As the debate throughout the eighties has concluded, the efforts of governments to intervene at the firm level has largely been disappointing. Using two examples drawn from the British experience, Rover and Inmos, this paper offers an analysis as to why the Government has encountered difficulties when it has sought to intervene in a strategic fashion. Essentially, public policy makers lack adequate mechanisms to intervene effectively in technology-based companies. Locked out of the knowledge base of the firm, inappropriate financial control is imposed which reinforces the ‘outsider’ status of the Government. Having addressed the limitations of strategic intervention, the paper, drawing on the comparative experience of other countries, then goes on to address how this policy boundary might be pushed back in the long term.

To better understand the impact of deliberations during participatory policymaking events, we introduce and explore the concept of group proximity. An example of such events is citizens’ summits, during which many parallel groups deliberate on solutions for a policy issue. At the summit that was studied, each group followed a value deliberation process with the aim to increase mutual understanding among participants. They were asked to rank the solutions in their order of preference before and after the deliberation. From these rankings, group proximity can be calculated with a rank correlation, enabling a precise comparison of participants’ preferences in each deliberative group. High group proximity indicates very similar rankings in a deliberative group, while low group proximity demonstrates the opposite. Comparing group proximity of the before and after rankings shows if a group ranked convergent, unchanged or divergent. This measure allows for a quantitative analysis of early-stage public policymaking processes.

Lobbyists sometimes represent clients with seemingly adversarial policy interests. We seek to explain the occurrence of such ostensible conflicts of interest. In hiring lobbyists, interests encounter a tradeoff between access and agency. Although some lobbyists promise access to lawmakers, they may not lobby as contracted. Interests hire seemingly conflicted lobbyists more often when access is costlier and reputational risks are smaller. We examine the hiring of tobacco lobbyists by health interests, given the possibilities for shirking and reputational damage. We find that institutions such as hospitals hire tobacco lobbyists regularly and more often than membership-based health groups. Intergroup competition for access and lobby laws, especially anti-conflict laws, affect the use of tobacco lobbyists independent of rates of multi-client lobbying. Conflicts are more common today than ever but interests can protect themselves somewhat from opportunistic agents. Our findings also suggest that reforms can improve the representation of client interests.

How does the public form preferences on racialized policy issues that are both widely discussed and broadly misunderstood? This has been the question centering around the sudden attacks on academic terms like “critical race theory” (CRT). I argue that the politicization of, and opinion polarization around, critical race theory is evidence of what I call policy branding, where political parties or organizations brand an arbitrary concept that has national salience into a policy issue. Using a series of original survey experiments, this study shows that one of the primary sources of opposition to critical race theory is the literal use of the term. I juxtapose this with evidence that the education policy issue at the core, antiracist teaching, maintained strong public, bipartisan support. This study has implications for the consequences of political elite capture of academic concepts and ideas.

The tendency of vote-seeking politicians to produce ever-more policies in response to the citizens’ demands has been identified as a central driver of the process of “policy accumulation.” If we accept this premise, policy accumulation should be a central feature of modern democracies but overall be less pronounced in autocracies. Due to its highly ambivalent nature, policy accumulation and its implications may thus constitute an important but so far neglected facets of the new system competition between democracies and autocracies. In this article, we test this argument in the context of the authoritarian regime of Singapore. Singapore is one of the very few autocracies that display elements of political competition and has a level of socio-economic development that is comparable to advanced democracies. Singapore thus constitutes a least-likely case for low levels of policy accumulation. By studying changes in Singapore’s environmental policy over a period of more than four decades (1976 to 2020) and by contrasting the patterns observed with the policy developments in 21 OECD democracies, we find that autocratic regimes do indeed tend to accumulate less than democratic regimes. More precisely, we find that Singapore (1) has only produced about one-fourth of the environmental policy measures of an “average” democracy and (2) is constantly the country with the lowest level of policy accumulation in our sample. These findings hold even when controlling for alternative explanations, such as the effectiveness of the administration and the government’s ability to opt for stricter and more hierarchical forms of intervention.

Why do citizens support or reject climate change mitigation policies? This is not an easy choice: citizens need to support the government in making these decisions, accept potentially radical behavior change, and have altruism across borders and for future generations. A substantial literature argues that political trust facilitates citizen support for these complex policy decisions by mitigating the cost and uncertainty that policies impose on individuals and buttressing support for government intervention. We test whether this is the case with a pre-registered conjoint experiment fielded in Germany in which we vary fundamental aspects of policy design that are related to the cost, uncertainty, and implementation of climate change policies. Contrary to strong theoretical expectations and previous work, we find no difference between those with low and high trust on their support for different policy attributes, assuaging the concern that low and declining trust inhibits climate policymaking.

Interdependence, that is, outcomes depending on what is done by more than one actor, is a fact of life for central banks, reflecting domestic and international pressures, both political and economic. National economies have become increasingly internationalized through trade in goods and services and in currencies too. In consequence, the economies of large as well as small countries are now shaped by actions abroad as well as by decisions at home. While interdependence is a fact of life, what governments do about it depends on political choices, and countries differ in their commitment to a national currency. Their choices are to: maintain a degree of institutional independence with a national currency subject to the vicissitudes of the international economy; join a currency union, as twelve countries of the European Union have done; or contemplate doing the latter while still pursuing the former policy, as Britain and Sweden are currently doing.

This article argues that differences in sociopolitical reputation can explain why interest groups fail or succeed in influencing policymakers and that therefore sociopolitical reputation is a useful addition to the conceptual toolbox of interest groups scholars. Focusing on pharmacies and their associations in Greece and Portugal between 2005 and 2021, this article uses the concept of sociopolitical reputation to explain why reform attempts to reduce pharmaceutical spending and increase competition in the pharmacy sector were successful in Portugal but not in Greece, even though pharmacists are a much stronger interest group in Portugal than in Greece and even though both countries were under significant exogenous pressure to introduce structural reforms in the wake of the Eurozone crisis.

Electoral accountability is widely considered to be an essential component for maintaining the quality of a polity’s institutions. Nevertheless, a growing body of research has found weak or limited support for the notion that voters punish political corruption, a central but partial aspect of institutional quality. In order to capture the full range of institutional dysfunction an electorate should be incentivised to punish, I further the concept of institutional performance voting, that is, voting on institutional quality as a whole. Using a novel data set on performance audit reports in Swedish municipalities between 2003 and 2014, I find that audit critique is associated with a statistically significant but substantively moderate electoral loss of about a percentage point for mayoral parties, while simultaneously associated with a 14 percentage point decrease in their probability of reelection.

Unilateral presidential action is thought to be limited by the ability of successors to easily reverse past decisions. Yet, most executive actions are never formally revoked. We argue that because of presidents’ unique position as chief executive, some actions create outcomes that make policy reversal more difficult or even infeasible. We develop a novel measure of policies with more immutable consequences and analyze the revocation of executive orders issued between 1937 and 2021. We find the degree of outcome immutability reduces the influence of political conditions on policy revocation. We further examine these dynamics in three cases in which presidents have substantial discretion – diplomacy, non-combatant detention, and police militarization. Scholarship has long highlighted the president’s first-mover status relative to other institutional actors as a key source of their power. Collectively, our argument and evidence demonstrate this applies to their relationship with successors.