Frey (1987) proposed a new information policy designed to lower the utility of terrorist action. The policy is predicated on the assumption that terrorists aim to draw public attention to their cause. Therefore, the terrorists' rewards can be reduced by refraining from attributing a particular terrorist act to any one group. Faced with diminished rewards, terrorists are likely to give up violent action or to resort to tactics that put them in greater jeopardy. The present article offers a thorough analysis of Frey's proposal. It shows that the proposal derives from a too limited view of the terrorist strategy and from unrealistic assumptions about the extent to which democratic governments can control the sources and the dissemination of information. A judgment of Frey's proposal according to criteria drawn from a more comprehensive view of the terrorist strategy leads to the conclusion that the proposed policy is both impractical and counterproductive.

This paper examines the hypothesis that corporatist intermediation by party governments facilitates incomes policy formation and is effective in reaching agreements between employers and trade unions as well. A social democratic party in government would positively enhance this process. Investigating this for the Netherlands between 1965–2000, two puzzles emerge. The first puzzle is that coalition governments of Social and Christian Democracy fall short of expectations despite their commitment to corporatism. The second puzzle is that the relationship between Social Democracy and effective corporatist intermediation is positive but cannot sufficiently account for the variation in agreements on Dutch incomes policy. That variation can be better understood as induced by institutional change, economic development and external vulnerabilities. The Dutch case study shows that the performance of a social democratic party in government in a corporatist context is less directly effective than the literature often has suggested.

Even though a central bank has formal independence, the success of its actions are part of an interdependent system of policies in which elected governments have a role too. In the making of monetary policy, economists have technical expertise but politicians claim electoral legitimacy. This paper examines monetary policy from the perspective of elected officeholders who must balance non-economic pressures, both domestic and international, against concerns of central bankers with monetary constraint. It emphasizes divisions within national governments about how that balance should be struck, and differences in political priorities for economic policymaking between countries and across time. It concludes with a POP (Politically Optimal Policy), having flexibility between multiple and shifting policy goals rather than fixing on a single target, monetary or non-monetary.

The social indicators movement sought to establish a system of social accounting that was broader than the money-based national income accounts. Specialized studies of social trends in housing, health, crime, and so forth could be successful in illuminating a specific area of social life, but together they became obstacles to the achievement of the ideal of an integrated set of social accounts. Even if crime and housing have a relationship the statistics generated within each domain are together incommensurable.

Devaluations are traumatic events. The historical record shows that a devaluation doubles the probability that a ruling group would be replaced and triples the likelihood that the Minister of Finance would be relieved. Yet in November 1978, Indonesia devalued its currency by 50 percent when observers were not predicting a balance of payments crisis in the near future. The devaluation was undertaken to effect an income transfer to the countryside and the Outer Islands, the centers of traditional agricultural export industries. Since this action contradicts the logic of the dominant models of the Indonesian state, we propose that authoritarian corporatism is a more accurate characterization of the state-society relationship. The economic conditions in the countryside and Outer Islands are important to policy makers because the former has a long history of agrarian radicalism and the latter a history of secessions.

During the 1960s and early 1970s, strong economic growth and highly expansionary income security policies led to considerable progress for the entire American population with respect to major income security goals. However, in the last fifteen years much of this progress has been either arrested or reversed, particularly for the non-aged, as economic growth slowed and income security policies ceased to expand and, in some cases, contracted. This retrenchment was the inevitable consequence of numerous phenomena which preceded, and were reinforced by the Reagan era. American income security policies are not likely to contract generally in the future, nor to resume expanding in a direction characteristic of many Western European welfare states. Rather, the prospects are for slow economic growth, higher targetting of programs by income in some areas, and marginal expansions requiring minimal new commitments of public resources in others. Major income security problems, especially among the lower income population, will remain.

Forums provide venues where different actors from the public administration sector, the interest group sector, or the research sector jointly discuss an issue of common interest. This article analyses which types of benefits are related to actors’ investing working time to forums. Actors’ dedication and work are basic predicates for forums to be able to produce outputs. The analysis of members of eight forums dealing with habitat and natural hazard governance in Switzerland suggests that actors participating in forums attribute more importance to exchange benefits, corresponding to opportunities of interaction with other actors – than to policy benefits – corresponding to opportunities for actors to influence policy or practice. However, more working time is invested by actors that lend importance to individual benefits – as opposed to collective benefits. These findings are important for understanding why actors provide work for forums in collaborative and polycentric governance systems.

Federalism allows state politicians opportunities to undermine or support for federal policies. As a result, voters often have varied impressions of the same federal programmes. To test how this dynamic affects voting behaviour, I gather data on the severity of the opioid epidemic from 2006–2016. I exploit discontinuities between states that expanded Medicaid and those that did not to gain causal leverage over whether expansion affected the severity of the epidemic and whether these policy effects affected policy feedback. I show that the decision to expand Medicaid reduced the severity of the opioid epidemic. I also show that expanding Medicaid and subsequent reductions in the severity of the opioid epidemic increased support for the Democratic Party. The results imply that the Republican Party performed better in places where voters did not have access to Medicaid expansion and where the epidemic worsened, demonstrating an unintended consequence of federalism on policy feedback.

How might public policy changes affect electoral support for authoritarian regimes? Missing from the existing scholarship, which focuses mostly on regimes generating political budget cycles and manipulating electoral rules, is an exploration of how non-fiscal and non-electoral policies may impact incumbent support. We examine this issue with electoral and census data from one of the world’s most prominent authoritarian regimes – Russia – to evaluate the regime’s 2017 change to the policy governing native language instruction, which curtailed minority students’ ability to learn their native languages and faced opposition in some ethnic regions. Examining panel data on presidential elections using fixed effects models, our results reveal that the regime’s support decreased in titular minority areas in 2018. The results also indicate that some of these patterns emerged in previous national legislative elections and thus cannot be solely attributed to the policy change.

This paper investigates how different factors, such as size, duration and composition of fiscal changes, can alter the effects of fiscal policy on private consumption. Using an unbalanced panel of 19 OECD countries during the period 1960–2000, it is found that transfer changes are believed to be permanent during fiscal contractions. Hence, it is more likely that an expansionary fiscal contraction will occur if the government cuts transfers. This result highlights the importance of taking into account specific circumstances, such as the debt and deficit position, when studying expansionary fiscal contractions. The results also indicate that expansionary fiscal contractions are likely to come at a considerable social cost.

The paper examines the range of currency and exchange rate regimes choices facing small countries living next to large currency blocs, such as the euro area and the United States. It draws on Canada's successful experience in the 1990s with a flexible exchange rate and explicit inflation targets to argue that such a monetary rule may be the appropriate policy alternative for small countries in this situation such as the United Kingdom or Norway, that are unwilling to surrender their national currency or their monetary independence for economic or political reasons. Because the Canadian economy is more dependent on the production of natural resource products than the economy of its major trading partner, the United States, Canada's flexible exchange rate plays a valuable role in helping to stabilise the Canadian economy in the face of global shocks to natural resource prices.

This paper explores the tension between social and commercial criteria and the importance of the nature of available information in influencing policymaking towards commercial or quasi-commercial activities such as transport undertakings. The importance of financial criteria as key indicators which influence railway policy is established by reference to significant landmarks in the corporate existence of British Rail. An underlying conflict between this information and the declared policies of successive governments is exposed. This reveals that, not only are policy-makers constrained by the difficulties of providing more appropriate information, but they are also the victims of their own reluctance to implement effectively policies which would actually improve existing sources of information.

Inadequate problem formulation leads to inadequate, alas persistent, solutions (programs). Program evaluation is commonly held as a means to put programs and policies to the test. The best of controlled experimentation, however, cannot serve as the ‘potential falsifier’ of problem formulation, only of the adequacy of means to solve a pre-conceptualized problem. An analysis of disadvantaged youth policy in Israel is provided to illustrate and support these contentions.

Collective-action theory suggests that a country's economic size determines its contribution to international organizations, with large economies paying a disproportionate percentage of their GNP for maintenance of these organizations. This paper argues against this reigning paradigm, finding that it fails to predict current contribution patterns in the United Nations (UN). Instead, the paper offers a more elaborate model of burden sharing that takes into account the domestic political setting and international setting that helps determine a nation's contribution to international organizations.

This paper examines approaches to public investment appraisal as theyare currently recommended in the British Treasury and implemented byevaluation units within the Department of Health, Department of Transport and the Home Office. The evidence suggests that spending departments have reacted to the pressure for increased selectivity in their expenditures by adopting a heterogeneous blend of appraisal techniques, including financial analysis, cost-effectiveness and option appraisal, withcost-benefit analysis eventually playing a minor role. The imposition of cash limits rations capital expenditures. When these constraints bite departments differently, either a unique social discount rate for projectappraisal is inappropriate or the rations themselves are giving wrong signals to the departments The departments do not have an incentive todevote time and effort to cost benefit analysis and other techniques of a more limited scope are implemented.

Although European Monetary Union led to the creation of one of the world's most independent central banks, politics has not been removed from monetary integration. The European Central Bank's primary claim to legitimacy rests with its ability to deliver low inflation and presumably higher growth. Its independence may be insufficient for this task, making its relationship with political institutions like the Euro-12 and European Parliament more important over time in order to augment its own credibility. This article argues that a model of collective responsibility is more appropriate than one of principle-agent theory to describe the development of European monetary relations between the various institutions as they will need to rely on one another if a coherent European monetary policy is to take shape.