspective, this idea has been criticized by researchers focusing on differences in timing and differences in the institutional set up of social security schemes across countries. Nonetheless, I argue that social security arrangements in European as well as Anglo-American countries may gradually become more similar. Using pension politics as the primary example, the article locates similar social and political mechanisms at work in different countries, pushing toward convergence in policy outcomes, despite persistent variation in institutional arrangements. In the final section of the article, I extract a model from the analysis, aimed at explaining political change while maintaining a connection between the micro and macro level of analysis.

To study technologies of political participation in the era of internet we examine how civic associations in Eastern Europe create socio-technical platforms of civic participation. The creation of socio-technical platforms combines specific technological features with actors and types of acts. Based on data we collected on 1,585 East European civil society websites we identify five emergent genres of online platforms of civic participation: newsletters, interactive platforms, multilingual solicitations, directories, and brochures. In contrast to the utopistic image of a de-territorialized, participatory global civil society shaped by the new technology, our examination of civil society websites finds that the transnational are not inclined to be participatory and the participatory are less likely to be transnational.

Given far-reaching changes in the legal systems of East Central Europe since the mid-1990s, one might expect administrative court judges to have modified the way in which they decide cases, in particular by embracing less formalistic adjudication strategies. Relying on an original dataset of over one thousand business-related cases from the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, this article shows that – despite some variation across countries and time – judges have largely failed to respond to the incentives contained in the new constitutional frameworks. They continue to adopt the most-locally-applicable-rule approach and are reluctant to apply general principles of law or to rely on Dworkinian ‘policies’ in deciding hard cases. The analysis links these weak institutional effects to the role of constitutional courts, case overload and educational legacies.

This article attempts to analyze the reorganization of local government, perceiving it as a general phenomenon in the modern state. While occurring in most developed societies, the reforms at the sub-national level do not seem to have followed a common pattern; they have been introduced and combined in different ways. Accordingly, two main questions have to be raised. Why have so many developed societies gone through some kind of reorganization? And why has the reorganization taken place at different stages and in different forms? A general, but somewhat unsatisfactory answer is that this trend reflects the expansion of the public sector. A more specific answer requires a differentiation between (a) various categories of reform, (b) different stages in the development of the welfare state and (c) varying ideological perspectives. After an elaboration of these analytical tools, the article illustrates such a structural approach through a description of the reorganization process in Norway and Sweden.

The difficulties of implementing large institutional reforms are legendary. Reform programs may face strong resistance from designated losers, falter at successive veto points, or stall when multiple decision makers have diverse goals. Institutional theories have successfully accounted for failure of reform in many settings, but scholars have paid less attention to how the strategic design of a reform process can have a positive effect on reform initiatives. We seek to fill this gap by studying the impact of planned ambiguity in reform processes. We hypothesize that reform proposals are more likely to succeed when policy entrepreneurs strategically hide the cost-benefit profile of a reform proposal behind a veil of vagueness until the final stages of the process. Designated losers with limited information about the impact of proposed reforms are less likely to succeed in thwarting the reform. We test the theory on four institutional reforms or reform attempts in Denmark.

This article addresses the absence of a federal equalisation programme in the United States, which is a significant aspect of “American exceptionalism”. Comparing the United States with Australia and Canada, we argue that three factors are relevant when accounting for this absence. On one hand, we turn to two societal factors to explain why there was never much political appetite for the creation of a stand-alone equalisation programme in the United States, namely the lack of a direct threat to the territorial integrity of the United States after 1865 and the comparative weakness of the idea of social citizenship in that country. On the other hand, our analysis shows that key institutional features of American political institutions, particularly strong bicameralism combined with the absence of formal party discipline, help illuminate why it would have been difficult to create an equalisation programme even if there had been some societal pressures to do so.

This paper provides a positive analysis of the evolution of competence allocation within the EU Competition Policy System. In the EU, competition policy competences are ascribed both to the European level and to each Member State. In regard to securing a sound antitrust system, the allocation and delimitation of these competences plays a major role. Accordingly, competence allocation has been a major issue in the recent reforms of cartel policy enforcement and merger control. Instead of normatively analysing the characteristics of optimal competence allocation, we positively identify the self-interest of the interacting groups of agents – European Commission and Courts, national authorities, business associations –  as a major-driving force of the reform process. We show that, as a consequence, the interest-driven outcomes of this process are largely ineffective and deficient – even if evaluated against the background of the publicly announced reform goals. This stands in accordance with longer-term patterns in competence allocation evolution in the EU Competition Policy System.

This article compares the performance of state institutions and compliance with EU law in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia. The public institutions highlighted are of crucial relevance when it comes to enforcing EU social standards and include the court and legal systems as well as labour inspectorates and equal treatment authorities. Expert and practitioner assessments point to major shortcomings in their institutional performance. The procedural compliance pattern to which these shortcomings give rise closely resembles that found by previous studies in some Western European countries, notably Ireland and Italy. Thus, the four countries examined here fall within a ‘world of dead letters’ as far as their compliance with EU law is concerned. In this ‘world’, EU directives tend to be transposed in a politicised mode (although so far, this happened rather timely and correctly) and there is frequent non-compliance at the later stages of monitoring and enforcement.

This paper takes a critical look at the struggle between the European Commission and European consumer markets over the future of agricultural biotechnology. While the Commission is keen to normalize the commercialization of biotech foods and crops, European consumers refuse to eat/buy products containing genetically modified organisms (GMO) and have effectively closed the market to GMO. Is this a rare example of European citizens prevailing over the elitist technical decision making procedures in Brussels and the pro-GMO coalition of agro-chemical companies, biotech research institutes, big farming, and selected member states? We show that peculiar circumstances enabled consumer-protection and environmental NGOs to mobilize consumers and to deflect the Commission’s goal of introducing biotech foods for a time, a rare achievement in the annals of EU policymaking. However, shifts in global agricultural markets will render this more difficult in the future, in part by awakening dormant tensions within the European anti-biotech movement.

When allocating distributive benefits, bureaucrats must balance their own policy preferences with requests from members of Congress. The elimination of earmarking may provide agency personnel with greater discretion in the allocation of distributive benefits. Using a novel data set of congressional letters written in support of their community’s air traffic control towers, we estimate a model that explores the Federal Aviation Administration’s decision to issue national interest exemptions to continue operations at towers slated for closure as a result of budget sequestration. Our analysis suggests that members of Congress do not enjoy the influence they possessed under earmarking when using a new method, letter-marking, to influence how agencies distribute benefits.

Familiar theories of market failure have diagnosed shortcomings in the economy, but theories of government failure argue that the state is incapable of correcting them. More than that, many criticisms of government implicitly or explicitly see failure as due to fundamental shortcomings of democracy. This paper argues that democratic forms of governments are not necessarily inefficient relative to other types of decisionmaking, for example, authoritarian government, and that if individuals are as rational in their actions and expectations as voters as they are meant to be in the market, then failures attributed to democracy lessen or disappear altogether. The paper demonstrates how more democracy, i.e. the use of the initiative and referendum, may actually improve the efficiency of government by giving the mass of citizens the information and opportunity to frustrate efforts of the classe politique to form a coalition against the voters. Empirical examples are drawn from the experience of Switzerland.

Privatization is an idea that is popular among political elites throughout the advanced industrial world. In Britain, it has been the centrepiece of Margaret Thatcher's three Conservative governments, reflected in the sale of publicly-owned industries to the private sector and in the sale of council houses to their tenants. Using survey data, this article tests two models to account for privatization policy. The median voter model argues that it was a policy demanded and initiated by voters, while the elite interests model argues that it stemmed from the government and that little popular demand existed for it. The evidence confirms the elite interests model and shows that public opinion has generally accepted the status quo on the public ownership of industry. In addition, the Conservatives have made modest electoral gains from privatization. However, voters are not consistent in their views about privatizating particular industries, implying the Conservatives may lose votes with future privatization.

Policy scholars tend to view disproportionate policy and its two component concepts – policy over- and underreaction – as either unintentional errors of commission or omission, or nonintentional responses that political executives never intended to implement yet are not executed unknowingly, inadvertently or accidentally. This article highlights a conceptual turn, whereby these concepts are reentering the policy lexicon as types of intentional policy responses that are largely undertaken when political executives are vulnerable to voters. Intentional overreactions derive from the desire of political executives to pander to voters’ opinions or signal extremity by overreacting to these opinions in domains susceptible to manipulation for credit-claiming purposes. Intentional underreactions are motivated by political executives’ attempts to avoid blame and may subsequently lead to deliberate overreaction. This conceptual turn forces scholars to recognise the political benefits that elected executives may reap from deliberately implementing disproportionate policies, and that such policies can at times be effective.

This paper contributes to the ongoing debate over European Monetary Union (EMU), reviewing the economics literature on the merits of a single currency (‘optimum currency area’) and on the requirements for astable currency (‘credibility’). To understand Europe's drive for EMU and the transition strategy adopted at Maastricht both issues must be analysed together. The controversial convergence criteria in the Maastricht Treaty, in particular, primarily address valid concerns about the (price) stability performance of a future single currency by determining the timing and membership of EMU. In general, we propose to interpret the Maastricht design as a mechanism that must reconcile conflicting interests, solve credibility problems over time and extract information about candidate countries’ ‘stability culture’ in the run-up to monetary union.

This research explores the impact of gender representation at the state and local levels on redistributive choices. This research also examines whether female officeholders moderate the impact of the local economy and institution on welfare spending. Hypotheses are tested across 58 counties in California over ten years, between 2001 and 2010. According to the fixed effect models, women in state legislature had a positive effect on local welfare spending, while women on county boards had no significant effect. However, a positive moderating effect of women on county boards during economic hardship was found. Three categories of control variables include institutional factors, such as the introduction of Proposition 1A and county home rule; political factors, such as the political preference of each county’s residents and strength of non-profit organisations; and socio-economic factors, such as intergovernmental revenue, unemployment rate and demographics. Counties with more intergovernmental revenue and supporters of Democratic presidential candidates are likely to spend more on welfare services.

The literature on policy convergence has identified numerous facets and causal drivers of convergence. Distinguishing four dimensions of convergence (object, benchmark, drivers and directed process) helps clarify why and in what form policy convergence may occur (or not). Thus, depending on, for example, the object of analysis (policy outcome or instruments used), the same empirical case may give rise to opposing assessments. Furthermore, both economic and political drivers are necessary to account for successful policy convergence: economic convergence partly explains why countries may face similar problems, and political mechanisms explain why they might choose similar policies to solve a given problem. This article illustrates the multifaceted character of convergence for the dynamic field of renewable energy policies in the European Union. The empirical results indicate temporary convergence in the case of policy support instrument choices and conditional convergence in terms of renewable shares. However, the results suggest divergence of public R&D subsidies targeting renewables.

The emergence of large technical systems like railroads, telecommunication networks or power grids was closely associated with hierarchical governance. Despite the success of hierarchical structures in promoting the development of these systems they have recently come under strain. They are suspected of being too slow, too cumbersome, and too unimaginative to deal with the complexity and turbulence of modern technology. Practical people as well as academics look for functional alternatives. One of the alternatives is the decentralisation of technical control via standards. The paper investigates this alternative by analysing the role that standards have achieved in telecommunications after the hierarchical order was eroded by globalisation and deregulation. It discusses how the demise of hierarchy has boosted the ‘demand’ for standards and how the institutional infrastructure for standardisation was adapted to meet this demand.

This paper analyses the reactions of a government faced with an unpredictable and unexpected crisis with possible catastrophic long-term effects: the AIDS epidemic in the United Kingdom in the 1980s. First, the AIDS epidemic is defined as a case study of government forced to cope with uncertainty, moral ambiguity and the knowledge that there are no solutions, only ways of limiting the damage. Second, it examines the evolution of policy of British ministers, who initially preferred to ignore evidence of AIDS but were forced to act by signals threatening a popular backlash. They did so by creating a programme of action based on the advice and values of the medical profession and public health experts. The conclusion argues that this kind of policy response may be generalisable. When societies are faced with problems that do not appear to be soluble but which may imperil social cohesion they seek to create an elite consensus to treat them as technical matters, so insulating the policy process from possible disruptive populist pressures.