In a democratic society, public policy must claim to provide what people want. One clue to this is the evidence of opinion surveys. Yet, in the field of welfare, surveys set policy analysts a puzzle: evidence about attitudes to what government should be providing displays an ambiguity. Some surveys demonstrate popular preferences for market provision, suppressed to a considerable extent by the coercive system of tax-financed state welfare, and others reveal a high level of satisfaction with and support for existing public welfare services. Both sets of opinions are tinged with a moralistic concern about the regulation of state services for stereotyped undeserving scroungers. The paper suggests that this ambivalence in findings is not simply the result of methodological difficulties: it may reflect an ambiguity in many people's attitudes in this area that is founded on the contrast between the ideology of individual self-interest prevalent in a market society and awareness of common needs for collective provision. Both aspects contribute to people's framework of ideas about the proper role of the state. Evidence from a recent survey is analysed to highlight the contradiction, and support this interpretation.

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.

This article attempts to analyse why, to quote a recent report from the Home Affairs Committee of the British House of Commons, ‘in the vacuum caused by the Home Office's reluctance to be seen to be interfering, ethnic minority concerns go by default’. It first examines the reasons for placing responsibility for race relations policy with the Home Office and then goes on to detail events within the Home Office in the two years following the introduction of the 1976 Race Relations Act. The article concludes by suggesting that a lack of preparedness for the implementation stage of the policy, together with a diminution of political commitment and the limitations on special funding, discouraged the Home Office from playing a more active and more effective role in coordinating and initiating within central government policies for racial disadvantage.

The regulation of risks to health and the environment in the United States is currently undergoing serious criticism for its impact on the recession economy. Attempts to diminish health risks by placing stringent limitations on potentially harmful substances are thought to be excessively expensive and ineffective. To remedy this problem, basic reforms in the way these regulations are fashioned have been proposed. Perhaps the best known is cost-benefit analysis. Nevertheless, there are a number of areas where agencies purposely avoid making tradeoffs between costs and benefits and instead assign priorities among levels and types of benefits. However, despite a considerable literature examining the merits of making tradeoffs in regulatory decisions, little attention has been given to the disparate premises of the tradeoff and no-tradeoff rules and how the choice of decision rules determines the role of cost considerations in agency decision making. This paper not only examines these issues, but develops an analytical framework for restructuring the choice between rules. Instead of abolishing the no-tradeoff rules, the analytical framework proposed here can be used to generate a compromise rule which permits partial tradeoffs under certain well-defined circumstances.

The command and control approach to government regulation of pollution is clearly not working for many problems. While the theoretical case for applying market mechanisms to control pollution as an alternative is persuasive, there are several stumbling blocks which arise in their application. This paper examines some of the key implementation issues which must be addressed in designing a marketable permit scheme. The issues are brought into focus by considering a particular example – the control of sulfur oxides emissions in Los Angeles.