European Community policymaking has been predicated upon the member governments acting as gatekeepers which mediate between their respective domestic political systems and EC institutions. However, the sweeping changes associated with Project 1992 threaten the gatekeeping status of the Twelve. This article explores the domestic and international consequences, which are cast in terms of three scenarios: the maintenance of the status quo, the emergence of a ‘Europe of Regions’, and a variegated set of outcomes. As an attempt to move beyond the realm of pure speculation, concrete lessons are culled from the reform of the European Regional Development Fund since 1979 and its effect on national and subnational interests in Britain and the Federal Republic of Germany. The theoretical premise is that national and subnational actors respond to Community initiatives within a structured context, the domestic policy networks in which they are embedded. These clusters of interorganizational relationships at the domestic level reflect the underlying distribution of resources among actors, and endow them with different capabilities and vulnerabilities as they seek to cope with changes administered to their policy environment by the EC. The findings suggest skepticism of the image of strengthened regions breaking out of the orbit of weakened states with the assistance of the EC. While the ability of member states to retain their roles as gatekeepers varies, this capacity remains strong. Moreover, subnational actors often view the EC as yet another exogenous institutional constraint on action.

Political adversaries have reason and opportunity to use foreign lessons to gain advantage in political conflicts. Political factors strongly affect the way public policy lessons are drawn and transformed into public policy. Political opponents contest the value, practicality, and transferability of policy initiatives in order to bias the outcome. The paper hypothesizes that (i) the politicization of lesson-drawing induces issue experts to emphasize the descriptive and technical aspects of programs; (2) gives an incentive to advocates of change to use lessons to advance their position during the agenda-setting process; and (3) gives opponents of change an incentive to draw counterbalancing negative lessons from foreign experience when a proposed lesson reaches the point where adoption is entirely possible. The 1988 Congressional debate over mandatory plant closing prenotification provides evidence supporting hypotheses. The paper further hypothesizes: (4) most polities will not adopt both conservative and liberal programs even when theoretically they could do so; and (5) the degree to which a population of polities adopt a particular lesson will be a function of the program's economic and politicial feasibility. The diffusion of labor market and income maintenance policies across the American states supports both of these claims.

The literature on policy success and failure does not capture policies that may be too successful, as well as “too much” and/or “too soon” patterns of policy. To bridge this gap, this conceptual article relies on one of the most robust findings in the psychology of judgement, namely that many people are overconfident, prone to place too much faith in their intuitions. Based on this premise, the analytical framework advanced here revolves around two key dimensions of policy overreaction: (i) the effects of positive and negative events, and (ii) the effects of overestimation and accurate estimation of information. Based on these dimensions, the article identifies and illustrates four distinct modes of policy overreaction that reflect differences in the nature of implemented policy. It argues that the policy tools menu utilised in each mode of policy overreaction is dominated by unique mechanisms for changing or coordinating behaviour, which, once established, produce excessive – objective and/or perceived – social costs.

Threats to effective policy-making arising from ubiquitous circumstances of complexity and uncertainty are often taken as reasons to eschew both the attacking of social problems through public policy and cogitation, such as policy analysis, in the policy process. It is suggested here that, as complexity and uncertainty increase, more cogitation is required, not less; but it is crucial that cogitation be of the appropriate sort. Greater use should be made of policy design, as opposed to methods emphasising selection among prespecified alternatives. The required design task varies with the level of difficulty – defined by complexity, uncertainty, and lack of feedback – in any case at hand. A taxonomy of levels of difficulty is developed, together with a preliminary outline of the design task required at each level.

Policy analysts typically presume that future payoffs should be discounted relative to present ones, and that this discounting should proceed at the same rate for all goods and all periods. Closer inspection of four arguments for discounting, however, shows these practices to be problematic. Only two of those arguments provide plausible justifications for time-discounting at all; and neither of those justify a constant rate throughout all periods or for all goods. Indeed, there is an important class of ‘nontradable’ goods which can be discounted only in their own terms. The overall conclusion is that policymakers ought, logically as well as morally, to weight the interests of the future far more heavily than in ordinary discounting procedures.

In recent years, issues of environment and human development have been gathered together under the integrative framework of sustainability (sustainable development), creating unprecedented demands on policy. Major policy processes have been constructed and are producing new and supposedly far reaching agreements, policies and strategies. However palatable politically, the likelihood of these leading to significant positive changes in the environment or human use of it, however, is questionable. This situation is sketched, using the Australian setting as an example. The article then establishes in detail the problem attributes particular to sustainability, and argues the crucial proposition that this policy field is different from others in both kind and degree. Some implications of this for policy analysis and prescription are noted.

Independent agencies are exempted from the accountability mechanisms inherent in the ministerial hierarchy. To compensate for this, politicians incorporate all kinds of information and reporting requirements into the statutes of the organizations. However, the degree to which this occurs varies considerably, which raises the question: Why are some agencies are made more accountable than others? This study examines the impact of political salience on degrees of accountability, controlling for other potential explanations. Using original data on 103 independent agencies in the Netherlands, the analysis demonstrates that salience has a twofold effect. First, agencies dealing with more salient issues are made more politically accountable. Second, agencies whose statutes are written when the issue of accountability is more salient are also subject to higher degrees of accountability. Other explanatory factors are the number of veto players and the legal basis of the organization.

This essay extends John Kingdon's work on predecision policy processes in US domestic policy to the foreign policy domain. While Kingdon's insights have significantly improved our understanding of predecision processes, further development is necessary for extension across both domestic and foreign policy domains. Kingdon's incremental evolutionary metaphor for alternative specification has to be revamped to include both gradualist and nonincremental policy types. Scholars must also make more explicit, elaborate, and thorough use of Cohen, March and Olsen's ‘garbage can’ model of decision making. To these ends, we offer a typology of policy alternatives that incorporates alternative metaphors premised on recent developments in evolutionary theory. The essay concludes by suggesting a research agenda amenable to pursuit in both national and cross-national contexts.

Interest in participatory governance recognises that communities can make valuable contributions to governance, but attempts to strengthen community participation encounter obstacles theorised as failures or incompleteness of participatory governance. This paper offers an alternative approach, drawing on ethnographic field data from a decade of work in rural Australian communities. It shows the nature of the community agency that is at the heart of policy interest in participation and how it differs from government efforts at community engagement. These insights suggest a need to rethink participatory governance, not as a single process with multiple participants, but as the juxtaposition of different ways of governing. Doing so opens up the possibility of governments and communities working together in new ways, with governments not only valuing what communities can contribute in theory, but also recognising how diverse communities work in practice.

This paper surveys literature from several disciplines on how and why governments grow. The empirical question as to whether, or to what degree, government has grown is critically entwined with the nature of the ‘dependent variable’ chosen (federal government expenditures as a proportion of GNP, total real public expenditures, number of government employees as a percentage of the workforce, etc.). Specific approaches to the study of government growth considered include those associated with: Wagner's ‘Law’, the ‘Displacement Effect Hypothesis’, formal models of political and economic behavior, behavioral views of organizational decision making, the ineffectiveness of the public sector in coping with economic decline, and Marxist views.

This paper aims to redress the asymmetry in the standard economic treatment of the shortcomings of markets and governments by developing and applying a theory of ‘nonmarket’ failure– that is, of government failure – so that the comparison between markets and governments can be made more systematically, and choices between them arrived at more intelligently. Several conclusions are drawn. First, the choice between markets and governments is not a pure one, actual systems inevitably involve combinations between markets and governments. Second, with respect to both static and dynamic efficiency criteria, markets generally do better than governments. Third, there are various ways in which government can contribute to improving the functioning of markets. Fourth, market forces can play a useful role in improving the functioning of government and reducing the incidence of nonmarket failures.

Past studies of the dynamics of U.S.-Canada environmental policy and policy-making have found little evidence of ‘weak’ convergence in this sector; that is, of Canadian policy moving towards the U.S. model of adversarial legalism, an implementation style based upon procedural policy instruments such as action-forcing statutes, citizen suits, and judicial activism. However, recent efforts at de-regulation and the reformation of government in the U.S., and moves towards multi-stakeholder policy-making in Canada, have altered the standard against which trends towards Canadian^ American convergence must be assessed. These reforms have moved the U.S. environmental regulatory system closer to that existing in Canada, in which regulations and other elements of the environmental regime are developed through negotiation rather than litigation. Since Canadian environmental implementation has also been altered over the same period, however, it is argued that a form of ‘strong’ convergence is emerging, in which both countries are moving not towards each other but towards a third, common, style, that associated with the development of self-regulation and voluntary initiatives under the influence of New Public Management ideas and principles.

This paper provides empirical evidence of the relation between trade openness, capital openness and government expenditures in a cross-sectional time-series context. It is shown that capital openness is significantly and negatively related to government expenditures in line with the conventional wisdom that capital mobility may undermine the ability of governments to maintain larger public sectors. More importantly, the compensation hypothesis originally proposed by Rodrik (1998) and traceable back to Cameron (1978) is not in general supported by the data.

This article analyzes the American influence on Canadian environmental regulation in order to show the international sources of domestic public policy, especially the manner in which Canadian policy development is influenced by the United States, and the specific dynamics of Canadian regulatory policy. The United States influences Canadian domestic public policy by the export of costs and the export of knowledge. An analysis of major developments in the areas of air pollution, water pollution, pesticides, toxic substance regulation, and environmental impact assessment demonstrates that American influence over Canadian environmental regulation is pervasive. The most frequent pattern is emulation, where value convergence combined with U.S. leadership leads to Canadian borrowing of U.S. policy innovations. This process can be either elite-driven or activist-driven, the latter being characterized by an enlarged scope of conflict, media exposure, and pressure campaigns on policymakers.

This case study asks whether delegated, sectoral governance by private actors and arm’s-length agencies enhances policy efficacy or does sectoral governance require a shadow of hierarchy cast by government actors to deliver desired policy results? EU energy market liberalisation shows that sectoral governance successfully mobilises regulatory expertise, capacity and legitimacy and delivers workable norms and rules for market transactions in a complex policy environment. However, it also finds that the efficacy of sectoral governance mechanisms is constrained by distributive conflicts between different national jurisdictions and sector interests. If deadlock occurs, the European Commission as governmental principal casts a double shadow of hierarchy over sectoral governance agents: the threat of further legislation and of EU competition law. While both instruments enhance policy efficacy, they cannot substitute for the intrinsic rule-making qualities of sectoral governance: governance and government play complementary roles in the policy process.

The neo-corporatist experiments of the 1970s were attempts to preserve the labor-inclusiveness of post-war European political economies in increasingly adverse domestic and international conditions. Since their demise in the early 1980s, industrial relations in Western Europe are characterized by high divergence between national systems combined with rising interdependence among national economies, creating a growth potential for inter-regime competition. Endeavors to provide the Internal Market with a Social Dimension are attempts to make the externalities of national industrial relations systems governable in a supra-national industrial order. The odds against European-level political reconstruction of industrial relations appear overwhelming.

While there is broad scholarly agreement that policy-making in the European Union (EU) involves a multitude of public and private actors at different levels of government, there is less agreement whether the EU should be conceptualized as a form of governance by networks or governance in networks. This article first examines different concepts of networks. It then sets out multiple functions of networks within the EU policy process. Particular attention is paid to the extent to which networks may provide added value to European integration and improve the quality of governance by effectively solving common problems and helping to address the democratic deficit or whether, by acting as mechanisms of exclusion rather than inclusion, they actually contribute to the EU's legitimacy deficit. Since networks can enhance governance quality as well as undermine its democratic credentials, a balance sheet shows both positive and negative consequences.

This article asks what shaped immigrant policy in the 50 states between 2005 and 2011. Theoretically, politicians are influenced by electoral considerations as they craft laws. Law-makers consider both current public opinion and how the electorate is likely to change, at least in the near future. Empirically, the article analyses an original dataset on immigrant-related laws enacted by the states with a Bayesian spatial conditionally autoregressive model. The analysis shows that state immigrant policy is affected primarily by legislative professionalism, electoral ideology, state wealth and change in the foreign-born population.

The budgetary response of Estonia to the 2008 global financial crisis poses a puzzle. While many other countries increased public expenditure and ran high deficits in 2009, the Estonian government was different: it undertook fiscal retrenchment, combining expenditure cuts and tax increases, despite a large drop in economic output. This article explains why the Estonian government opted for fiscal consolidation during the crisis. The ideological position of the governing parties and their desire the join the euro-zone played an important role in driving fiscal discipline. It also argues that the key to understanding Estonia's fiscal decisions in 2009 is what happened in the 1990s: fiscal policy choices became path-dependent as a result of positive feedback loops from previous periods of fiscal consolidation. Path-dependency was further reinforced by institutional capabilities (or lack thereof) created by initial macroeconomic policy choices.

In a quantitative study using unique quarterly data across two decades, this article addresses the opposition's opportunities to influence policy; a topic that has been neglected in existing party-policy research. The idea that is developed is applied to a remarkable policy development on crime during the Danish leftwing government in the 1990s. Contrary to its policy position when it took office in 1993, the leftwing government repeatedly adopted severe restrictions to penal policy. The policy position of the rightwing opposition and its vehement and persistent criticism of the government provide an explanation, the article argues. Taking media coverage, public opinion, violence statistics, and the government's performance into account, the analysis shows that opposition criticism spurred the penal policy restrictions. Hence, by incorporating a policy agenda perspective, this article encourages a broadening of the perspective on parties’ policy influence. In particularly the opposition's opportunities to politicise issues and hereby influence policy.