The paper examines three forms of budgetary rule applied to the food stamp program — discretion, entitlement, and expenditure caps. The different budget rules are modeled with respect to their reversion point, the outcome that prevails by default if no cooperative agreement is reached. Hypotheses concerning budgetary politics and policy are derived from the models and tested using historical data from one arena over time. The case study is relevant to the broader problem of welfare spending. The dilemma is how to reconcile budget protection needed for the impoverished against the fragmentation and fluctuations of routine political conflict, and budget integration needed for democratic deliberation regarding the multiple tasks of government. Entitlement status insures program benefits for qualifying households, but it also carves off a portion of total outlays declared to be relatively uncontrollable, outside of the annual mechanisms of review and adjustment. Discretionary budgeting, by contrast, incorporates welfare within ordinary collective decision-making that establishes priorities across competing claimants for public funds, but it also risks making the poor in society victims of their own vulnerability. Expenditure caps have recently been proposed as a solution to the dilemma, allowing outlays to grow automatically up to a given threshold but requiring conscious choice if they threaten to breach the threshold. Caps are celebrated by proponents as an instrument fostering enhanced managerial oversight and reasonable expenditure control. This study of the food stamp program, however, reveals that caps are more likely to engender procedural complexities and substantive policy bias. Moreover, these are logical and foreseeable results, easily deduced from the models of budgetary rule.

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 government plays first fiddle in European Union (EU) decision-making processes, but a role in EU governance is also performed by the national parliament, which has gained additional competence to submit reasoned opinions based on the subsidiarity principle and participate in the political dialogue with the European Commission. The authors trace the policy-shaping and policy-taking processes and explore the impact of parliamentary and government involvement in EU policy-making on belated and timely transposition of EU directives in the Czech Republic. This comparative analysis of six directives, of which three were transposed on time and the other three from the same policy areas not, shows that the connection between ex-ante and ex-post stages still seems weak, and thus, greater involvement by parliament in EU affairs does not alone affect the time of transposition. Instead, the capacity of the government, determined partly by the salience of the legislation and its characteristics, is the main explanation for the transposition delays.

Interest groups are key intermediary actors that communicate societal interests and preferences to public officials. Given public officials’ reliance on interest groups’ input in public policy processes, it is essential to understand how groups establish policy positions and assess the democratic nature of this process. Focusing on the leadership perspective, this article examines how interest groups involve their membership base in the process of defining their policy positions. The article relies on qualitative data from interviews with the leaders of interest groups active at the EU level and the statutes of these organizations. The findings show that the nature of policy issues under discussion and unequal resources of members lead to biased membership involvement in policy position-taking. While leaders are aware of these dynamics, their efforts to mitigate unequal participation seem limited, which raises questions about the representative potential of interest groups and the legitimacy of their policy claims.

State and local governments put hundreds of referendums on the ballot each year. Often, they pass but sometimes they fail. What happens after a successful or failed attempt at the ballot box? Do advocates go back to voters with another request? And if they do, do they tend to succeed? We employ a regression discontinuity empirical framework to causally estimate referendum dynamics in the arena of land conservation. Our results suggest municipalities where a referendum just barely fails hold about 0.5 more referendums and pass about 0.28 more referendums than municipalities that just barely pass, meaning initial defeat is often reversed. We also investigate whether strategic changes are made in election approaches for those that try again. We find no evidence of systematic patterns in strategic revisions for municipalities that fail their first referendum. However, when revisions are made, our evidence suggests that voters appear to respond positively.