This essay is an introduction to a little studied aspect of a world-wide phenomenon, the political environment of the professions. In the absence of any model of political interactions between the environment and professions, a deductive developmental model is set out below, detailing the stages of conflict between the professionals and the non-profesionals, or ‘laity’, whom they serve. Its evidence is adduced from primarily the United States, but also from elsewhere in the English-speaking world; its application should be even wider. A concluding section briefly suggests explanatory propositions for this conflict. Throughout, the focus is not upon professionals as such, but upon (a) the potential for conflict which lies in the grant of autonomy given them by the society, and (b) the current crisis when the autonomy of even the most powerful profession is under challenge.

The choice of rules for the central government budget process represents a trade-off between potentially conflicting goals. Budgetary reforms triggered by serious imbalances in public finances over the last two decades indicate that a political reorientation has taken place, giving more emphasis to macroeconomic impacts, long-term budgetary restrictions, and transparency in budget decision making. The paper analyses a number of generic problems of collective decision-making in the fiscal policy area and their relation to fundamental values upon which democratic states are built. The discussion is illustrated by experiences from a major budget process reform in Sweden between 1992 and 1997. The conclusion is that tighter fiscal discipline can be achieved without encroaching upon democratic values; it is argued that democracy can in fact be strengthened by such a shift of regime.

Relationships between five central value orientations and party choice are examined in a comparative West European setting by using the second wave of the European Values Study from 1990. These orientations comprise two central conflict lines related to the Old Politics model for political cleavages, namely religious/secular and left-right materialist value orientations, and three new sets of value orientation which, according to theories of New Politics, should become important in advanced industrial society. The research problems are: To examine the comparative strength of the impact of the various value orientations on party preference in a comparative West European setting; To examine how voters of different party families are grouped along the various value orientations. Which parties have the most secular or religious, leftist materialist and post-materialist electorate, and are there consistent comparative patterns concerning where the voters for given party families are placed?; To focus upon the impact of the New Politics value conflicts.

The Social Indicators Movement which emerged in the late 1960s was motivated by a broad and appealing idea. It is important to monitor changes over time in a wide range of quality of life, both for a population as a whole and for its significant subgroups, because such information, when combined with other data, can generate new knowledge about how to increase quality of life through more effective social policies.

Nearly every OECD country has faced a scissors crisis in public finance since the worldwide depression of the mid-1970s; in slow growth economies public spending has been rising faster than tax revenues. In response, a great variety of methods have been employed to control public spending. Governments have sought to: impose global ceilings on spending; modify indexation rules; decentralize decremental decisions among government agencies; improve cash flow management; devise balanced packages; introduce new constitutional rules; provide incentives for retrenchment; and privatize public sector activities. Efforts to impose cuts in spending have been directed at the bureaucracy; transfer payments; subsidies; local and regional government; and quangos. The conclusion emphasizes that retrenchment policy presupposes a shift in the balance of power between guardians and spenders.

This article examines the changes of the Lisbon Treaty to the rules on agreeing the European Union's (EU) annual budget and multiannual financial framework. The comparative budgets literature as well as theories of agenda-setting, veto players and empowerment of the European Parliament inform the analysis of how the EU's budgetary powers changed and the likely outcomes on spending. Overall, the powers of the European Parliament are reduced, the budget becomes more inflexible and, most significantly, the rules of the Lisbon Treaty have the effect of reducing the amounts available to spend. Although the Lisbon Treaty grants the European Parliament greater influence over ordinary EU legislation, national governments seem to have used the same treaty to send the Parliament's budgetary powers in the opposite direction and to curtail EU expenditure.

We argue that Americans’ policy attitudes on firearm availability are influenced by the identity of the prospective owner. We use an experiment to demonstrate that attitudes towards gun control/availability are influenced by both race and gender; whether subjects are primed to think of African-Americans versus whites or men versus women has a substantial impact on the degree to which they support firearm access. We find that for many white Americans, Black men and white women stand on opposite poles – priming white Americans with the thought of a Black man decreases support for gun availability, whereas priming the thought of a white woman increases support for gun availability. Further, the magnitude of this effect is quite large – comparable to the difference between Democrats and Republicans. These findings underscore the importance of thinking about the complicated role identity groups play in understanding Americans’ preferences for government (in)action, even in policy areas with explicit Constitutional mandates.

While there is much research on the developmental trajectories of post-Communist state institutions and the external and domestic influences that have shaped their paths, much less is known about institutional performance, that is, the manner in which institutions operate and the extent to which they produce predictable patterns of effects. Academic analysis has been reluctant to shift attention from institutionalisation to effects, not least because of the fluidity of many formal institutions. The present article documents that over the last decade state institutions in East Central Europe have increasingly stabilized, especially at the macro-institutional level. The analysis highlights insights from institutional theory – notably how degrees, time, preferences and resources matter – to encourage further research in the field.

Federal agencies perform many important tasks, from guarding against terrorist plots to mailing social security checks. A key question is whether Congress can effectively manage such a large and influential bureaucracy. We argue that Congress, in using oversight to ensure agency responsiveness to legislative preferences, risks harming agency morale, which could have negative long-run effects on performance and the implementation of public policy. More specifically, we argue that oversight’s effects on agency morale are conditional on whether oversight is adversarial or friendly. We assess our claims using a novel data set of the frequency and tone of hearings in which federal agencies are called to testify before Congress from 1999 to 2011 and merge it with data on agency autonomy and job satisfaction. Our findings suggest that agency morale is sensitive to congressional oversight attention, and thus speak to questions regarding democratic accountability, congressional policymaking and the implementation of public policy.

At first sight, French nuclear energy policy offers a textbook example of how technical, constitutional and economic restrictions, powerful interest groups and path dependence constrain democratic responsiveness. This paper uses what might seem to be an unlikely case in order to question explanations of policy choices in terms of technocracy, path dependence and interest groups against the background of an under-estimated factor: party and coalition strategies. The original data collected on public attitudes towards nuclear energy and the attention dedicated to this issue in the media, as well as in the parliamentary and electoral arenas, show that the effect of public opinion is conditioned by party incentives to politicise the issue at stake. In other words, parties and coalition-making constraints act as a mediating variable between citizens’ preferences and policy choices. These findings point to the need to integrate this conditional variable into analyses of responsiveness and models of policymaking.

In this paper we analyse the effects, over time, of the liberal (US), corporatist (German) and social democratic (Dutch) welfare states on poverty, inequality and income redistribution 1985–89. Unlike previous international comparisons relying on static frameworks and cross-sectional data, we use panel data from the Dutch Socio-Economic Panel (SEP), the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), and the American Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) — all of which have large samples (15,000+ respondents) and all of which have been running for fully a decade — to compare welfare state performance over one and five years. We find that both the corporatist (German) and especially the social democratic (Dutch) welfare states redistribute income substantially to reduce poverty and inequality, and that in both cases these effects are substantially greater over five years than one. In the social democratic (Dutch) regime very few people have incomes which, taking a five year average, put them below the poverty line. The corporatist (German) regime also turns out to be much more redistributive over five years than would ordinarily be expected. The liberal (US) welfare state, in contrast, is not only much less redistributive on a one-year basis but also no more so over five years than one. There is, however, evidence of efficiency losses in the more ‘generous’ social democratic welfare state, in that fewer people appear to escape poverty through labour markets than in the liberal welfare regime.

Terrorists act rationally; one of their dominating goals is to attract public attention to their cause. As a consequence, the authorities should refrain from attributing a particular terrorist incident to any one group. They should stress that many different actors must be considered as the possible perpetrators. Such an information policy sharply reduces terrorists'rewards. The terrorists are therefore likely to cut down on such activities or must undertake riskier acts, which increase their chance of being caught. The approach suggested is complementary to the policies currently in use; it does not make police measures unnecessary. The strategy is, however, active while the traditional approaches are passive responses to terrorist activities. In contrast to other anti-terrrorist measures, it does not violate human liberties, civil rights or the freedom of the press.

The impact of political institutions on policy performance has been a major research question in studies of advanced democracies. This study analyzes the effects of institutions and political actors on economic, social and environmental policies in ten Central Eastern European countries from 1995 to 2004. Using time-series-cross section (TSCS) regression analysis, this study shows that the impact of institutional veto players on policy output is more significant than international pressure. Moreover, the communist legacy has a much higher effect on policy output than expected.

This paper analyzes choices concerning the increase of energy efficiency made by the Swiss energy policy elite; it is based on interviews with 240 of its members. It starts from the assumption that choices depend on characteristics of the actors involved (their membership in policy coalitions, their core beliefs etc.), the characteristics of the instruments (in particular their familiarity and the extent to which they impose constraints upon the coalitions involved) and of the policy context (policy equilibrium vs. rapid change). Depending on these characteristics, actors are expected to make choices which are to a greater or lesser degree value-rational or instrumentally rational. The results of the present analysis indicate that, rather than being exclusive alternatives, the two types of rationality often complement each other in choices among policy instruments. We hope that they provide a promising opening in the often rather sterile debate between advocates of the rational choice approach and practitioners of more classical approaches of policy analysis.

The author presents an empirical study of the direct corporate taxation policy process in the European Union. The study links three public policy literatures that are usually considered somewhat distinct and independent: the literature on the politics of tax reform, the literature on policy change and the political role of knowledge, and the literature on European integration. The examination of these literatures leads to a series of hypotheses which are used for addressing the analysis of the policy process. The conclusions assess the hypotheses and draw implications for the study of knowledge utilisation, policy change, and policy types.

This paper seeks to explain patterns of central government control and local government discretion across nations as well as across policy areas. The argument is that central-local policy is the result of the interaction of three types of actors: ‘Expenditure advocates’, ‘expenditure guardians’, and ‘topocrats’. The argument is based on two assumptions. First, the actors are assumed to pursue self-interests – respectively, sectoral policy goals, macroeconomic control, and local autonomy. Second, the actors' abilities to pursue their self-interests are assumed to be constrained and facilitated by the structure of intergovernmental policy networks. The theoretical propositions are put to a first test in a comparative analysis of three policy areas (economic policy, health policy, and child care policy) in the three Scandinavian countries of Sweden, Norway and Denmark.

The EU plays a significant role in public policy aspects of Internet governance, having created in the late 1990s the dot eu Internet Top Level Domain (TLD). This enables users to register names under a European online address label. This paper explores key public policy issues in the emergent governance system for dot eu, because it provides an interesting case of new European transnational private governance. Specifically, dot eu governance is a reconciliation resulting from a governance cultural clash between the European regulatory state and what can be described broadly as the Internet community. The EU has customised the governance of dot eu towards a public–private dispersed agencification model. The paper extends the evidence base on agencification within trans-European regulatory networks and the emergence of private transnational network governance characterised by self-regulation.

We develop a model of “notice and comment” rulemaking, focussing on strategic issues facing agencies and interest groups in light of judicial review in this process. Specifically, we analyse the incentives for agencies and groups to produce and reveal information during rulemaking. We show that judicial review can produce informed policymaking, but that participatory rulemaking can bias agency policymaking in favour of groups with access to the rule-making process. In addition, the model allows an analysis of doctrines of judicial review of agency policymaking. The model reveals that “politicised” judicial review can be beneficial because of its effects on agency incentives for information acquisition in policymaking. Accordingly, socially optimal judicial review may be “legally irrational” and, contrary to standard doctrines of judicial review in the United States, judicial deference to rules with thin records can be optimal.

This paper explores intertemporal relations between innovations in government receipts and expenditures, by type and in total, at federal and state-local levels in the United States over the period 1955–82. A structural model is specified with tax and spending components as endogenous variables. After estimation with full information maximum likelihood techniques, residuals derived from the reduced form equations are used in causality tests. These tests show that where there is an indication of causality, spending tends to lead taxes. The lesson learned from past data thus appears to be that changing aggregate tax rates does not cause spending to change. Tax initiatives provide little leverage if changes in the growth of government are intended.

As far as local governments are responsible for the practical implementation of many European Union (EU) policies, they codetermine member states’ EU compliance records and the fate of EU legislation. Yet, they do so in remarkably different ways, as exemplified by the variegated implementation of the Ambient Air Quality Directive 2008/50/EC by Dutch municipalities. Taking guidance from the literature on EU compliance, in this article we explain the differences in local implementation performance based on the political and managerial approaches. Understanding which of the two approaches drives different local responses to EU policy bears consequences for the appropriate remedy for nonimplementation. Four municipalities were purposefully selected along with the two-by-two implementation performance scoring matrix in the realm of air quality. A comparative within-case analysis specifies how political explanations outweigh managerial explanations in accounting for variation in implementation performance and distils ‘policy saliency’ as the driving causal mechanism.