Policymakers hold and seek to act on beliefs concerning trade strategies as well as those concerning trade tactics and instruments. In contrast to prominent hypotheses in the literature, this article argues that constraints placed on specific dimensions of trade policy by societal groups and state institutions appear to play a greater role in shaping the impact of beliefs on policy choices than overall shifts in discretion accorded to policymakers. Insights into the resurgence of the retaliatory tariff in U.S. trade policy during 1985–88 are at the interaction of policy beliefs and variation in executive discretion. Although lending support to scholarship focusing on the interaction of ideas and institutions, these findings raise questions concerning prominent claims about the significance of policy beliefs.

The census is a social fact, the outcome of a process that involves the interaction of public laws and institutions and citizens' responses to an official inquiry. However, it is not a ‘hard’ fact. Reasons for inevitable defects in the census count are listed in the first section; the second section reports efforts by the US Census Bureau to identify sources of error in census coverage, and make estimates of the size of the errors. The use of census data for policy purposes, such as political representation and allocating funds, makes these defects controversial. Errors may be removed by making adjustments to the initial census count. However, because adjustment reallocates resources between groups, it has become the subject of political conflict. The paper describes the conflict between statistical practices, laws and public policy about census adjustment in the United States, and concludes by considering the extent to which causes in America are likely to be found in other countries.

Why do German policymakers support some aspects of a single European pension market, but not others? This article argues that the German government’s preferences towards European Union (EU) pension directives are best explained by combining historical institutionalism (HI) and domestic discourse analysis (DA). Each approach by itself is insufficient to account for the observed variation between 1991 and 2007. Arguments based on party ideologies offer less explanatory power. HI explains why all governments – Kohl, Schröder, and Merkel – protected employer-sponsored book reserve pensions, a cornerstone of Germany’s coordinated market economy, from the scope of EU directives. DA allows us to grasp how interests were reframed. While the status quo stance of the Kohl government succeeded in delegitimizing supporters of alternative pension security concepts, the Schröder administration imposed an economically efficient pension reform without much public support. The grand coalition, in turn, abandoned Chancellor Merkel’s initial plan to expand second-tier pensions in the light of rising pressures that the Left Party posed for the Social Democratic coalition partner.

Major social reforms affect the extent to which social rights are granted widely and equally or selectively and in a manner re-enforcing social stratification. Thus, they affect the amount of institutionally sanctioned inequality in a welfare state. This paper seeks to explain the politics of making decisions about unequal social rights. It emphasizes the importance of studying the substantive contents of the policy changes that are on the reform agenda; the kind of actors involved in reform controversies; and the kind of demands they raise. Which actors involved prevail in these controversies, however, is a function of the dynamic of political competition at the time of legislative decision-making. That dynamic tends to be centrifugal; it empowers groups at strategic positions in the political constellation. The paper develops analytical categories for capturing both typological distinctions of substantive policy contents and the empowering dynamic. It demonstrates the significance of this model by analyzing four instances of major welfare reform in Germany.

Fiscal decentralisation theory calls for enhanced local revenue and spending responsibilities to promote the efficiency of public service delivery. However, some have pointed to the danger of local capture cancelling out these effects. I examine the argument that organised crime violence (OCV) intensifies as mafias fight for access to local government resources, which they consider an attractive income source. I regress violence on local spending (LS) in Mexican municipalities over the period 1995–2015. I find a significant relationship between LS and the intensity of violence: higher levels of LS per capita are strongly related to higher homicide rates, conditional on them being positive. However, LS does not determine the probability of OCV taking place in the first place. The results suggest that caution should be exercised when initiating decentralisation reforms in the context of local capture and OCV.

This paper is an attempt to make more specific the familiar sociological notion of the ‘unanticipated consequences of social action’. Reasons for the relative neglect by practitioners and analysts of the side-effects of legislative action are suggested. The discussion of unintended and unanticipated social action is related to the work of classic sociologists, to theorists of diffusion, and to the study of innovations and inventions. Previous studies of Congress (including those by the author) are shown to have focussed on process and representation at the expense of the legislation itself and its consequences, examples of which are considered in this paper. An economic law about the creation of demands by legislation, explaining the development of many side-effects, is proposed. The relationship between rules expressed in enactments and the whole system of formal and informal rules in the life of a society is explored. A number of considerations for future work are outlined, and the paper concludes by arguing that greater awareness of the problem of side-effects will have two valuable consequences: (1) the identification of general tendencies may help to avoid gross perversion of purposes; (2) even where there are no clear regularities of response, the observation of patterns of side-effects and their correlation with other factors may enable analysts to anticipate likely side-effects and suggest readjustments.

This article seeks to answer the question of why we see continuity in German monetary policy but relative discontinuity in German policy toward European monetary regimes. The paper develops an analytical framework for understanding the factors that account for the dynamics of policy. The article argues that the institutional structure of policy-making is the key factor that accounts for patterns of policy dynamics. The way domestic policy institutions are structured will determine who has a say and when they have a say in policy-making, thus shaping the pattern of policy dynamics. The article shows that the institutions of policy-making are crucial determinants in the dynamics of German monetary and regime policy by the way they offer or block opportunities, at particular points in the policy process, for interested policy actors to achieve the types of policies they want.

The policy studies literature is divided on how information processing takes place in policy processes. Punctuated equilibrium theory claims that policymakers tend to process information disproportionately, giving more weight to some incoming signals than to others. By contrast, thermostatic models of policymaking argue that policymakers respond in a more proportionate way. In this paper, we analyse information processing in the adoption of Total Allowable Catches (TACs) under the European Union’s (EU) Common Fisheries Policy. Based on a novel measure for the proportionality of information processing, it shows that over time TACs have become more closely aligned with incoming signals about fish stocks. This development can be explained through a combination of changing discourses around fisheries conservation and institutional adjustments in EU fisheries policy. This analysis has implications for the debate between punctuated equilibrium and thermostatic models of policymaking and our understanding of the effectiveness of EU fisheries policies.

The outbreak of COVID-19 unleashed a severe crisis in society. The suddenness and speed with which the disease spread into a global pandemic makes it an outstanding case for showing how bureaucracy acts in response to a crisis marked by uncertainty and urgency. This article focuses on the role played by the central government bureaucracy in preparing and enacting the Danish government’s response to the COVID-19 crisis. It is based on full access to internal government files related to crisis management during the winter and spring of 2020. These files include memos, e-mails, decision notes, and draft decisions from key civil servants. The article demonstrates the strength of the theory of bounded rationality when it comes to analyzing the interaction between top civil servants and political executives. Moreover, it shows how administrative and political executives can mold a governmental organization to overcome the inertia inherent in bureaucratic organization and procedures.

Many families, despite need and eligibility, struggle to meet programme deadlines to retain critical benefits. When families fail to complete programme recertification on time, they lose needed support. While scholars have tested behavioural theories like chunking, implementation intention, and loss framing to promote programme uptake, less is known about how well-designed communications can promote continuity through successful recertification, especially where recertification entails a significant administrative burden. Further, scant evidence guides how best to frame recertification deadlines. In a randomised trial with government partners (n = 3,539), we find that sending a reminder letter informed by these behavioural theories increased the number of families maintaining participation by 14 per cent. Further, anchoring people to a deadline month may suffice to thread the motivational needle: overcoming procrastination without lowering self-efficacy by anchoring them to a specific day. Adopting the most effective letter in Washington, DC, would lead 766 more families to participate uninterrupted each year.

This article examines the issues and the problems confronted by those conducting comparative research of charity-state relations in England, Canada and the United States. It also provides an explanation of why the interaction between charities and the state is important for political science: in part this is because in all three countries charities have become increasingly dependent on government for their income. In section I, the article examines the relationship between the concepts of a third sector, voluntary sector, non-profit sector and charity and concludes that the last might be the most appropriate to employ in comparative analysis. In section 2, the authors argue that in both England and Canada the state is formally responsible for the formation of certain kinds of charities; they also argue that in the United States a stricter separation between state and charity exists but that, in practice, the boundaries between charities and the state and the market are not clear ones.

Danish industrial policy reflects a ‘liberalistic’ paradigm, with industrial subsidies being general rather than selective, and based on profitability. There was an increase in the number of industrial policy instruments introduced in the second half of the 1970s, and in particular there seems to have been an increase in subsidies for technological innovation. The amount of money allocated for industrial subsidies has increased, especially during the economic recession. However, Danish industrial policy can only be conceived of as a crisis response policy in a relatively diffuse way, with only a few arrangements directly targetted at firms in difficulties, whereas most aim at making the surviving firms expand, innovate and increase their exports. Similarly, with few exceptions Danish industrial policy can be seen as anticipatory only in a very general way. The administration of industrial policy is characterised by close cooperation between state, industry and labour in tripartite boards and committees that take decisions about the administration of industrial policy or advise the government. The widespread use of such tripartite bodies hampers changes in industrial policy because all partners have to acquiesce in the changes. Innovation in Danish industrial policy is likely to be a gradual process, with most existing arrangements surviving, and a desultory increase in the use of more selective measures.

The regulation of risks to health and the environment in the United States is currently undergoing serious criticism for its impact on the recession economy. Attempts to diminish health risks by placing stringent limitations on potentially harmful substances are thought to be excessively expensive and ineffective. To remedy this problem, basic reforms in the way these regulations are fashioned have been proposed. Perhaps the best known is cost-benefit analysis. Nevertheless, there are a number of areas where agencies purposely avoid making tradeoffs between costs and benefits and instead assign priorities among levels and types of benefits. However, despite a considerable literature examining the merits of making tradeoffs in regulatory decisions, little attention has been given to the disparate premises of the tradeoff and no-tradeoff rules and how the choice of decision rules determines the role of cost considerations in agency decision making. This paper not only examines these issues, but develops an analytical framework for restructuring the choice between rules. Instead of abolishing the no-tradeoff rules, the analytical framework proposed here can be used to generate a compromise rule which permits partial tradeoffs under certain well-defined circumstances.

The United Kingdom's system of utility regulation – controlling prices rather than profits – is under increasing criticism. At the same time, the government continues to employ rate of return controls when purchasing from the defence and pharmaceutical industries. The existence of alternative regulatory regimes raises three questions. First, has price cap regulation enabled the UK utilities to earn excessive profits? Second, has profit regulation prevented excessive profitability in the defence and pharmaceutical industries? Third, how does profitability compare between price cap (utilities) and rate of return (defence/pharmaceuticals) regulation? Our results suggest that three of the four utilities studied have been able to earn rates of return that are considerably greater than in the corporate sector as a whole. Price caps have been far too lenient. In defence and pharmaceuticals there is less evidence of excessive profitability but these suppliers still earn 25 per cent more than comparable firms elsewhere.

Although the NHS operates throughout the United Kingdom, it is organised, and services are planned, differently in each of the four countries: England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Curiously, the differences are generally either overlooked or dismissed as irrelevant. Yet their persistence gives the lie to the view that the NHS is a highly centralised, monolithic entity. Moreover, they illustrate the paradox of considerable diversity within a unitary state. This paper examines some of the variations that exist, noting that recent changes in the organisation of health services have done little to modify these differences. Indeed, in regard to developments in the private health sector and to approaches to planning and priority-setting, the differences may, in future, become greater. For such a compact entity, UK policy analysts are surprisingly uninformed about practices occurring around them. The paper argues that there is a need for researchers and policymakers to pay more attention to intra-UK variations such as those evident in the NHS and to devise ways of ascertaining their impact on service delivery and, if possible, on performance.