This study aims to identify those factors that impact the comprehensiveness of state human trafficking legislation. To do so, we propose independent effects of policy diffusion and the percentage of females in a state legislature. Building on this framework, we then suggest a process of gendered diffusion, whereby female state legislators represent a unique diffusion network for “women’s interest” issues both within their own legislature, as well as across state networks. Taken together, this paper suggests that, for certain types of new issue areas, the demographic composition of state legislative chambers and the policy diffusion process are conditional on one another. This finding extends the bodies of scholarship concerning descriptive representation and policy diffusion, and presents a novel way to look at the policy-making process.

Activists try to use high profile trials to advance their political agendas, and we want to understand why they occasionally succeed in promoting policy reforms. We begin by reviewing literature on agenda setting and social problem construction, conceptualising high profile trials as “focusing events” that offer activists a chance to advance their definitions and remedies for particular social problems. We next outline the feminist movement against sexual violence as a useful example of activists trying to use trials for their own political purposes. Using events data from the New York Times and the secondary treatment of 13 high profile trials from 1960 to 1997, we examine factors that help or hinder activists’ efforts to use a trial to forward their cause. We see that both the nature of the trial and the political context surrounding it affect the likelihood that a movement gains control of its meaning and secures policy reform.

Who foresaw the UK banking crisis? This paper addresses this issue through detailed empirical work on the content of the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s speeches, Bank of England Financial Stability Reports, Financial Service Authority reports and speeches by Bank of England officials, editorials in the Times and Financial Times, bank annual reports and financial statements, credit rating reports, share price movements, Parliamentary questions, Treasury select committee reports and the output of academic economists. We find that few people inside or outside government recognised the existence of significant financial vulnerabilities in the financial system in the years prior to the collapse of Northern Rock in September 2007. We use the conceptual lenses of individual, institutional and paradigmatic pathologies to provide explanations for this failure to detect looming crisis conditions. We argue ultimately that regulators and commentators were blinded by faith in market forces and the risk-tempering properties of securitisation.

This paper develops a framework for analysing intergovernmental relationships around greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation policies along a cooperation-conflict spectrum that affects the probability of their enactment. Cooperative policies, such as federal fiscal transfers to sub-national governments, facilitate enactment. Coordination policies, including enabling and funding mechanisms, promote interdependence between jurisdictions. Competitive policies, such as federal performance standards and price mechanisms, increase political conflict over authority. We categorise 23 policies developed by over 1,500 state stakeholders into the cooperation/coordination/conflict taxonomy. If scaled to the national level, these policies could reduce GHG emissions by over 3 billion tonnes by 2020 and generate nearly 2.2 million jobs (1.19 per cent above baseline projections). Nearly two-thirds of the job gains are from coordinated and cooperative policy options that are unlikely to occur under the status quo policy process. We recommend a national climate action planning process to reduce GHG emissions while increasing aggregate economic efficiency.

At first sight, French nuclear energy policy offers a textbook example of how technical, constitutional and economic restrictions, powerful interest groups and path dependence constrain democratic responsiveness. This paper uses what might seem to be an unlikely case in order to question explanations of policy choices in terms of technocracy, path dependence and interest groups against the background of an under-estimated factor: party and coalition strategies. The original data collected on public attitudes towards nuclear energy and the attention dedicated to this issue in the media, as well as in the parliamentary and electoral arenas, show that the effect of public opinion is conditioned by party incentives to politicise the issue at stake. In other words, parties and coalition-making constraints act as a mediating variable between citizens’ preferences and policy choices. These findings point to the need to integrate this conditional variable into analyses of responsiveness and models of policymaking.