Failures of compliance with European Union (EU) directives have revealed the EU as a political system capable of enacting laws in a wide range of different policy areas, but facing difficulties to ensure their actual implementation. Although the EU relies on national enforcement agencies to ensure compliance with the EU legislation, there is scarce analysis of the differential deterrent effect of national enforcement in EU law compliance. This article examines the enforcement of an EU water directive, the Urban Waste Water Treatment Directive, in Spain and the UK. It focuses on the existing national sanctions for disciplining actors in charge of complying with EU requirements, and on the actual use of punitive sanctions. The analysis shows that a more comprehensive and active disciplinary regime at the national level contributes to explain a higher degree of compliance with EU law. The article calls for a detailed examination of the national administrative and criminal sanction system for a more comprehensive understanding of the incentives and disincentives to comply with EU law at the national state level.

Since the 1980s public investment expenditures have been cut back in many OECD democracies. One explanation is a priority for fiscal stringency in order to curb big government in the context of neo-liberal ideas, which is reinforced by EMU requirements in the 1990s. Another is the potential impact of left and right partisan politics on investment policies. The main finding here is that the overall decrease in public investment expenditure appears to be caused by collateral damage due to the downsizing of total government outlays. This is particularly the case where there is a policy legacy of the Left with high levels of total public spending on the welfare state prior to the 1980s. Where the Right in government has been dominant after 1980, this downward development in public investment is particularly noticeable.

Little attention has been paid to the comparative study of the politics and administration of race in the USA and Britain. There exist certain important similarities between the two countries particularly with regard to the way in which even militant leaders are willing to co-operate with centrally funded community agencies and to moderate their demands to gain political and economic returns for their organisations from government. There are, however, structural differences between American and British community bodies which affect the success of those institutions in obtaining the allegiance of community militants and in more fully integrating moderate leaderships into local level participatory processes. In the USA the system encourages an apparently high degree of ‘voluntarism’ and ‘independence’ from direct central control through relative institutional autonomy. This is more conducive to group co-operation than Britain's more centralised community relations framework with its closer direct association with government and the so-called ‘white power structure’. Because, therefore, of the American version of ‘independence’ groups there are actually more effectively integrated than the British into governmentally funded institutions.

The extent of political fragmentation of metropolitan areas impedes effective land use planning in many countries, and thus contributes to the phenomenon of urban sprawl. For some metropolises in the United States and Europe, strategic interaction between local policymakers codetermines the implementation of local planning policies. However, previous empirical analyses of this phenomenon have usually assumed interdependence in planning decisions to be confined to neighbouring jurisdictions. This is a common simplification in research on diffusion in public policies. Proceeding on the assumption that municipal zoning decisions are subject to competition between municipal authorities trying to attract new residents, I suggest an alternative conceptualisation of location-choice competition in Tiebout-like economies: the correlations of out-commuting patterns serve as a proxy for the degree to which municipalities are competitors for mobile residents, irrespective of their contiguity. Spatial autoregressive models, estimated on the basis of a large panel of fine-grained zoning data, reveal that zoning decisions in the Canton of Zurich, Switzerland’s most dynamic metropolitan area, are indeed subject to such interdependence.

A contrast is often drawn between ethics and expediency in politics; however the contrast might be overdrawn. We can hold firmly to the classical notion that politicians should steer society according to some higher values, while retaining the notion of democratic accountability, just so long as electors see the same stars as political leaders do and are as keen to follow them. There are grounds for thinking that this may well be so, either for broadly utilitarian reasons or for basically idealistic ones.

Governments in the industrialised western democracies have repeatedly been advised to curb the welfare state when adjusting public finances in order to stabilise public debt in the long run and to create economic growth. This recommendation has been founded on a vast body of research on fiscal adjustments, which has come to the conclusion that cutting social expenditures leads to expansionary and more sustainable budget consolidations. This paper adds to the existing literature suggesting a more nuanced view, which challenges the simplicity of the “cutting-welfare” advice: first, we find that whereas less social spending is indeed associated with expansionary and successful adjustments, this is not the case for overall welfare state generosity. Second, disaggregating the welfare state in its components reveals that a reduction of pension generosity is indeed related to successful adjustments whereas reducing unemployment generosity does not seem to play a major role.

This article applies regulatory competition theory to an unexplored case of competition among legal norms: asylum. The asylum case study allows for a discussion of two main assumptions of regulatory competition theory: the spontaneous emergence of competition among rules and the mechanical response of regulators to market forces. The article explains to what extent the current legal framework impacts on the emergence and development of the competitive process. This framework determines the existence of a market of legal norms, it impacts on the arbiters' mobility and on States' decision to compete. The article then addresses the mechanical vision of competition. It shows that law frames the response given by regulators to market forces. It discusses the hypothesis that competing legal rules evolve in a linear way and converge. Finally, the asylum case shows the limits of competition theory's ability to explain the evolution of law.

Between 1960 and 1981 there was a very substantial increase in female enrolment and a move towards a much lessened degree of gender inequality in tertiary education in most advanced industrial societies. The article seeks to locate the main determinants of cross-national variance in gender inequality at both time points and of change across time. The hypotheses examined suggest the influence of a variety of economic, social structural, political, demographic and attitudinal variables and a multivariate analysis demonstrates that all are implicated in the transformation of educational policy outcomes during the period.

In assessing whether or not harmonisation is an appropriate policy goal for a social dimension to the European Community, the article compares different aspects of employment conditions, practices and legislation in member states to see the extent to which these converge or diverge. The thesis is that harmonisation for the most part depends on whether convergence already exists in specific aspects of the member states' labour markets. If there is considerable divergence, then it will be practically impossible to obtain harmonisation without highly disruptive and far-reaching policy changes by some member states, changes which may not necessarily yield them beneficial results.

In the absence of partisan ownership of an issue, what factors shape public preferences for federal, state and local policy action? The Zika virus provides a unique context in which to examine this question, as it is a new threat to public health in the United States and lacks clear partisan ownership. We examine (1) which Zika policies do citizens support, (2) at which level(s) of government and (3) what factors explain citizen assignment of policy responsibility to different levels of government? Using nationally representative survey data, we find that the three most popular policy responses to Zika are travel warnings, research funding and public education, with the federal government being the preferred policy actor. In the absence of clear partisan issue ownership, we find that Republicans are significantly more likely to prefer state policy action, while partisanship has no impact on public preferences for federal or local policy action.

The structural weaknesses of the UK industrial economy are discussed and it is argued that the policy response does not match the scale of the crisis. Whether there should be an industrial policy is politically contentious. Aid has been directed towards the declining sections of manufacturing industry. Policy adaptation has been ad hoc and decision-making on industrial policy and programme administration is fragmented. Reform is difficult because of genuine policy disagreements between the main political parties, the inherent tendency to return to cautious middle-ground policies defined by the bureaucracy and the persistence of a laissez-faire tradition that leads to an institutional isolation of business and government. The unsatisfactory nature of British industrial policy is related to factors deeply embedded in the political system and a pessimistic view is taken of the possibility of profound change.

For all the day-to-day changes, the parties have actually been surprisingly faithful to their overarching ideologies. However, in no way has this stability precluded change. The main claim made in this article is that, on the contrary, in several instances it appears that the only way of keeping up ideological stability is through policy change. The kind of stability based on an ongoing adaptation and change might be the very triggering cause behind the successful opening up of a policy window. By offering a firm point of reference, ideology analysis could function as a bridge between ‘formative’ approaches – which indicate some degree of actor freedom — and ‘path dependency’ approaches – which stress deterministic structuring by institutions – and provide one of the missing links between institutional and rational choice analyses.

State-level income tax policy is a hotly debated topic in both academic and political spheres. Although economic theory and some empirical analyses suggest that larger income tax burdens affect migration decisions, there is also a good deal of empirical evidence showing that tax policy has little to no effect. This lack of consensus in the academic literature is echoed in the political world, where many states are debating whether to eliminate income taxes or reduce rates as a means of spurring economic growth. Connecticut’s adoption of an income tax policy in 1991 provides a unique opportunity to analyse the impact of a sizable income tax policy change on migration. The results suggest that Connecticut’s income tax deterred movement into the state but had no impact on exit from the state, resulting in a net loss in migration.

In the public debate on climate change in Europe, aviation transport has become a bone of contention and thus also a target of political regulation. While the actual available policy instruments, their designs and effects have been extensively studied, their political economy has remained a rather blind spot of research. Therefore, in this article we explore factors accounting for the instrument choice in aviation policy. Revealing most different evolutions in this matter, the Netherlands and Germany represent appropriately illustrative cases for a comparative exploration. Based on the Political Process-inherent Dynamics Approach, we shed light on a highly complex and limiting institutional environment for aviation policy-making and ultimately identify diverging conceptions of problem structures as well as different configurations of party competition as main explanatory factors for instrument choice and aviation policy evolution.

Policy processes are affected by how policymakers assess public support for a policy. But is public support for a given policy itself affected by characteristics of the policy process, such as cooperation or confrontation amongst policy actors? Specifically, if different branches of government hold conflicting positions on a given policy, do clashes affect public support for the policy? To address this question, we exploit an unexpected clash amongst the executive and judiciary in New Delhi, between survey waves, over exemptions for women in the context of the odd–even rule, a policy intervention to reduce air pollution from transportation. We find that public support for the contested policy was not undermined by the executive–judiciary clash. However, the clash polarised public opinion by gender, based upon the policy exemptions. Our findings shed new light on the broader question of how conflicts amongst different parts of government influence mass public policy preferences.

Research on bureaucratic power typically focusses on rulemaking and policy implementation, while bureaucrats’ participation in the legislative process remains underexplored. We theorise and test a specific mechanism by which bureaucrats attempt to sway legislative outcomes, which we term indirect bureaucratic lobbying. Using a novel survey of state-based health lobbyists in 25 states, we show that state Medicaid agency staff routinely request lobbying assistance from provider associations and consumer advocates. We also provide the first systematic evidence of the conditions under which indirect bureaucratic lobbying is likely to occur. Our results suggest that individual-level policy agreement interacts with institutional factors, most notably agency performance and gubernatorial power, to increase the likelihood that bureaucrats will use this strategy to attempt to influence legislative deliberations.

While the importance of political appointments is a matter of consensus, theorists and empiricists generally focus on different considerations, such as ideology and confirmation duration, respectively. More recently, there have been efforts to integrate empirical and theoretical scholarship but, to date, no empirical analysis assesses theoretical expectations about the relationship between temporal concerns and nominee ideologies. We fill this gap by examining theoretical predictions and related expectations about how the passage of time affects the President’s choices of nominees. We find that executives are disadvantaged as days pass and Presidents propose nominees with whom they are less ideologically compatible over time.

Governance has become one of the central concepts in political science, but what is absent is the question: Which modes of governance produce which policy output? This paper develops a classification scheme for modes of governance in all dimensions of public policy and then applies it empirically in four Austrian case studies concerning higher education and innovation. We extend the scholarly discussion on governance to the factor interests and argue that this analytical factor needs to be taken into account in future research in order to understand the modes of governance in policy processes.

This paper attempts to explain what influenced efficient decisions in the adoption of important technology in the steel industry. An index of efficient decisions for the adoption of the basic oxygen furnace and for continuous casting is discussed theoretically and then empirically developed for the steel industries of 28 and 27 countries respectively. Statistical tests are performed to determine the influence of government ownership of the steel industries, central planning of the economies and involvement in international competition on efficient decisions regarding technology adoption. The tests reveal that both government ownership and central planning retarded efficient decisions regarding the adoption of technology.