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Budgetary Policy‐Making under Institutional Restrictions: The Experience of Britain, France, West Germany and the United States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Roland Sturm
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POLITICIANS LIKE TO BE REGARDED AS EFFECTIVE IN THE WORK THEY do. They insist that the promises they make and the programmes they decide on are more than mere declarations of goodwill. To practise what they preach is of special importance to governments which stress that their policies are substantially different from the policies of their predecessors. Thus, a departure from conventional politics on the model of the social-democratic consensus was asserted by the previously more pragmatic, now more ideologically minded, Conservative governments in Britain (1979), the United States (1980) and to some degree also by the electoral successes of Conservative parties in West Germany (1983) and France (1986). The conservative ground-swell in current government policies in Western democracies is, however, not restricted to the countries mentioned here, although Britain and the United States have played a special role as pathfinders for the political reorientation process.

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Articles
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Government and Opposition , Volume 21 , Issue 4 , 01 October 1986 , pp. 437 - 455
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1986

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