It is not hard to find the complaint that a group of policies are incoherent, operate in silos or are unintegrated. The aspiration to coherence is widespread across all political systems: it is today's idea in good currency. Scholarship has identified conditions that support coherence: a strong constituency with a shared policy image. This article confirms that these are vital sources of more or less coherence, but explores the question of whether more coherence in one area comes at the cost of incoherence elsewhere.

Case study detail contrasts the Scottish Executive's projection of a unified rural policy, with the reality of a persistent Scottish agricultural sector, with contending (multiple) publics with separate and often conflicting agendas: the case study found no unified policy community with shared perceptions. While a lack of coordination may simply be the manifestation of poor policymaking, this piece argues that in other cases the practical limitations on policy harmonization have to be acknowledged. Imperfectly coordinated rural policy may be inevitable as coordination in particular niches is often a casualty of competing priorities. This article argues against over ambitious expectations about the feasibility of integration. Accordingly it suggests that the project to rid policy practice of incoherence is too heroic: instead this article rediscovers the virtues of bargaining among informed and relevant participants, and incremental politics.

We provide the first comprehensive study of lobbying across venues by studying interest group registrations in both the legislative and administrative branches. We present four major findings based on Federal and state data. Firstly, groups engage in substantial administrative lobbying relative to legislative lobbying. Secondly, the vast majority of groups lobby the legislature, but a large proportion of groups also lobby the bureaucracy. Thirdly, representational biases in legislative lobbying are replicated across venues: business groups dominate administrative lobbying at least as much as they do legislative lobbying. Finally, the level of interest group activity in one venue for a given policy area is strongly related to its level in the other venue. The findings potentially have important implications for the impact of institutional design on both the form and promotion of broad participation in policy-making as well as the ultimate content of policies chosen by democratic governments, broadly construed.

The extent to which e-governance develops in a country is a function of the collective national and local capital supplying IT services and of informal social and human capital creating a demand for e-governance. Supply requires public officials and citizens to have access to the Internet and access varies enormously according to a country's modern resources and political openness. But the characterization of these differences as a digital divide is misleadingly static. A diffusion model of Internet access shows that it is more realistic to think of cross-national differences in terms of leading and lagging countries; in this model laggards have the potential to catch up with leaders. Differences in the capacity of countries to supply standard e-government services are a consequence of its degree of modern resources and to supply e-participation facilities reflects its political openness and extent of corruption. In countries with a high degree of modern resources and a majority of adults on line, digital choice creates limits as well as opportunities for e-governance, since most non-users of the Internet are older people who see no need for going on line. Among those on line a majority prefer to contact local and central government by traditional means, such as telephone or writing a letter. In the most modern and open societies the diffusion of the Internet is most likely to promote government efficiency and the virtual linkage of disparate public agencies serving the same client. In developing countries it will be one more pressure to reduce corruption and increase bureaucratization and in relatively closed regimes it can threaten destabilization by strengthening dissident mobilization within and across national borders. Globally, the diffusion process will promote openness in ‘intermestic’ public policies that involve both national and trans-national politics. It will also reduce the proportion of native English-speakers and increase bilingual and bicultural Internet users.

In federal systems, governments have the opportunity to learn from the policy experiments – and the potential successes – of other governments. Whether they seize such opportunities, however, may depend on the expertise or past experiences of policymakers. Based on an analysis of state-level adoptions of antismoking restrictions targeted towards youths, we find that US states are more likely to emulate other states that have demonstrated the ability to successfully limit youth smoking. In addition, we find that political expertise (as captured by legislative professionalism) and policy expertise (as captured by previous youth access policy experiments at the local level) enhance the likelihood of emulating policy successes found in other states. As such, we establish that internal expertise and external learning are complements, rather than substitutes.

This paper examines trends in world military expenditures and offers an econometric examination of their determinants in 125 countries from 1972 to 1988. A simultaneous equation framework based on a public choice model shows military expenditures as a ratio of GDP to be influenced by the level of GDP, central government expenditures, other financial indicators, the form of government, and geographical characteristics of countries. The study also examines the opportunity cost of military expenditures and analyzes the budgetary trade-off between military, social, and development expenditures. Although military expenditures may benefit a given country, they may also have a negative impact on the welfare of rival nations. Hence a coordinated reduction in military expenditures that does not alter the strategic balance will increase economic wellbeing in the world.

Our understanding of international competition in regulatory policies has not progressed much because conventional theories lead to a bewildering range of conclusions. Empirical evidence has shown the limitations of simplistic models. Fresh work should overcome the obsession with ‘races’ and ‘final outcomes’ of conventional theoretical approaches and start modelling real-world mechanisms of regulatory competition. The first part of the article shows the limitations of conventional theories. The second introduces eight problems that explanations of international regulatory competition should address. It also discusses how the articles presented here contribute to the solution to problematic aspects of the puzzle. The conclusion reports results achieved in terms of key concepts of regulatory competition, sequences of cooperation and competition, the role of non-unitary actors in networked regulatory action, and why regulatory competition is still limited, both in the EU and in transatlantic relations.

One school of thought in the literature on regulatory competition in environmental and consumer policy argues that inter-jurisdictional competition promotes regulatory laxity. The other highlights rent-seeking as a major driving force, implying that regulatory laxity is rare because rent-seeking is omnipresent. We observe that in most areas of environmental and consumer policy in advanced industrialized countries regulation has become much stricter since the 1970s. What then has been driving environmental and consumer risk regulation up? A popular explanation holds that large green jurisdictions have been forcing their trading partners to trade or ratchet up their regulation. In addition, political economists have developed bottom up explanations focusing on interest group politics and corporate behaviour. This article adds to the latter line by endogenising public perceptions and by exploring the effects of corporate environmental performance strategies on environmental and consumer risk policy. The empirical relevance of propositions is illustrated with case studies on growth hormones, electronic waste, and food safety.

What is the impact of direct democracy, e.g. referendums, on public policymaking? The study will present data for Switzerland, the United States, Australia and Germany leading to the conclusion that direct democracy is an effective, but flexible veto player against expansive spending and taxation. The level of public expenditure and taxation is significantly lower in countries that have elements of direct democracy compared to pure representative democracies. Several theoretical arguments support this finding. For example, the social discount rate of voters is lower than that of politicians. Also direct democracy is related to the benefit principle in public finance. Taxpayers want their payments to be related to public services they receive. They are therefore inclined to veto projects not reflecting their preferences. Moreover, referenda have an implicit restraining effect on governments and the mere threat can reduce their capacity to act.

Cutbacks in thirteen Swedish transfer programmes are analysed to evaluate the argument that explaining welfare retrenchment is a different enterprise from explaining welfare expansion. The conclusion is that the ‘New politics of welfare’ is of major importance in the Swedish context, not only in the Anglo-Saxon context that Paul Pierson studied. Programmes relatively susceptible to non-transparent reforms have suffered larger cutbacks than other programs. Non-indexed programmes present opportunities for cutbacks by non-decision and are particularly vulnerable to obfuscation. Hence we have a politics of blame-avoidance rather than one of credit-claiming. Pensions are among the least targeted for cuts because pensioners’ organisations that emerged as the welfare state matured have gained influence at the cost of unions.

In this paper, we examine the impact of financial experience on financial literacy. Exploiting a unique feature of New Zealand, whereby domestic students can obtain interest-free student loans and can fully participate in the national retirement scheme while international students cannot, we employ an instrumental variables approach to identify the causal effect of financial experience on financial literacy. We conduct surveys on a sample of 338 business students and find that there is a positive and causal effect of financial experience on financial literacy. Our results have important implications for financial education programmes and may explain why many of these programmes to date have had limited success.

To analyse convergence and divergence in Natural Resource New Governance Arrangements (NRNGAs) two regimes in the environmentally-related areas of forest and fisheries management are examined. The findings reveal limited convergence across sectors and countries in the general aims and ideas behind NGAs and evidence of significant policy divergence in the tools and mechanisms created for their implementation. The reasons for the differences lie primarily in the policy formulation process. While the impetus for the adoption of both NRNGAs is in the international and regional realms, without the force of either international law or competitive advantage, pressure for convergence is weak. Aspects of the policy formulation process, especially the manner in which the changing capacities of domestic public and private actors active in the affected resource policy arena interact to influence policy design, are critical for explaining policy convergence and divergence. Specifically, the interplay between the effect of the internationalization of resource policy issues, tending to increase private capacities at the expense of the public one, and the declining importance of primary industries, which has the reverse effect, is shown to have played an important role in NRNGA policy dynamics.

This study raises two basic questions. How is competition in telecom and electricity governed? What explains the considerable differences in their governance regimes? To answer these questions the study compares the economic and technological characteristics of the sectors; deconstructs the telecom sector into two micro-regimes (terminal type-approval and networks interconnection) and the electricity sector into three (generation, transmission, distribution); defines intergovernmentalism, supranationalism, liberalism, and étatism for each of the five segments of the sectors; distinguishes three different kinds of competition – deregulated competition, regulation-of-competion, and regulation-for-competition; and deconstructs the European policy game into three different games (sectorial, national, and union). The European Union's policy choices are: supranational governance in telecom and intergovernmental governance in electricity. The introduction of competition as an administrative process leaves considerable room for entrepreneurship and political choice by European nation-states and strengthens their regulation capacities. Differences in the governance regime for telecom and electricity are explained by a state-centered multi-level approach.

This article applies the multiple streams approach to a multilevel implementation setting to analyse why Swiss member states enabled the labour market integration of asylum seekers between 2000 and 2003. It argues for integrating the social construction of target groups into the problem stream, and complementing the policy stream with inherited policy paths. A fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis reveals that institutionalised policy paths trump politics in explaining the enabling of labour market integration of asylum seekers. Conversely, a weak political left combined with negative problem constructions aces out policy paths in explaining restrictions of labour market integration. The results illustrate how social constructions influence problem framing. Historical institutionalism theory helps us understand how inherited policy logics feed back with actors’ problem perceptions. Because of the parallels in their multilevel systems, political contexts and problem pressures, this historical case offers salient lessons for the refugee crisis in the European Union today.

Normative theories of democracy agree that public demand should be the main guide in policymaking. But positive theories and related empirical research disagree about the extent to which this holds true in reality. We address this debate with an empirical focus on climate change policy. Specifically, we are interested in whether observable variation in public demand for climate change mitigation can help explain variation in adopted national climate policies. Using our own data to approximate public demand, we estimate the responsiveness of policymakers to changes in public demand in six OECD countries from 1995 to 2010. We find that policymakers are responsive and react in predicted ways to variation in our opinion component of measured public demand, rather than to the mere salience of the climate issue. The effect of issue salience is strongest in combination with our opinion measure as this creates a scope for action. The results underscore the importance and usefulness of our concept and empirical measures for public demand, as well as of our disaggregated analysis of climate policy outputs in this area.

Scholarship on social policy has recently emphasised the importance of gradual processes of institutional change. However, conceptual work on the identification of processes such as drift, conversion and layering has not produced clear empirical indicators that distinguish these processes from one another, posing major problems for empirical research. We argue that, in order to improve the validity of its empirical findings, scholarship on gradual change should – and can – pay more attention to issues of measurement and detection. We then contribute to this goal by clearly articulating observable indicators for several mechanisms of gradual institutional change and validating them against extant empirical work on political economy.

Recent social science research – particularly evaluation research and cost-benefit analysis – has produced a substantial and very useful literature on the impact of public policy and on the relationship of program inputs to outputs and outcomes. However, the explicit focus of these analytic techniques on impacts and outcomes does not systematically yield useful information on why programs have been successes or failures. Policy-makers faced with an evaluation of program success or failure obviously need to know something about the why question if they are to make needed adjustments in the program or carry the lessons of one program to other areas. This article attempts to present a comprehensive framework for explaining and understanding program performance. It is meant to have two uses and to serve two clienteles. First, it presents for social scientists a set of research questions to guide research into the determinants of program performance. Second, it provides public policy-makers with a set of action questions which should be asked and answered appropriately in the actual formulating and carrying out of public policy, as a means of enhancing the chances of program success. The framework is divided into two parts, the formulating process and the carrying out process, although these two processes may overlap considerably, both in time and in terms of substantive concerns. Program success may be impeded by problems or inadequacies in one or more of the components in either the formulating stage or the carrying out stage or in both.

Complex environmental challenges cut horizontally across sectors and vertically across levels of government. To address them in coordinated and integrated ways, governments have resorted to integrated, multi-sectoral strategies since the 1990s. After introducing this new governance approach, we describe the policy rationale, prevalence, governance characteristics and performance of three distinct yet thematically related, integrated strategies on sustainable development, climate change mitigation and adaptation in the EU-15 countries. Based on this literature-based synthesis, we highlight their similarities and differences and the lack of linkages between them. The concluding discussion explores options on how to develop integrated strategies further. Since all three integrated strategies failed as comprehensive governing processes that aim to better coordinate policies, we suggest recalibrating them towards communication so that they can be more effective in pursuing the functions they can realistically fulfil: providing direction and raising awareness.

Whereas many studies of democratization evaluate it in idealist terms, Winston Churchill offered a relativist criterion, democracy being a lesser evil compared to other types of regime. Since everyone in a post-Communist society has lived in at least two different regimes, the New Democracies Barometer survey of post-Communist countries can ask people to evaluate five alternative regimes: a return to Communist rule, the army taking over, monarchy, rule by a strong leader, and decision making by economic experts. Factor analysis shows endorsement of three alternatives—the return to Communism, army rule, and personal dictatorship—form an authoritarianism scale. It also shows support for authoritarian rule is confined to a minority. Five hypotheses are tested to see what accounts for this. The political legacy of the past is more important than current government performance, economic attitudes, social structure differences, and national culture and traditions. Endorsement of economic technocrats making decisions is not related to authoritarianism; it reflects some national differences. Given the importance of experiencing both democratic and undemocratic regimes, the Churchill hypothesis does not apply in a country that has not yet attempted to introduce democratic institutions.

A complete conceptual framework for policy analysis requires a theory of government supply and government production failure to complement the well-developed theory of market failure provided by welfare economics. Charles Wolf has made an important start by attempting to draw parallels between market failures and the manifestations of government supply failures. This article provides a more useful analytical framework for government supply failure in two important ways. First, it draws on several perspectives from the economics of organization to sketch both normative and positive theories of government supply. Second, it uses the positive theory of government supply behavior to make direct comparisons with the traditional market failures. It concludes with some implications of the framework for assessing the potential gains from privatization.