The idea of path-dependency is applied to an examination of health policy reform in Germany, France, Great Britain and the United States. In the path-dependent model, actors are hemmed in by existing institutions and structures that channel them along established policy paths. Therefore, in any system, big (non-incremental) change is unlikely. However, sometimes we do observe big change. Why? By developing the interplay of structure with conjuncture, the occasional accomplishment of big change - in spite of path dependency - can be systematically understood.

The article attempts to explain the expansion of the European Community (EC) policy agenda to new policy areas such as the environment, regional development and research and technological development, and the variations in policy development from one area to another. Lowi's classification of policy types-regulatory, redistributive and distributive-is adapted for use in the EC context. Each policy type, it is argued, deals with a distinct arena featuring different actors, different institutional decision rules, and different types of Council bargaining, and each therefore corresponds to a distinctive pattern of task expansion. Thus, regulatory policies can be explained in terms of functional spillover from the Internal Market, while redistributive policies can be understood as side-payments in larger intergovernmental bargains, and distributive policies are the result of the Commission's policy entrepreneurship and log-rolling Council bargaining. These three patterns of task expansion are examined in an empirical study of policy development across six areas.

This paper discusses the ethical barriers to development in economies whose institutions have not quite adjusted to the needs of capitalism. It is argued that at a given stage of market development, the market forces will either impose behaviours and moral codes which further sustain the development of capital markets or will be defeated. The defeat may lead a country back to pre-capitalist relations, behaviours and rules that will jeopardize any further development. In post-socialist economies, in particular, large sections of society are unprepared to apply the rules of advanced capitalist markets. Resistance to market becomes an obstacle to the building of institutional ethics and transparent markets. Only openness to foreign competition and foreign demand for higher ethical standards in business can help the adjustment of economic and legal institutions to the requirement of advanced markets. The Italian case offers an instructive example of contradiction between institutional backwardness and market dynamism in which the catalysing factor was foreign competition.

A central question in the welfare state debate has been whether or not social policies in industrialized countries converge. Originally linked to the logic of industrialism perspective, this idea has been criticized by researchers focusing on differences in timing and differences in the institutional set up of social security schemes across countries. Nonetheless, I argue that social security arrangements in European as well as Anglo-American countries may gradually become more similar. Using pension politics as the primary example, the article locates similar social and political mechanisms at work in different countries, pushing toward convergence in policy outcomes, despite persistent variation in institutional arrangements. In the final section of the article, I extract a model from the analysis, aimed at explaining political change while maintaining a connection between the micro and macro level of analysis.

This paper examines the place of groups in the consultative process in British policymaking. It stresses the importance of consultation even under the Thatcher government and distinguishes between consultation, bargaining and negotiation. The paper identifies the important divide between the relatively few groups with privileged status and the greater number of groups who find themselves consigned to less influential positions. The discussion revisits the insider/outsider typology often used to differentiate interest group strategies and status in policy development. It suggests that the insider group term is associated with a particular style of policy making, and offers amendments to the existing use of the terms to avoid the difficulties which occur from the conflation of group strategy and group status.

This paper represents a case study in welfare state expansion. It takes an actor-centered point of view and reconstructs the long process which has ultimately led to a compromise solution to the problem of providing long-term care, especially for the elderly. It describes the previously means-tested arrangement of long-term care provision and its shortcomings. Furthermore, it sketches the different stages through which the political debate on this issue has passed during the last twenty years: from the initial phase of defining the “social problem”, to the final stage when the approval of the compromise package became a question of “all or nothing”. The analysis of the politics of long-term care insurance reveals that the difficulties of reaching an agreement mainly resulted from the complex decision-making situation. It was in essence a problem of decision-making under conditions of general uncertainty.

The Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) was developed to provide a causal theory of the policy process which would serve as one of several alternatives to the familiar stages heuristic, with its recognized limitations. This paper first summarizes the central features of the ACF, including a set of underlying assumptions and specific hypotheses. We next review the implications for the framework of six case studies by various authors dealing with Canadian education and with American transportation, telecommunications, water, environmental, and energy policy. While generally supportive of the ACF, the case studies also suggest several revisions.

This article unveils the resilience of national institutional designs in the process of European unification; more specifically, the article stands out the pervasiveness of the pattern of relationship between government and industry in the environmental policy of two countries: Spain and Germany. Although the European Union (EU) is increasingly influential in environmental policy, these designs have only recently undergone slight changes. This can be explained not only by the lesser importance that the EU has heretofore attached to the connection between the systems of interest intermediation and the fulfilment of Community policy goals, but by the strength of the historical arrangements and cultural traditions at the national level.

Using Atkinson and Coleman's typology of policy networks, this article shows how many of the differences in policy outcomes can be traced to the structure of the policy environment in each nation. French and Germany policy makers adopted a strategy of investing in high speed passenger transport to revitalize their declining railway sectors. The French TGV was developed in a state-directed policy network which insisted on cost containment and commercial viability. In Germany a corporatist style of policymaking in the rail sector led to delays and higher costs for the ICE train. A separate clientele pluralist network led by the Research Ministry developed the Transrapid maglev option, but in order to finance and deploy an operational system, the Chancellor and cabinet had to create a concertation network. The policy network approach provides a useful framework for conducting comparative analysis. In addition, these detailed cases suggest that it is useful to add a dynamic, cross-temporal dimension to the static typology.

The Federal Reserve Bank of the United States is a pre-eminent banking institution, and an institution that has been subject to scrutiny from a wide variety of scholarly perspectives. The object of this article is to review prominent works dealing with the politics of the Federal Reserve, particularly its relations with other institutions and their effects on monetary policy. The review shows that the formal legal independence of a central bank such as the Fed does not mark the end of monetary politics, and its record suggests a greater measure of modesty and caution on the part of enthusiasts for independent central banks.

A policy-focused human capital approach to development, incorporating industrial policy but stressing land reform, education, and labor-intensive production, is used to explain why South Korea and Taiwan have developed more successfully since 1960 than Argentina, Brazil, or Mexico. The policy-focused human capital approach is contrasted to free-market and cultural-values approaches.

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.