Notwithstanding an ever-growing body of literature on administrative reforms, the studies either focus on single countries or emphasize common tendencies in all countries; hence providing little systematic insight for the evaluation and explanation of administrative change from a comparative perspective. In the light of this deficit, it is the aim of this article to develop an analytical concept for explaining cross-national variances in patterns of administrative development. For this purpose, the concept of national administrative reform capacity is developed, arguing that the potential for reforming different administrative systems is basically dependent on the general institutional context in which these systems are embedded. On this basis, two ideal type constellations of administrative reform capacity and corresponding patterns of administrative development are identified and illustrated by a systematic comparison of administrative reform capacities and administrative changes in Germany and Britain.

In an effort at theoretical clarification, the authors reviewed 45 recent articles reporting empirical research employing the concept of ‘social capital’. The literature is roughly equally divided between those who treat social capital as an independent variable and those who consider it as a dependent variable, and between those who operationalize the concept principally in terms of norms, values and attitudes and those who choose a more social structural operationalization, invoking social networks, organizations and linkages. Work on social capital as a mainly normative variable is dominated by political scientists and economists, while sociologists and a wide range of applied social scientists utilize more social structural understandings of the term. We find little to recommend in the use of ‘social capital’ to represent the norms, values and attitudes of the civic culture argument. We present empirical, methodological and theoretical arguments for the irrelevance of ‘generalized social trust’, in particular, as a significant factor in the health of democracies or economic development. Social structural interpretations of social capital, on the other hand, have demonstrated considerable capacity to draw attention to, and illuminate, the many ways in which social resources are made available to individuals and groups for individual or group benefit, which we take to be the prime focus and central attraction of the social capital concept. The paper concludes by elaborating a context-dependent conceptualization of social capital as access plus resources, and cautions against ‘over-networked’ conceptualizations that equate social capital with access alone.

This study raises two basic questions. How is competition in telecom and electricity governed? What explains the considerable differences in their governance regimes? To answer these questions the study compares the economic and technological characteristics of the sectors; deconstructs the telecom sector into two micro-regimes (terminal type-approval and networks interconnection) and the electricity sector into three (generation, transmission, distribution); defines intergovernmentalism, supranationalism, liberalism, and étatism for each of the five segments of the sectors; distinguishes three different kinds of competition – deregulated competition, regulation-of-competion, and regulation-for-competition; and deconstructs the European policy game into three different games (sectorial, national, and union). The European Union's policy choices are: supranational governance in telecom and intergovernmental governance in electricity. The introduction of competition as an administrative process leaves considerable room for entrepreneurship and political choice by European nation-states and strengthens their regulation capacities. Differences in the governance regime for telecom and electricity are explained by a state-centered multi-level approach.

Scholars studying the processes that lead to significant alterations in public policies have identified two major sources of change: policy-oriented conflict and policy-oriented learning. Many investigations of specific cases of consequential policy change also suggest that “shocks” from outside the policy subsystem, (that is, the specific political arena where a policy issue is formulated and implemented) are often necessary for significant policy change to occur. Rather than being competing explanations of policy change, this paper argues that external shocks, conflict, and learning often interact to generate windows of opportunity which enable policies to be significantly altered. These perspectives on policy change are then qualitatively applied to recent changes in U.S. national security policy which have allowed formerly secret spy satellite technology to be used in commercial data gathering systems. The final part discusses the implications of this research for the theory of policy change and for U.S. national security policy.