Welfare states contribute to people's well-being in many different ways. Bringing all these contributions under a common metric is tricky. Here we propose doing so through the notion of temporal autonomy: the freedom to spend one's time as one pleases, outside the necessities of everyday life. Using income and time use surveys from five countries (the USA, Australia, Germany, France, and Sweden) that represent the principal types of welfare and gender regimes, we propose ways of operationalising the time that is strictly necessary for people to spend in paid labour, unpaid household labour, and personal care. The time people have at their disposal after taking into account what is strictly necessary in these three arenas – which we christen discretionary time – represents people's temporal autonomy. We measure the impact on this of government taxes, transfers, and childcare subsidies in these five countries. In so doing, we calibrate the contributions of the different welfare and gender regimes that exist in these countries, in ways that correspond to the lived reality of people's daily lives.

Europeanization involves the transposition and implementation of European legislation in EU member states. Whereas EU policy implementation is explicitly recognized as the responsibility of the member states, the new emphasis on benchmarking recognizes that different implementation strategies can be beneficial, provided the outcome is appropriate. New data representing the full EU transport acquis from 1957 to 2004 and the national transposition instruments derived from data bases for Germany, Greece, the UK, Spain and the Netherlands show that only 39 per cent of the acquis was transposed in time. Why do member states not transpose EU directives on time? Logistic and multinomial logistic analysis explains this in terms of the level of complexity of EU directives; the use of national legal instruments that include considerable de facto veto players; and the shorter the transposition time set in the directive, the more delayed the transposition process.

This study assesses the explanatory power of two competing views about intergovernmental fiscal transfers; one emphasizing the traditional neoclassical approach to federal-subnational fiscal relations and the other suggesting that transfers are contingent on the political fortunes and current political vulnerability of each level of government. These models are tested using data from Argentina, a federation exhibiting one of the most decentralised fiscal systems in the world and severe imbalances in the territorial distribution of legislative and economic resources. Over-represented provinces ruled by governors who belong to parties different to that controlling the national executive can bring into play their representational advantages to attract shares of federal transfers beyond social welfare criteria. This finding suggests that decision makers in federal countries must pay close heed to the need to synchronize institutional reforms and fiscal adjustment.

The recent bifurcation of European studies into state-centric and new institutionalist camps has resulted in a sterile theoretical debate that says little about an empirical world where bargaining outcomes cover both member states' preferences and the institutional setting. This article is an attempt to move beyond the theoretical debate. It juxtaposes a conceptual framework for analyzing EU negotiations with an analysis of the bargaining process on the settlement of the European Union's Common Fisheries Policy. The conceptual framework will identify a set of variables that can explain the bargaining outcome: preferences of national government representatives, preferences of the European Commission, and the institutional setting.

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.