The literature on carbon pricing offers competing explanations for the introduction of carbon taxation. This article contributes to the field by highlighting the interaction of dynamic political factors and external pressures in explaining the timing of the adoption of carbon taxes. Focusing on the second wave of European countries, the study combines the multiple streams framework with qualitative comparative analysis to identify conditions favourable to the introduction of carbon taxes. Additional case studies on Ireland and Portugal serve to illuminate the reform process, especially the role of policy entrepreneurs. This approach yields three insights. First, fiscal crises provide political actors with an opportunity to raise environmental taxes. Second, the introduction of carbon taxation is most likely when push and pull factors come together, i.e. when high problem pressure coincides with governments receptive to environmental issues. Finally, the prospects of “green” policy entrepreneurs are strongly determined by their standing within the government.

One of the reasons for which corruption is so difficult to eradicate is because the actors involved are skilled in adapting their behaviour to changing institutional landscapes. However, surprisingly little is known about how corruption displacement functions across multiple levels of government. Using novel multilevel data on a political scandal in Italy and a Difference-in-Differences estimation strategy, I provide within-country evidence that a sudden increase in accountability for national deputies can impact negatively upon the behaviour of local-level public officials and politicians. In treated districts, where there is an increase in the indictment rate of national deputies, local-level corruption increases significantly as compared to nontreated districts. My results show how, in contexts characterised by systemic corruption, changes intended to enhance accountability can trigger a series of mechanisms within the political machine that exploit different levels of government.

Given pervasive gridlock at the national level, state legislatures are increasingly the place where notable policy change occurs. Investigating such change is difficult because it is often hard to characterise policy change and use observable data to evaluate theoretical predictions; it is subsequently unclear whether law-making explanations focusing on the US Congress also apply to state legislatures. We use several measures of state policy outcomes to examine lawmaking in state legislatures across nearly two decades, and we argue for using simulation studies to connect theoretical predictions to empirical specifications and help interpret the theoretical relevance of estimated correlations. Doing so reveals that the observed law-making outcomes we study are most consistent with law-making models emphasising the importance of the chamber median and the powers of the governor rather than those that focus on the preferences of the majority party.

This paper compares four different theoretical accounts of the reform of British local government finance at the end of the 1980s: public choice, marxian political economy, bureaucratic process, and party politics. Five key questions are identified as the most essential and puzzling features of the change: why reform; the timing of reform and implementation; the national non-domestic rate; the choice of a poll tax; and why the ‘final solution’ of direct central control has been eschewed. The ability of each theoretical approach in answering these five key questions is then assessed in the light of what we know about the history and logic of local government finance in Britain. The conclusion is that the reform can be explained, but that no single theoretical approach can give a completely satisfactory account. Overall, a competitive party politics model, complemented by public choice ideology and bureaucratic process, gives the fullest explanation.

The most basic question about the structure and organization of government is Why we should be concerned about this question at all?' Many of us trained in political science programs during the behavioral revolution were taught to believe that the structures of government were insignificant as a focus for research. The structures ofgovernment became encapsulated in an opaque black box; that part of the political system where decisions were made. Fortunately, this view no longer prevails and there is increasing interest in structural questions, in part generated by the increasing interest in the state as a focus for political inquiry (Dyson, 1980; Benjamin and Elkin, 1985). Much of the work on the state as yet, however, leaves that concept largely undifferentiated and has not dealt systematically with the structure of the state apparatus. Thus, concern for the development of state theory, as well as the concerns of those interested in public policy, has returned structural questions to a more central position in political science.

More than 25 years have now passed since the idea of a regular social reporting about the effects of political programmes was first introduced, i.e. a System of Social Accounts (SSA) that was to supplement the System of National Accounts (SNA). The SNA could not provide answers to vital social questions pertaining to those parts of our living conditions that could not be evaluated in economic terms and consequently were not covered by the System of National Accounts, nor to questions of how welfare and living conditions differed in various population groups.

Under what conditions do dominant policy ideas change in Japanese bureaucratic organizations? The answer is developed in reference to a rare empirical case in which critical information has been released about intra-bureaucracy politics, the Japanese Ministry of Finance during the 1969–1971 international monetary crisis. The paper contends, first, that the crisis did not automatically lead to a change of a dominant policy idea prevalent in the Ministry. A policy change occurred only after tactful leadership was exercised by the highest Ministry official. Second, dynamics of paralysis and change were strongly shaped by structures and norms characteristic of Japanese organizations. At a more general level, the case study shows that the exercise of policy-changing leadership vis-á-vis bureaucracies depends on two intra- governmental structure variables: institutional arrangements within and surrounding bureaucracies; and the level of information control exercised by bureaucracies.

Existing research identifies partisan differences in taxing choices made by state governments. Research has also found that, even when controlling for intrastate characteristics such as party, jurisdictions respond to the taxing decisions of their neighbours, particularly when citizens can easily cross-border shop. These studies treat political and competitive factors as independent influences on taxes. We suggest they are more likely to interact in taxing decisions. We argue that the political costs of cross-border shopping are higher for Republicans, and the threat of it should have a greater negative impact on taxes when that party controls major state policy-making institutions. Our analyses of state cigarette taxes between 1980 and 2011 confirm that a higher threat of cross-border shopping has a larger negative impact on taxes under Republican governors. We conclude that, by missing the interaction between partisanship and the threat of fiscal mobility, previous work misestimates key influences on tax competition.

As intense international competition along with rapidly changing product markets and technology have come to dominate the economic environment for firms, industries, and nations, government pursuit of a coordinated, proactive industrial policy has increasingly been viewed as a key to national economic success. Owing largely to its utility in generating consensus-formation, corporatist concertation has been suggested by a number of commentators as an ideal mechanism for implementing industrial policies. However, the legitimacy of corporatism as a mode of interest intermediation rests on the capacity of interest group representatives to win benefits for all their members, while industrial policy decisions are by nature selective or discriminatory. This feature of industrial policy casts doubts upon its compatibility with corporatism. The postwar policy-making experiences of Japan, Sweden, and West Germany support this skepticism.

Federalism allows state politicians opportunities to undermine or support for federal policies. As a result, voters often have varied impressions of the same federal programmes. To test how this dynamic affects voting behaviour, I gather data on the severity of the opioid epidemic from 2006–2016. I exploit discontinuities between states that expanded Medicaid and those that did not to gain causal leverage over whether expansion affected the severity of the epidemic and whether these policy effects affected policy feedback. I show that the decision to expand Medicaid reduced the severity of the opioid epidemic. I also show that expanding Medicaid and subsequent reductions in the severity of the opioid epidemic increased support for the Democratic Party. The results imply that the Republican Party performed better in places where voters did not have access to Medicaid expansion and where the epidemic worsened, demonstrating an unintended consequence of federalism on policy feedback.

The EU infrastructure policy has relied on Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) as a means to successfully deliver infrastructure of benefit for the EU. To reach its infrastructure policy objectives, the EU has implemented support mechanisms aimed at facilitating the delivery of PPPs. This article is aimed at evaluating to what extent these mechanisms have actually contributed to improving the economic performance of PPPs. To that end, we have selected the case of Spanish road PPPs for empirical analysis. The main result shows that EU support positively influences the economic performance of PPP projects. This is caused by the fact that the EU conditions its financial support on a project’s meeting a set of requirements that help assure the success of the project. From this result, we obtain a set of conclusions that may be generalised to other cases, and provide a contribution to the body of knowledge on PPPs.

Although the United States (US) federal bureaucracy is plagued by high vacancy rates generally, quorum requirements and small board sizes make vacancies particularly problematic within major independent regulatory commissions. Not all vacancies, however, are created equal. By statute, some major boards allow members to continue serving beyond their original term in the absence of a confirmed replacement. The difference between an empty seat and a holdover official is important as it can determine whether a board is functional or inoperable. In this article, we examine how the presence of holdover provisions within such commissions alters confirmation dynamics and vacancy rates. Evidence suggests that holdover provisions lead to quicker confirmation on nominations as well as fewer complete vacancies. Such structures thus help mitigate the short-term problems stemming from staffing independent regulatory boards, especially given the tendency towards obstruction in the US Senate.

Research into the detection of fraud and corruption has brought many new insights in recent decades, partly thanks to a decrease in the costs of data collection and processing. However, access to data often remains an issue, especially when fraud or corruption seems to be present. This article applies a simple detection method focussing on possible manipulations in the car registration process in the Czech Republic, where car registration plates are allegedly assigned in random order. As access to official data was denied, we collected data in the field for a random sample of 5,000 cars, and used this to examine the existence of statistical relationships between the cars’ estimated price at registration and their registration plate numbers. The results show that cars with intuitively appealing registration plates are on average significantly more expensive than other cars. Moreover, this price difference corresponds to the relative scarcity of the given type of registration plate number, which could be a sign of discretionary behaviour in the allocation of such plates.

In the context of declining relative output and productivity there have been increasing calls for the American government to play a greater role in industrial policy in recent years. Traditionally, however, US government intervention has been ad hoc and reactive rather than planned and strategic. Regulation policy has rarely been linked to economic growth, and most recently has evolved in a policy context separate from and largely antagonistic to business. Direct and indirect government aid is largely a result of the lobbying activities of diverse economic interests operating in an open but fragmented policy system. Of the various industrial policy options open to federal governments only one, facilitative or positive adjustment policy, is politically and ideologically possible. Even this, however, will be difficult to implement in a pluralistic and fragmented political system.

Drawing primarily from the Turkish example, this essay examines the fit of the input-output policy model, widely used in West, to less developed countries (LDCs). Three hypotheses are explored. In LDCs, compared to the West: (1) Policy patterns are more subject to political penetration; (2) once implemented, policies have a higher probability of penetrating social conditions; and (3) implementation structures and practices are less penetrable by policy directives.

The major bottleneck to innovative policy formation and delivery in LDCs is the implementation process. Bureaucratic resistance and hesitancy to innovate are due to a control rather than service orientation, stemming from the peculiar sequencing of development of state apparatuses vis-a-vis the marketplace. These historical-institutional peculiarities do not appear to detract from the input-output model's ability to spot targets of opportunity for useful policy inquiry in LDCs.

This paper examines the determinants of Japan's most serious postwar blunder: failure to define and implement effective and timely counter-measures to deal with its change from deficit to surplus international monetary status during the 1969–1971 period. It concludes that intense bureaucratic compartmentalization and a lack of supra-ministerial leadership of national policy were key determinants of this failure, leaving Japan's political system dependent upon irresistible external pressure (gai-atsu,) in this case from the United States, to define and force implementation of necessary policy changes. This critical but largely ignored episode illustrates a negative aspect of the traditional insulation of Japan's national bureacracy from political (as opposed to administrative) interference in the definition and pursuit of basic national policy objectives.

In 2010, the United States Congress placed a moratorium on earmarks – congressionally mandated spending projects. But did the earmark moratorium actually rid public policy of earmarks? I use earmark data and 2010–2020 state-level highway funding metrics to examine the relationship between previously expired transportation earmarks and federal highway funding during the earmark moratorium. Earmarks in the 2005 surface transportation law (SAFETEA-LU) continued to benefit certain states in 2020, even though the projects technically expired in 2009. This is because the funding “formulas” established by all post-2009 surface transportation laws were fully determined by the highway allocation percentage each state received in the preceding year, inclusive of earmarks. Further, I find the relationship between SAFETEA-LU earmarks and state funding disparities strengthened from 2010 to 2020, meaning the expired earmarks increased in policy significance during the moratorium. Highly earmarked states became even more advantaged after the earmarks were institutionalised into the highway funding formula.

The publication of a major report on social expenditure under the auspices of the OECD Manpower and Social Affairs Committee raises many questions relevant to public policy. The report is distinctive in that it not only deals with public expenditure for the past two decades, but also projects to 1990 levels of public expenditure for income-maintenance, health, education and related programmes. Given the variety of questions raised by this report – analytic, methodological, comparative and prescriptive – the Journal of Public Policy is making it the subject of an international symposium, with comments from leading social scientists and policymakers of diverse experiences and orientations, who have been invited to examine the foundations of the report, and to consider its implications