The public policy issues of modernizing public agencies in Central Europe are nowhere more pressing than in the process of modernizing militaries. The leaders of central Europe – Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia – plan to deploy smaller, more professional forces equipped with advanced weapons and support systems, changing their organizations accordingly. This paper argues that the political and organizational circumstances roughly common to Central European countries make such modernization highly problematical for effective civilian policy in crises. Advanced technologies can compound the normal problems of civilian ministerial control by altering modernizing military organizations in unexpected ways. The more intricate, critical and expensive the machines, the more organizational effects they induce. Even in minor crises, military leaders will probably want to move to heightened states of readiness to be sure the machines are in place and functional. Under these circumstances, there is greater potential for each otherwise noisy but survivable crisis to escalate through regrettable military guidance and destabilizing military actions, with or without full civilian understanding.

The author presents an empirical study of the direct corporate taxation policy process in the European Union. The study links three public policy literatures that are usually considered somewhat distinct and independent: the literature on the politics of tax reform, the literature on policy change and the political role of knowledge, and the literature on European integration. The examination of these literatures leads to a series of hypotheses which are used for addressing the analysis of the policy process. The conclusions assess the hypotheses and draw implications for the study of knowledge utilisation, policy change, and policy types.

Since 1945, there has been substantial variation among the OECD countries and within them over time in central-government deficits. This paper surveys and assesses the literature on deficit spending in these industrialized democracies, emphasizing positive theories and the empirical support, or lack thereof, for each of them. We begin by considering the degree to which theories about the size of government and empirical tests of these theories about the level of overall government spending can explain deficits. We then survey theories pertaining to the political economy of fiscal deficits per se, including the ‘tax smoothing’ hypothesis, the neo-Keynesian countercyclical hypothesis, the public choice perspective, the ‘left-right ideology’ hypothesis, Roubini and Sachs' (1989) ‘strength of government’ hypothesis, and the importance of divided government in non-parliamentary systems.