Interest groups are a major channel through which citizens can express their opinions to decision-makers. Their participation in policymaking may improve decision-making processes by supporting policies that are in line with citizen preferences and blocking policies that solely reflect the interests of the governing elite. At the same time, however, intense interest group pressures may make it difficult for policy-makers to implement the most efficient policies since such policies often impose costs on parts of the public. Competition among interest groups over the distribution of economic gains may also slow down the rate of economic growth (Olson 1982). Finally, if some groups constantly win, interest group politics may undermine the legitimacy of electorally accountable decision making in a democracy.

The literature on path dependence has emphasized positive feedback effects that make it difficult to shift from a policy regime once it is in place. This article argues that policy regimes may also have strong negative feedback effects that undermine the political, fiscal or social sustainability of an existing policy regime. The prospects for a shift in policy regime depend largely on the balance between positive and negative feedback effects; the availability of incremental reform options that can be used to patch the status quo; and the availability of politically and fiscally attractive regime transition options. The paper argues that differential survival rates of different public pension regimes in western industrial countries can be understood by the interaction of these three factors.

Most studies of policy formulation focus on the nature and kind of advice provided to decision-makers and think of this as originating from a system of interacting elements: a “policy advisory system”. Policy influence in such models has historically been viewed as based on considerations of the proximate location of policy advisors vis à vis the government, linked to related factors such as the extent to which governments are able to control sources of advice. While not explicitly stated, this approach typically presents the content of policy advice as either partisan “political” or administratively “technical” in nature. This article assesses the merits of these locational models against evidence of shifts in governance arrangements that have blurred both the inside vs outside and technical vs political dimensions of policy formulation environments. It argues that the growing plurality of advisory sources and the polycentrism associated with these governance shifts challenge the utility of both the implied content and locational dimensions of traditional models of policy advice systems. A revised approach is advanced that sees influence more as a product of content than location. The article concludes by raising several hypotheses for future research linking advisory system behaviour to governance arrangements.

A growing literature in public policy, comparative politics and international relations has studied how the policies of one unit (e.g. country, federal state or city) are influenced by the policies of other units – that is, how policies diffuse. This article provides a meta-analysis of 114 studies, demonstrating persisting inconsistencies in the measurement of the mechanisms driving policy diffusion processes. Different indicators are used to measure the same mechanism, and the same indicators are used to measure different mechanisms. To improve this state of affairs, this article puts forward a conceptual structure that serves as a guide for the application of diffusion arguments, a starting point for theoretical refinement and a benchmark to assess measurement validity. In addition to paying more attention to the conceptual consistency of indicators, overcoming the problems currently found in the literature requires the construction of original, innovative research designs instead of the replication of widely used templates.

The repercussions of European integration on national policymaking have increasingly drawn scholarly attention, yet, the determinants of national adaptation to the European Union are still poorly understood. This article takes issue with evolving arguments which grant crucial importance to the “goodness of fit” between European provisions and national rules and practices for explaining the degree of national adjustment to European requirements. In the case of the implementation of the Packaging and Packaging Waste Directive in Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, the country with the greatest misfit, the United Kingdom, adapted more successfully than the country which only needed incremental adjustments, Germany. The German record was also worse than the Dutch, despite the higher adaptation pressure of the latter. The case study suggests that the number of institutional veto points that central governments has to face when imposing European provisions on their constituencies, ultimately tend to shape the pace and quality of implementation, regardless of differential degrees in the goodness of fit.

This article presents an alternative trajectory to policy paradigm change to that outlined by Peter A. Hall's social learning model, in which unsuccessful efforts by state officials to respond to policy failures and anomalies in the existing paradigm eventually trigger a broader, societal, political partisan debate about policy principles. From this society-wide contestation over policy goals, problems, and solutions, a new policy paradigm emerges. Drawing on the conceptual tools of policy feedback and policy networks, this article describes an alternative route to paradigm shift in which change is negotiated between state actors and group representatives. Discussions of change are largely confined to sectoral policy networks and the result is a more managed series of policy changes that culminate in a paradigm shift. This argument for a second, cumulative trajectory to paradigm shift is developed by examining agricultural policy change in three countries: the United States, Canada, and Australia.

A vigorous tradition in comparative politics argues that national policymakers develop characteristic and durable methods for dealing with public issues, that these can be linked to policy outcomes, and that they can be systematically compared. More recently, a number of scholars have suggested reversing the direction of causality, claiming that the nature of political issues themselves causes the politics associated with them. This policy sector approach implies that there should be cross-national similarities in the way issues are treated, whatever the styles particular nations adopt. The two approaches need to be integrated into a common framework built around a research strategy that investigates policymaking within specific sectors across multiple national cases. Such an approach can transcend the often sterile debate over whether the policies of nations are unique or are converging by seeking to explain how the nature of issues structures the variation among the policies of nations.

This article focuses on the use of Computer-Mediated Communication by the movement for global justice, with special attention to the organisations involved in the movement and its activists. We examined data collected during two supranational protest events: the anti-G8 protest in Genoa in July 2001 and the European Social Forum (ESF) in Florence in November 2002. In both cases, we have complemented an analysis of the Genoa Social Forum and ESF websites with a survey of activists, including questions about their use of the Internet. We then examine hypotheses about changes new technologies introduce in collective action. The Internet empowers social movements in: (a) purely instrumental ways (an additional logistical resource for ‘resource-poor’ actors), (b) a protest function (direct expression of protest); (c) symbolically (as a medium favouring identification processes in collective actors) and (d) cognitively (informing and sensitising public opinion).

One of the emerging areas in the public policy literature concerns new modes of thought about the construction and analysis of public policy. This article extends notions about politics within the ‘policy design’ literature by considering the implications of different political environments for policy design and implementation. Two different political environments – policies with and without publics – that form ends of a continuum of policy publics are discussed. A contrast is drawn between these two polar political environments with respect to differing policy design and implementation challenges, as well as with respect to differing opportunities for policy learning.

Policy design, whether conceptualized as a verb referring to the process of formulating policy ideas, or as a noun describing the logic through which policy intends to achieve its objectives, remains relatively uncharted territory. This paper reviews what we know about how policy designs emerge, and identifies the kinds of biases and weaknesses that are introduced into designs by the decision heuristics employed. Theories of policy invention and expert decision-making suggest that individuals search through large amounts of relevant information stored in memory, reason by analogies, make comparisons, and either copy or simulate patterns of information. Policy scholars may contribute to improved policy design by making more explicit the biases introduced through reliance on decision heuristics, and by suggesting a more formal, self conscious search and selection process that enables designers to be more discriminating when they pinch policy ideas from other contexts. To perform this task, comparative policy analysis is needed in which common elements that exist in virtually all policies are identified and the underlying structural logic of the policies is made explicit. In this paper we set forth generic elements found in policies, describe and compare some of the more common design patterns, and discuss the circumstances where these may be inappropriately copied or borrowed, thereby thwarting the effectiveness of the policy.

Firms are legitimate political actors, but few empirical studies examine how firms have re-structured their political organisation to maximise the political options in the constantly evolving European public policy system — or assessed the impact of these changes on the member states' industrial relations. Based on a study of Europe's largest firms, this article explores the degree to which the creation of the single market and the strengthening of European institutions has harmonised the firms' political activity across borders, sectors and issues. It concludes that multinationals have established a sophisticated political capacity that allows them to develop new multilevel and ad hoc political alliances and that this new political co-ordination has standardised political responses across issues and altered national public policy systems.

The analysis of European integration has tended to use a toolkit drawn from international relations. But since the revival of integration in the mid-1980s, the governance of the European Community and European Union has increasingly come to resemble that of a multi-tiered state. Accordingly, this article analyzes the governance of the European Union from a comparative public policy perspective. Using new or historical institutionalism, three levels are considered. In the first part, attention is focused on the EU's institutions and the available instruments of governance. The second part examines the analysis of governance at the policy-specific or sub-system level, and puts forward an approach based on governance regimes. The final part considers the institutional roots of the persistent, regulatory character of governance in the European Union.

This paper examines three distinct images of the policy process. Iron triangles emphasiże stable relations among a limited number of participants in a relatively closed policy area. Issue networks are fragmented, open and extraordinarily complex and are ill-structured for resolving conflicts and reaching authoritative decisions. The neo-corporatist literature posits a mechanistic interpretation of society: hierarchy, discipline, command and stability, though organized through sectors. These three images can be contrasted with an image of cabinet government which stresses the integrative capacities of central government. The United States can be seen to have moved to some degree from a pattern more closely captured by the iron triangle image to a looser, more complex one resembling features of the issue network image. In Britain, it is possible to detect some movement towards the complexity of the issue network approach. Despite some superficial plausibility, the corporatist image does not apply to Britain, which is best described by drawing on elements of the iron triangle and cabinet government images and some of the complexity of the issue network image. Finally, limits to the fragmentation implied by the issue network image are noted.

The article attempts to explain the expansion of the European Community (EC) policy agenda to new policy areas such as the environment, regional development and research and technological development, and the variations in policy development from one area to another. Lowi's classification of policy types-regulatory, redistributive and distributive-is adapted for use in the EC context. Each policy type, it is argued, deals with a distinct arena featuring different actors, different institutional decision rules, and different types of Council bargaining, and each therefore corresponds to a distinctive pattern of task expansion. Thus, regulatory policies can be explained in terms of functional spillover from the Internal Market, while redistributive policies can be understood as side-payments in larger intergovernmental bargains, and distributive policies are the result of the Commission's policy entrepreneurship and log-rolling Council bargaining. These three patterns of task expansion are examined in an empirical study of policy development across six areas.

In technically complex areas, political actors increasingly rely on private actors to shape public policy, due to the greater expertise of private actors. This article theorises and empirically investigates the conditions under which self-regulation by industry (governance) emerges in environmental policy at the European level and asks how effective it is. Is a shadow of hierarchy (governmental intervention) needed to ensure the emergence and effectiveness of voluntary agreements? We show that the willingness to engage in self-regulation is prompted by the threat of governmental legislation. Once legislation has been pre-empted, environmental self-regulation is implemented under a weak shadow of hierarchy. We identify the causes of this weak control and explain the differential performance in the two sectors on the basis of different market incentives.

Since 1990 the age of the average OECD median voter has increased three times faster than in the preceding 30 years. We use panel data from 1980–2002 to investigate the effects of population aging on both the program size and the benefit generosity of public pensions in 18 OECD countries. Population aging is accompanied by cutting smaller slices out of larger cakes: it increases aggregate spending on pensions but freezes or decreases the generosity of individual benefits. Controlling for political, institutional and time-period effects, we find that public pension efforts are significantly mediated by welfare regime type. Moreover, since the late 1980s pension effort has more fully adopted a retrenchment logic. It is the politics of fiscal and electoral straitjackets, not gerontocracy, which shape public pension spending today. While population aging is accelerating, contrary to alarmist political economy predictions democracies are not yet dominated by a new distributive politics of elderly power.

e-Government is a global project of technology transfer taking designs from one context into a different context. Using examples of ‘e-transparency’ projects, this paper finds that the context of design inscribed into e-government systems in both explicit and implicit ways can produce a mismatch with the context in which it is deployed. This creates a contextual collision that can often lead to e-government failure. In other cases, there is some form of accommodation between the two contexts: users may appropriate inscribed elements to their own purposes or there may even be a reciprocating accommodation leading to a viable system. Factors that shape either failure or accommodation are identified, as are the networks of interests that determine the design inscription and deployment accommodation processes. Conclusions are drawn about policy on e-government project design and development of e-government capacities; and about the relevance of developing/transitional economy cases for the literature on the sociology of technology.

The concepts of policy instruments and policy networks have played important roles in recent theoretical development on public policy, as research in several nations attests. These notions, however, have largely been considered in isolation from each other. Here a simple typology of policy networks is used to help explain the selection of different kinds of instruments by governments. Several instrument characteristics are considered for the expected impact of network features on instrument selection, and a set of propositions is developed that matches degrees of network interconnectedness and cohesion with the choice of different kinds of instruments – such as regulations, subsidies, and covenants. Examples from different national and policy-sectoral contexts are used to indicate the plausibility of the argument. The article suggests that considering network attributes can be useful in understanding governments' choice of instruments and can strengthen extant discussions largely focused on such variables as learning and policy style.

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.