Since 1990 the age of the average OECD median voter has increased three times faster than in the preceding 30 years. We use panel data from 1980–2002 to investigate the effects of population aging on both the program size and the benefit generosity of public pensions in 18 OECD countries. Population aging is accompanied by cutting smaller slices out of larger cakes: it increases aggregate spending on pensions but freezes or decreases the generosity of individual benefits. Controlling for political, institutional and time-period effects, we find that public pension efforts are significantly mediated by welfare regime type. Moreover, since the late 1980s pension effort has more fully adopted a retrenchment logic. It is the politics of fiscal and electoral straitjackets, not gerontocracy, which shape public pension spending today. While population aging is accelerating, contrary to alarmist political economy predictions democracies are not yet dominated by a new distributive politics of elderly power.

This paper explores the impact of internationalization on the financial services policy subsystem in Canada. It uses subsystem adjustment as a concept to bring some analytical clarity to how exogenous factors like globalisation and international crises may impact existing policy regimes. Based on examination of globalisation-induced banking deregulation (1987–1991) and the current crisis of securitized banking, the paper argues that the strength of this approach is that it integrates endogenous effects of the existing subsystem in explaining policy changes in response to what are normally treated as exogenous shocks. Careful effort needs to be made to differentiate the processes of external systemic perturbations from subsystem spillovers as these two processes of adjustment and policy change can lead to different policymaking dynamics over the long term.

In the early 1990s the Danish Ministry of Finance initiated an experiment where a few ministerial departments negotiated performance agreements with their agencies. Since then internal contracting has spread and is now nearly universally used in central government. However, a close study demonstrates that in this process contract content has changed dramatically. The early contracts were quid-pro-quo agreements. Agencies committed themselves to improve efficiency but contracts at the same time admitted them increased managerial discretion. The mature contracts are quite different. Departmental ministries have exploited their considerable autonomy to set demands that are related to policy and service levels rather than internal management. Here ministries have adapted to the characteristics of their policy tasks and to the presumed concerns of the target groups dominating their political environment. Building on an analysis of all contracts in force in 1995, 2000, and 2005 the paper sees this change as a transformation of an ideal type NPM-instrument into a managerial tool adapted to a system where highly autonomous ministers act as unquestioned political executives.

Most studies of tobacco control policy focus on the central level of national governments. Yet within the European Union, three levels of government have responsibilities for tobacco control: the EU; the central governments of member states; and provinces or devolved levels of government. This article examines the role of each in the formation of tobacco policy in the United Kingdom. It compares the theory of regulatory federalism with multilevel governance as explanations for tobacco regulatory policy within the EU. While executive-legislative fusion in the United Kingdom leads to the practice of discretionary federalism, the EU provides mixed support for the theory of regulatory federalism. There is significant policy innovation in the UK and its devolved territories as well as limited policy authority for tobacco control in the EU. Overall, multi-level governance (MLG) may be a superior, albeit incomplete, explanation of tobacco control within the EU and the UK.

Comparative analysis shows that while policy windows and policy entrepreneurs are important, they are insufficient to account for policy change. An understanding of the institutional setting is key to explaining the speed and the magnitude of policy dynamics. In both food safety and pharmaceutical policy in Spain, a redefinition of policy image has involved a transformation of the policy subsystem. In the case of food safety such a paradigm shift has represented a dramatic change, in the case of pharmaceuticals it has meant a gradual process that has developed over a decade. Periods of stability in the pharmaceutical sector reflect the ability of a closed policy community to control problem framing. By contrast, rapid changes in food safety policies are the result of crisis situations governed by a relatively loose policy network. The European Union has been a key policy venue that can transform an institutional framework towards one that is more pluralistic and expert oriented.