What is the impact of Greece's fiscal meltdown on the effectiveness of Europe's response? Using Perrow's normal accidents theory, I argue that efforts to reduce the likelihood of a Greek default activated conflicting centripetal and centrifugal modes of governance. Greater centralisation in decision-making at the European Union level improves policy effectiveness because it addresses problems of contagion but it simultaneously raises the risk of overall failure by increasing diagnosis, coordination and compliance costs. Three episodes are explored: the first bailout in May 2010, the mid-term fiscal strategy in June–July 2011 and the second bailout in February 2012. Implications are drawn for theories of delegation, intergovernmentalism and the future of EU crisis management.

Using evidence from China, this study proposes the conflict expansion model to explore how pressure for policy change can build up to overcome resisting force and stimulate a response from decisionmakers in an authoritarian context. Tracing the policy change processes of four national policies, this study finds that the social pressure mobilised by media reports focused on specific events is a major force for facilitating policy change in China. However, owing to institutional constraints, the influences of societal actors are sporadic, incident-based and varied by population. The policy change process is protracted and difficult when it encounters resistance from state actors who have multiple institutional access channels for influencing the decision-making process. The power distribution between the facilitating and resisting forces determines whether policy change proceeds quickly or arduously.

There is consensus in the literature that policymaking in the United States (US) and Europe generates different lobbying styles. Two explanations for these differences have been developed so far. The first posits that distinct lobbying styles reflect different political cultures. The second attributes distinct lobbying styles to variation in the institutional context in which lobbyists operate. Studies that have analysed lobbying within the US and Europe and assessed the relative importance of these arguments are problematic because both explanations are consistent with observed differences in lobbying style. In this article, we circumvent problems of observational equivalence by focussing on European and American lobbyists who are active in a similar institutional venue – that is, international diplomatic conferences. Relying on evidence collected at World Trade Organization Ministerial Conferences and United Nation Climate Summits, we tested the relevance of alternative explanations for the variation in lobbying styles between European and American lobbyists. Our results give robust support to the institutional argument.

This article draws on the Programmatic Action Framework (PAF) to tackle the question of how the dominance and decline of a specific policy programme in a policy sector can be explained. It starts from the observation that visionary policy programmes, defined as a set of policy goals and instruments that find their expression in subsequently adopted and interconnected policy reforms, may shape a sector’s policies over several decades. Linking policy programmes to programmatic groups that promote these programmes in search of boosting their careers and authority, the programme’s rising and declining dominance can be explained by the career trajectories of programmatic actors. By displaying empirical evidence for the argument from German health policy, the article shows that proponents of today’s change are opponents of tomorrow’s change since individual careers depend on the dominance of policy programmes.

Undertaking cross-national research in order to improve national policy is an idea that goes back centuries. Aristotle examined the constitutions of city-states for the sake of civic betterment. The American Founding Fathers studied the English Constitution to avoid its presumed defects. In turn, Tocqueville examined democracy in America because, as he explained to his French readers, ‘My wish has been to find there instruction by which we may ourselves profit’ (1954 ed.: vol. 1, 14). In the contemporary world, policymakers in every society constantly cite the lessons that they draw from their own past or from the experience of other nations – and in Eastern Europe and the Third World there are many governments anxious to learn from the practice of others how to improve their own policies.

This article analyses the conditions under which a race to the top or California effect is likely to take place. To that end, it examines two cases in which the EU restricted or threatened to restrict imports from the United States and Canada because of differences in regulatory standards. In one case, the European data protection directive, a California effect occurred. In the other case, the EU ban on hormone-treated beef, no California effect occurred. An analysis of these two cases leads to two additions to existing explanations of the California effect. The analysis also has a number of implications for the debate on the race to the bottom thesis.

On average, higher per capita income comes with lower corruption levels. Yet, countries like Mexico, Libya and Saudi Arabia are relatively wealthy but experience comparatively high corruption levels. Simultaneously, countries like Madagascar or Mozambique (in the 1990s) combine poor economic development with a low level of corruption. I propose that the two most common variables in corruption research – wealth and democracy – are mutually conditional: economic development brings about a larger (and stronger) middle class that demands public goods from the government. However, citizens’ ability to influence governmental decision-making varies by political regime type. In democracies, citizens are, on average, more successful in demanding goods from the government than in autocracies. Using a large-N approach (up to 139 countries, 1984–2006), the analysis finds robust empirical support for the proposed conditional effect.

The European Commission has taken significant steps towards the recognition of political party foundations at EU level. Firstly, it has agreed to recognize them as actors of European development policies. Secondly, it has proposed the creation of political foundations at EU level, linked to the European political parties. This article analyses the reasons, modalities and potential impact of this process, which signifies a breakthrough in comparison with the Commission's previous attitude towards party affiliated organisations. For the foundations, network-building turns out to have been a crucial means to attain legitimacy and access to the European institutions: firstly, through the mobilisation of political entrepreneurs in the European Parliament lobbying the Commission and Council representatives; and secondly, by linking the future role of non-state actors such as political foundations to the reconsideration of the EU's communication policy.

Exogenous shocks may lead to policies that seem extreme and even “irrational”. This paper argues that, in the event of a major energy shock in the US that persists, such legislation is an inevitable response to the demand from constituents that political actors “do something”. Since shocks by their nature are unanticipated and are often highly technical and complex, boundedly rational legislators cannot generally understand all of the ramifications of the shock, much less hope to craft well-considered and precise legislation to deal with it. But the demand to “do something” means that a range of actions is politically necessary. The “shock” policy process is modelled as a stepwise legislative decision problem. If the crisis persists, legislation that promises a solution is likely to be the result, even if this “solution” is infeasible. The model is applied to five US energy shocks.

Scholars have consistently shown that learning of successful policies in other states leads to higher likelihood of policy adoption. This study extends this finding two ways. First, policy learning can also lead to more comprehensive adoption of successful policies. Second, the effect of policy learning on policy comprehensiveness is conditional on lobbying by interest groups, an alternative source of information about policy success. To test these hypotheses, we conduct a directed dyad-year analysis using a dataset on American state drunk driving regulations from 1983 to 2000. The results show that more comprehensive policy adoption by states is positively related to policy success in other states when lobbying by Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) is relatively low. Moreover, lobbying by MADD increases policy comprehensiveness when policy success is relatively low. This study advances the literature by examining the conditional effects of lobbying on the relationship between policy learning and policy reinvention.

This essay analyzes the relationship between international investment interests and foreign economic policy. The first step and level of analysis looks at nation-states as the relevant actors, and claims that a country's international investment position tends to affect its international economic preferences in ways that are easily understood and anticipated. Countries' international asset positions often have a predictable impact on their policies toward international monetary relations, cross-border investment, and trade.The second step and level of analysis looks inside national societies at the international asset positions of various domestic groups. It argues that sectors with varying interests related to their international investment positions contend for influence over national policy. The economic circumstances of each sector lead to sectoral policy preferences with predictable implications for domestic bargaining over foreign economic policy. The general argument is applied briefly to a number of modern creditor countries and sectors, most prominently the United States after World War Two.

Though each of the capitalist democracies has developed a similar battery of programs for mitigating labor market problems, politically significant differences in strategy underlie superficial similarities. By the 1970s, labor market strategies could be distinguished by three models: a passive social democratic or guardian strategy (Britain), an active social democratic or egalitarian strategy (Sweden), and a passive neo-liberal or business-centered strategy (United States). In response to high unemployment, the Thatcher government has resurrected a long dormant fourth strategy that combines neo-liberal principles with an active state. This active neo-liberal or market-centered approach seeks a workforce that is less organised, has greater wage disparities, and is more adaptable to business needs. The government's activism is evident in the growth of the Manpower Services Commission, both in absolute terms and relative to passive compensatory measures. Its neo-liberalism is evident in reducing structural impediments to lower wages, increasing incentives for individual initiative, and revamping employment and training schemes along neo-liberal lines. These efforts correlate with decreasing levels of union membership, increasing self-employment, and increasing wage disparities in the British economy, trends that are, by the government's criteria, improvements.

This article develops the concept of policy advisory system (PAS) management in recognition of the need to better theorise and empirically study how governments approach the complex systems of advice around them. In our analysis, we go beyond the conceptualisation of degrees of government’s “control” over advisory sources. We use the dimensions of government agency and discretion and argue that PAS management falls into four forms: authoritative, dependent, laissez-faire, or absent. Using evidence from Australia, Canada, Britain, and New Zealand, we explore how governments operationalise these approaches through a range of choices and practices. The analysis points to the need to recognise that attempts to manage these systems occur both proactively and reactively with clear differences in the broad or narrow scope of management efforts.

The Conservative Government elected in Britain in 1979 wished to change the extent and pattern of government expenditure. We use econometric techniques to investigate whether it did so in the period up to 1984, concentrating attention on the welfare state. We also test the hypothesis that the observed changes favoured the middle classes. After discussing the channels by which the middle classes influence government policy, a model of government behaviour is outlined. The theoretical model indicates the forms of specification error that we might expect in our econometric results, which, in turn, suggest that the Conservatives tended to favour the middle classes, while the previous Labour administrations did not. However, the estimates for the Labour period appear to be misspecified, but those for the Conservative period survived tests of misspecification.

This article seeks to acquaint the reader with the intellectual landscape of comparative policy studies, and to raise the level of self-consciousness of scholars active in the field. To this end it discusses why comparative policy studies emerged when and where it did in the 1970s. Then it grapples with the reasons and possible effects of the fact that the very term ‘comparative policy’ is so difficult to translate into non-English languages, and links this to a discussion of problems of conceptual cohesion. The last part assesses the prospects of a field which is seeking to gain and retain intellectual coherence and respect, though not nestled comfortably within a single discipline, and is subject to contending pulls from national and international academic, political and bureaucratic forces.

Welfare states contribute to people's well-being in many different ways. Bringing all these contributions under a common metric is tricky. Here we propose doing so through the notion of temporal autonomy: the freedom to spend one's time as one pleases, outside the necessities of everyday life. Using income and time use surveys from five countries (the USA, Australia, Germany, France, and Sweden) that represent the principal types of welfare and gender regimes, we propose ways of operationalising the time that is strictly necessary for people to spend in paid labour, unpaid household labour, and personal care. The time people have at their disposal after taking into account what is strictly necessary in these three arenas – which we christen discretionary time – represents people's temporal autonomy. We measure the impact on this of government taxes, transfers, and childcare subsidies in these five countries. In so doing, we calibrate the contributions of the different welfare and gender regimes that exist in these countries, in ways that correspond to the lived reality of people's daily lives.

National governments follow country-specific reform trajectories, which imply uniform preferences for specific types of quasi-autonomous organisations (quangos). However, at micro level there is little uniformity; similar tasks are charged to different types of quangos. This contradiction could be explained by the existence of styles of quango creation at the level of policy sectors. Do such styles exist? Using the literature on policy styles and administrative culture, four styles of quango creation are deduced: traditional, bureaucratic, professional and managerial. The analysis shows that the majority of Dutch policy sectors indeed have a dominant style of quango-creation. The bureaucratic style is found in ten out of eighteen sectors. Replication of this study may help to improve the explanation of quango creation in western countries.

Norway reformed its pension system in 2011, introducing a Swedish-style, NDC system. Contrary to expectations, the reform was largely supported by the dominant confederation of trade unions, the LO. In this article, we look at LO involvement in the process at different stages. Through qualitative interviews with key reform architects, we have traced the process between 2005 and 2008, emphasising actors, meeting places and interests. Starting from the insight that unions can influence through lobbying, bargaining and (the threat of) mobilising, we suggest that lobbying can be a mutual process, where parties and unions move each other’s positions. In addition, bargaining can take the form of behind-the-scenes cooperation, as well as of negotiations in the classic, Nordic-style industrial relations sense. Expanding on this framework, we suggest that the literature on pension reforms should pay more attention to negotiated and voluntary labour market occupational schemes, and to the importance of expertise and networks.

Americans lack a sense of the state for many understandable historical reasons. Yet the specific organizational forms that state activities have taken in the United States from the time of the Constitution to the present have profoundly affected the social cleavages that have gained political expression and influenced the sorts of public policies that governments have – and have not – implemented. As an alternative or supplement to theoretical perspectives emphasizing the causal primacy of industrialization, national values, or class politics, this state-society perspective can illuminate patterns of American social policy, from distributive social benefits in the nineteenth century to bifurcations between social insurance and public assistance since the New Deal. These American policy patterns are contrasted with the more comprehensive and nationally uniform policies characteristic of certain Western European welfare states.