Strike costs provide incentives for bargaining parties to seek agreement by effective negotiation. To perform this role efficiently both the magnitude and distribution of such costs are crucial. Despite the apparently low aggregate costs of strikes the extreme concentration of stoppages indicates that costs may be sufficient. The burden of such costs appears inefficient in certain situations. In such cases government intervention may be required. Impending legislative changes in Britain contribute little to strike containment and are likely to manifest their effect in bargaining outcomes as opposed to the bargaining process. Increases in the strike costs suffered by one side in wage negotiations serve only to increase the relative bargaining power of the other side. Reductions in state subsidies to the strike costs suffered by labour appear more effective as a device for controlling wage growth than strike activity. A poor level of understanding of the strike process makes this an area where public policy must incorporate gradualism and pragmatism.

Past discussions of market versus planned economies in terms of the efficiency/equity tradeoff missed the adverse equity implications of totalitarian political systems and the importance of pluralistic political decisionmaking structures. The paper demonstrates the role of the paternalistic party–state in creating nonmarket inequities, limiting the articulation of political preferences concerning social safety nets, and restricting nonstate sources of welfare. The transition to pluralistic market economies implies potential improvements both in equity and efficiency. The distinct problems of the transition are primarily rooted in uncertainties arising from the scarcity of resources and the fluidity of political preferences.

Social indicators research developed in the United States at the end of the 1960s and the principal ideas and approaches were received by West German social scientists soon thereafter. It became common usage to speak of a social indicators movement, an expression which is rather unusual in regard to a scientific approach.

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.

Innovation is only one of a range of public policy responses to social and technological novelty and is not necessarily the most appropriate response. While a number of case studies have provided information about determinants of innovation and have traced processes leading to the adoption of innovation, there has been little attention given to the processes that lead to the rejection, deferral or avoidance of available innovations. This paper examines the technical and political controversy surrounding a proposed resource recovery steam plant in metropolitan Syracuse, New York. Although a report on solid waste management had been prepared in 1969 and a dozen consulting studies authorized over the next decade, by 1981 no decision had been reached. In analyzing twelve years of ‘nondecision’, this study seeks to examine some of the difficulties of using technical information in complex policy problems. The case highlights a number of issues pertaining to the use of information in technology policy including: (1) the role of scientific and technical information in policymaking; (2) the interplay between technical information and political values, and (3) the reciprocal effects of information resources and decision processes.

When the European Monetary System was negotiated in 1978, governments in France, Britain, and Italy took very different approaches to this new international institution for coordinating exchange rate policies. The French government actively supported the creation of the European Monetary System, the Italian government entered the system but on weaker terms than the French, and the British government refused to enter the system, preferring to allow the pound to float. To explain these different policy choices, I analyze the impact of domestic politics and institutions on exchange rate policy, paying particular attention to how the organization of bank-industry relations and government instability shape policymakers' policy preferences and their abilities to implement these preferences.

Previous scholarship has shown that experience with public policies can affect citizens’ willingness to participate in politics. However, few studies have examined whether the effect of experience with policy is moderated by existing policy environments. We focus on the impact of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and examine how it affects foreign-born Latinos’ political orientation and behavior. We find a relationship between enrollment in DACA and political orientation and that the effect on participation is moderated by the intensity of enforcement in an immigrant’s county of residence.

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.

This article examines the institutional characteristics of market and centrally planned economies and their impact on the environment. It argues that while the planned economies are utilising market mechanisms in environmental protection, their market counterparts are facing more and more environmental problems that require governmental intervention. Using the latest statistical information, the records of sulphur dioxide emission under market and planning over the past twenty years are compared. The findings show that while planned economies generated more pollution due to energy inefficiency, they were nevertheless quite effective in reducing pollution under centralised coordination. This is particularly true at the initial stage of pollution control. Although the industrialised market economies were capable of diverting resources into pollution control, they were equally capable of causing environmental disruption, especially at their early stages of industrialisation. Finally, it is argued that environmental protection in post-socialist societies is likely to experience a downturn in the near future. This is due to the decreasing role of government coordination, the lack of a legal system, and the difficulty of developing a well-functioning market.

Researchers and practitioners are increasingly embracing systems approaches to deal with the complexity of public service delivery and policy evaluation. However, there is little agreement on what exactly constitutes a systems approach, conceptually or methodologically. We review and critically synthesize systems literature from the fields of health, education, and infrastructure. We argue that the common theoretical core of systems approaches is the idea that multi-dimensional complementarities between a policy and other aspects of the policy context are the first-order problem of policy design and evaluation. We distinguish between macro-systems approaches, which focus on the collective coherence of a set of policies or institutions, and micro-systems approaches, which focus on how a single policy interacts with the context in which it operates. We develop a typology of micro-systems approaches and discuss their relationship to standard impact evaluation methods as well as to work in external validity, implementation science, and complexity theory.