Since 1945, there has been substantial variation among the OECD countries and within them over time in central-government deficits. This paper surveys and assesses the literature on deficit spending in these industrialized democracies, emphasizing positive theories and the empirical support, or lack thereof, for each of them. We begin by considering the degree to which theories about the size of government and empirical tests of these theories about the level of overall government spending can explain deficits. We then survey theories pertaining to the political economy of fiscal deficits per se, including the ‘tax smoothing’ hypothesis, the neo-Keynesian countercyclical hypothesis, the public choice perspective, the ‘left-right ideology’ hypothesis, Roubini and Sachs' (1989) ‘strength of government’ hypothesis, and the importance of divided government in non-parliamentary systems.

The paper looks at the outcomes of nuclear technology policies in five advanced Western industrialised countries which have developed major nuclear construction industries. The genesis, development and dissemination of thermal nuclear reactors is examined and found to be influenced by a range of non-technical factors. Various concepts of ‘political styles’ are explored. Different styles of technological development are identified with reference to the networks of actors relevant to the development of thermal reactor technology, taking particular account of the resources of different actors and their interrelationship. Three distinctive styles are found, associated with three different technological outcomes, two of which are associated with policy success. We conclude that political styles do make a difference, but that their applicability to the explanation of outcomes of technology policy is dependent on the resources of individual actors and the specific demands set by the technological, economic and political context.

We examine unequal outcomes in the implementation of India’s national rural electrification program in Uttar Pradesh. We ask two questions: (1) to what extent did Dalits, the lowest group in India’s caste hierarchy, receive less attention when the state electrified rural communities? (2) Was BSP, the state’s Dalit party, able to reduce this inequality? Using data from a hundred thousand villages, we provide robust evidence for unequal outcomes. Villages inhabited solely by Dalits were 20 percentage points less likely to be covered by the program than villages without any Dalits. Moreover, a regression discontinuity analysis shows that the electoral success of BSP failed to reduce such differences. These results highlight the magnitude and persistence of caste inequality in the implementation of democratic public policy, despite political representation.

This article examines the conditions under which interest groups interact with political parties. Existing research finds that interest group–political party interactions in most western democracies have become more open and contingent over time. The close ideological and formal organisational ties that once characterised these relations have gradually been replaced by alternative, more pragmatic forms of cooperation. However, most of this research stresses the importance of the structural factors underpinning these links over time and across countries, but sheds little light on the factors driving short-term interest group–party interactions. Here, by drawing on survey data on Spanish interest groups obtained between December 2016 and May 2017, this article seeks to fill this gap by taking into account party status, issue salience and a group’s resources as explanatory variables. It shows that mainstream parties are the primary targets of interest groups, that groups dealing with salient issues are more likely to contact political parties and that the groups with most resources interact with a larger number of parties.

This work examines the relationship between policy style and issue environment. Empirical research in the electricity supply sector in West Germany suggests that even at the sectoral level the expectation of a monolithic and static policy style cannot confidently be sustained. This sector displays a dual policy style, the source of which is located in the relationship between state and sector, the structure of interest representation, and ownership / market relations in the sector. Fluctuations in policy style are related to changes in the issue environment. Addressing the structural dimension of issues, the work abstracts the structure and form which issues assume from their substantive content to identify issue anatomy. This concept is deployed in an explanation of changing policy style in the face of a complex of sectoral issues.

This paper advances the concept of a policy conspiracy – perpetrators strive together to steer the policy process in a direction which they believe to be worthwhile and possible. A policy conspiracy is conceived as an exclusive social network of policy participants who commit themselves to the advancement of a policy quest which embodies their shared hopes and who promote one another to positions of influence on the basis of the mutual trust they develop through regular interaction. The degree to which the network of technocrats, technopols and change agents who played a pivotal role in the implementation and consolidation of the ‘New Zealand experiment’ between 1984 and 1993 exhibit these characteristics is considered. By examining the way this policy conspiracy took advantage of a significant window of opportunity for reform, this paper seeks to make a contribution to the literature concerned with the conditions for radical policy reform.

Research on the determinants of government performance has identified numerous factors bearing on effective governance and government's role in it. However, understanding of how these factors are causally inter-related is limited. We take as our point of departure a multi-level analytic framework termed a logic of governance (LOG), previously used to reveal patterns of causality in governance based on hundreds of published research publications. Using a revised LOG, we reinterpret the earlier analysis in terms of organisational effectiveness indicators, and identify patterns of causal interaction in 300 more recent research articles. We formulate a multi-level model of governance that postulates how public policy and management interact to affect government outputs and outcomes. We hypothesise that the exercise of hierarchical authority is more fundamental to performance than has been acknowledged by governance scholars. We challenge the argument that advanced democracies are moving towards “governance without government”.

This article forges a link between support for European integration and adoption of tobacco advertisement restrictions in Swiss cantons. Leaning on the policy diffusion literature, this article argues that the more voters support deeper European integration, the more likely cantonal governments are to restrict tobacco advertising. Policymakers use voters’ support for more European integration as a signal that they support regulatory policies that are strongly associated with the European Union (EU) in the political and media debate, such as tobacco advertisement bans. This effect ought to be especially strong in the absence of adverse economic interests, such as the presence of the tobacco industry. To buttress these claims, the present article uses statistical analysis, specifically event-history analysis. Apart from the insights about Swiss tobacco control policy, this article contributes to our understanding of indirect EU influence on cantonal policymaking and policy diffusion.

This article builds on previous studies concerning the question of street-level bureaucracy, an expression coined by Lipsky (1980) – Street-Level Bureaucracy. Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services (New York: Russel Sage Foundation) – to highlight the importance of the discretionary power that professionals in public agencies exercise during the implementation of laws, standards and guidelines. Discretion may depend on the need to compromise between the limited resources available and the claims of citizens, or between administrative policy directives and assessments, on the one hand, and their interpretation by “street-level” bureaucrats, on the other. This article focuses on the dilemmas that labour inspectors face when dealing with employment irregularities involving domestic workers. Based on nine months of observations in a local office of the Italian Labour Inspectorate, it aims to understand how labour inspectors make use of their discretionary power when the workplace is the home. This article connects studies of street-level bureaucracy with the new institutional organisational analysis, focusing on the isomorphic pressures from the institutional field in which the labour inspectors operate, together with the manner in which such pressures shape labour inspectors’ discretion. Through this connection, the article aims to extend the scope of both theories.

Economic actors command political power as well as economic power. It is used to the same effect to create monopolies and oligopolies. The two powers can be combined; e.g., aside from monopolies based only on economic power or only on government intervention, there are especially powerful monopolies that command both powers. The stability of the various power holders is related to the nature of their power base; pure economic power is particularly unstable. However, economic power can be more readily amassed than interventionist power, which violates norms, and has a sharply declining marginal utility. When the effects of interventionist power are added to those of economic power, economies such as America, which are often classified as quite competitive, turn out to be much less so.

This article discusses the use made of the ‘Austrian’ concept of entrepreneurship in the present British government's policy discussions, and, using an ‘Austrian’ method of argument, demonstrates that there is a deep-seated inconsistency in its policies which suggests that it, along with the administrations of a number of other western democracies including the United States, has not fully understood the implications of the doctrines to which it appears to have committed itself. This inconsistency relates to its continued support for the existing structure of subsidies in the UK housing market which, it is argued, have made private home-buying so profitable an activity for entrepreneurial individuals as to substantially reduce the attractiveness of the option of setting up new businesses. Whether or not the government is right to believe that, in an economic environment with greater incentives, there would be a great expansion in individual entrepreneurial effort in ‘productive’ activities, this is not likely to happen whilst, amongst other things, the structure of housing subsidies remains substantially unchanged. We suggest, in the light of comparative international evidence, that a better alternative is available.

Numerous governments have adopted innovative policy instruments to deal with important environmental policy challenges and negotiated instruments offer the potential to improve performance beyond what regulation alone can accomplish. Dutch covenants, which represent negotiated agreements with sectors of industry as targets of behavioral change, provide useful evidence of the determinants of success. For improving environmental performance, certain features of the policy setting explain much of the variance in ambitions and outcomes: attitudes of decision makers in the affected businesses, attention to cost minimization, and possibly the degree of ambition built into the agreement. Modeling to explain the extent of ambition and compliance offer further insights. While some Dutch lessons may be restricted to more corporatist policy settings, others may help improve the effectiveness of negotiated agreements in many national settings.

In order to shed light on the recent debates that are reinterpreting the role played by organized employers in the development of modern social policy, this paper examines the origin of the system of contributory social insurance during the Weimar period. Contrary to ‘laborist’ accounts of the origin of the modern welfare state that view the working class as the most important protagonist behind the transition from ‘assistance’ to ‘insurance’ policies, this paper argues that employers' dissatisfaction with the means-tested system of unemployment assistance and employers' endorsement of an insurance solution to the risk of unemployment remained the decisive factor leading to the introduction of the insurance system during the Weimar period. Drawing on employers' deliberations and archival material, the paper reconstructs the process of preference formation of German employers. The significance of a sectoral conflict between employers of large and small firms about the organization of the ‘risk pool’ within the system of unemployment insurance is also highlighted. While the existing literature fails to characterize employers' preferences towards social policies and to explain the variation in the degree of employers' support for particular social policies, this paper does so. Firms' preferences towards social policies can be analyzed along three dimensions: ability of social policies to redistribute risks, locus of control within alternative policy arenas and the costs imposed by different social policies.

The aim of this article is to examine the politics of competition policy in the United Kingdom by taking into account regulatory cooperation at the European Union level. Adopting a multiple streams approach, the article follows a bottom-up approach placing domestic politics at the heart of the puzzle. The analysis leads to four conclusions. First, pace-setters, such as the UK, may not be interested in playing one dimension of the regulatory competition game, that is, trying to influence the development of EU policy. Second, incongruence between domestic and EU regimes does not necessarily produce change at the domestic level. Convergence is not a top-down process. Third, the activating stimulus for change may be external (the EU), but the process is basially of domestic politics. Fourth, to the extent that the removal of political discretion characterizes a more transparent and strictly enforced regime, British competition policy provides empirical support for the hypothesis that the interaction of regulatory competition prior to regulatory cooperation leads to convergence to the top.

This article focuses on one type of institutional change: conversion. One innovative approach to institutional change, the “political-coalitional approach”, acknowledges that: institutions can have unintended effects, which may privilege certain groups over others; institutions are often created and sustained through compromise with external actors; and institutions’ external context can vary significantly over time, as different coalitions’ power waxes and wanes. This approach helps explain the conversion of one institution drawn from the UK National Health Service, the National Reporting and Learning System. However, the shift of this system from producing formative information to facilitate learning to promote safer care, towards producing summative information to support resource allocation decisions, cannot be explained merely by examining the actions of external power coalitions. An internal focus, which considers factors that are normally viewed as “organisational” (such as leadership and internal stability), is also required.

A substantial aspect of scientific research involves linking concepts to observations using measurements. This exercise has raised questions among researchers of whether or not measurements “truly” and “reliably” capture ideas and observations. We address this question by setting out a methodological standard on how to assess the validity and reliability of measurements. We do this by examining measurements that evaluate public policy, arguing that this topic is gaining increasing attention from political science researchers and policymakers. The analysis concerns measurements of the level of transparency and accountability of lobbying laws, central to recent regulatory policy research. We conduct convergent validation, content validation and reproducibility tests on four indices applied to 13 regulations found worldwide. By doing so, the article provides scholars with an evaluation of measurements of lobbying laws’ robustness, while offering methodological and theoretical lessons of value to larger regulatory and public policy scholarship.

Policy analysis may benefit from specific conceptual contributions derived from Jurgen Habermas's critical social theory. In particular, Aaron Wildavsky's emphasis on the policy analyst's fostering of social and political ‘interactions’ can be given concrete empirical content derived from the critical theorist's account of social and communicative action. In addition, the critical theorist's distinction between action and ‘learning’ extends and sharpens Wildavsky's and Lindblom's account of policy outcomes. Once obstacles to social and political learning are distinguished from ordinary constraints upon citizens' action, policy analysis research (as formulated by Wildavsky and Lindblom) can be more concretely specified and then understood also and essentially to involve fundamental normative judgments of the legitimacy of policy-fostered ‘interactions’.

Federalism and the associated multi-level polity-structure have been frequently blamed for delaying the implementation of European Union (EU) directives. However, this verdict is incomplete as only a few studies open the “black box” of federalism to analyse the involvement of subnational parliaments and executives or second chambers in policy implementation. This article fills this gap and explains the transposition delay on the level of each individual implementation measure. Our novel data set covers about 850 directives and the corresponding 1,950 implementation measures between 1990 and 2018 in Germany. Using logistic regression models, we find that involving the subnational authorities substantially delays transposition. Subnational measures are three times more likely to be delayed than national ones. The effect of the veto power of a second chamber remains inconclusive. Our findings highlight the challenges federalism poses for the multi-level implementation of EU policies and have implications for the broader literature on compliance with public policies.

Policy responses to the tumult of the global financial crisis of 2007–9 prompt a consideration of the critical dimensions in specifying policy change. UK monetary policy between 2007 and 2009 is characterised by a remarkable degree of innovation yet counts as a ‘normal’ period of policy making under the Hall (1993) framework of policy change, the enduring workhorse of the comparative public policy field. This exposes its lack of conceptual refinement in describing significant but within paradigm policy change. This paper traces this failing to the notion of a policy paradigm, both its scale and the ideational mechanisms which bind policy change. The paper develops the UK monetary policy case to consider the potential of the recently-minted concept of a thermostatic policy institution for the development of Hall's framework; but finds analytical limitations in coping with significant policy spillovers. Suggestions are made to meet this important challenge for future research in policy studies on the specification of policy change.