State capacity is a key concept for research in public policy and political science. Despite its importance, there is no broadly accepted measure of state capacity in the existing literature, and frequently used measures of capacity have not been examined for their validity. We begin with an explicit definition of state capacity – the state's ability to implement public policy – and connect this definition to a measurable outcome of state capacity – the state's taxation of income. We show that this measure, income taxes as a percentage of total tax revenue, is a useful indicator of state capacity and meets higher standards of measurement validity than other tax-based indicators. We also compare our measure to the most common existing indicators of state capacity to show that income taxation is a better theoretical and statistical measure of states’ effectiveness in policy implementation.

What determines which political actors dominate a country’s news? Understanding the forces that shape political actors’ news coverage matters, because these actors can influence which problems and alternatives receive a nation’s public and policy attention. Across free-press nations, the degree of media attention actors receive is rarely proportional to their degree of participation in the policymaking process. Yet, the nature of this “mis”-representation varies by country. We argue that journalistic operating procedures – namely, journalists’ incentive-driven relationships with government officials – help explain cross-national variance in actors’ media representation relative to policymaking participation. We examine two free-press countries with dramatically different journalistic procedures: United States and Korea. For each, we compare actors’ policymaking participation to news coverage (using all 2008 New York Times and Hankyoreh Daily front-page stories). Although exhibiting greater general discrepancy between actors’ policymaking and media representation, diverse actors are over-represented in United States news; in Korea, governmental actors are dominant.

There has been little research on élite preferences regarding supranational integration. Regional élites have been particularly neglected, even though they are implementers of European policies and programmes and therefore contribute to the integration process. To bridge this gap, this article explores the preferences of top regional civil servants – regio-crats – towards one of the most prominent supranational institutions, the European Commission. We put five explanations to the test. Support in favour of a stronger, more autonomous Commission can be driven by (1) pragmatic inter-institutional alliances, (2) the domestic distribution of power, (3) benefits derived from the integration process itself, (4) identity and identification elements and (5) transactionalism. We find support for three of these explanations as inter-institutional relations, perceived benefits and region-specific identity characteristics contribute to and account for regio-crat preferences. This resonates with interest- versus value-based approaches to European Union (EU) integration and contributes towards a better understanding of the dynamics at play in integrating multi-jurisdictional polities, of which the EU is an example.

This research explores the impact of gender representation at the state and local levels on redistributive choices. This research also examines whether female officeholders moderate the impact of the local economy and institution on welfare spending. Hypotheses are tested across 58 counties in California over ten years, between 2001 and 2010. According to the fixed effect models, women in state legislature had a positive effect on local welfare spending, while women on county boards had no significant effect. However, a positive moderating effect of women on county boards during economic hardship was found. Three categories of control variables include institutional factors, such as the introduction of Proposition 1A and county home rule; political factors, such as the political preference of each county’s residents and strength of non-profit organisations; and socio-economic factors, such as intergovernmental revenue, unemployment rate and demographics. Counties with more intergovernmental revenue and supporters of Democratic presidential candidates are likely to spend more on welfare services.

This article addresses the absence of a federal equalisation programme in the United States, which is a significant aspect of “American exceptionalism”. Comparing the United States with Australia and Canada, we argue that three factors are relevant when accounting for this absence. On one hand, we turn to two societal factors to explain why there was never much political appetite for the creation of a stand-alone equalisation programme in the United States, namely the lack of a direct threat to the territorial integrity of the United States after 1865 and the comparative weakness of the idea of social citizenship in that country. On the other hand, our analysis shows that key institutional features of American political institutions, particularly strong bicameralism combined with the absence of formal party discipline, help illuminate why it would have been difficult to create an equalisation programme even if there had been some societal pressures to do so.

Failures of compliance with European Union (EU) directives have revealed the EU as a political system capable of enacting laws in a wide range of different policy areas, but facing difficulties to ensure their actual implementation. Although the EU relies on national enforcement agencies to ensure compliance with the EU legislation, there is scarce analysis of the differential deterrent effect of national enforcement in EU law compliance. This article examines the enforcement of an EU water directive, the Urban Waste Water Treatment Directive, in Spain and the UK. It focuses on the existing national sanctions for disciplining actors in charge of complying with EU requirements, and on the actual use of punitive sanctions. The analysis shows that a more comprehensive and active disciplinary regime at the national level contributes to explain a higher degree of compliance with EU law. The article calls for a detailed examination of the national administrative and criminal sanction system for a more comprehensive understanding of the incentives and disincentives to comply with EU law at the national state level.