Voters in many American states have considered important social policies that redefine civil liberties within their state through the initiative and referendum. An important question remaining is, are voters knowledgeable enough to make decisions on these social policies that have far-reaching effects? The common wisdom is that voters rely on information shortcuts in lieu of extensive knowledge about the issues. Unlike candidate elections, however, ballot measures lack some prominent and useful information shortcuts (i.e. party identification). We test the hypothesis that voters use shortcuts to inform their decisions on two ballot measures central to today's policy debates: California's Proposition 4 on parental notification for abortion and Proposition 8 on same-sex marriage. We show that voters do not use cues universally, and, furthermore, factual information has a limited effect on voters’ decisions. In particular, we find that the persuasiveness of an endorsement is conditional on whether an individual trusts the source.

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.

Governments in the industrialised western democracies have repeatedly been advised to curb the welfare state when adjusting public finances in order to stabilise public debt in the long run and to create economic growth. This recommendation has been founded on a vast body of research on fiscal adjustments, which has come to the conclusion that cutting social expenditures leads to expansionary and more sustainable budget consolidations. This paper adds to the existing literature suggesting a more nuanced view, which challenges the simplicity of the “cutting-welfare” advice: first, we find that whereas less social spending is indeed associated with expansionary and successful adjustments, this is not the case for overall welfare state generosity. Second, disaggregating the welfare state in its components reveals that a reduction of pension generosity is indeed related to successful adjustments whereas reducing unemployment generosity does not seem to play a major role.

The degree to which interest groups gain access to policymakers has often been explained by focusing on the exchange of resources in a dyadic relation between interest groups and policymakers. This article argues that the position an interest group occupies within a coalition and the relations it has outside its coalition substantially affect the likelihood of gaining access to policymakers. Our empirical focus is on the Dutch interest group system for which we examine how coalitions among groups and the network position of interest groups within and between such coalitions shape access. The analysis, based on data collected among 107 Dutch interest groups and 28 policymakers, leads to the conclusion that network positions count differently for elected and non-elected officials, and that network ties that bridge different coalitions add significant explanatory leverage to resource-based explanations of access.

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.

This paper contributes to our understanding of why delegitimising focusing events, combined with the mobilisation of policy losers, does not always result in major policy change by undermining a monopolistic policy image and policy subsystem. Based on a close enquiry of American biofuel policy development, it argues that we can make headway in this endeavour by focusing on three factors: first, the congruence of a policy image with core values of the polity; second, the multidimensionality of a policy image; and third, policy image management strategies that maintain cohesion among coalition supporters and respond to outside criticism. In understanding better why some policy images (and policy monopolies) prove resilient when they come under assault, this paper offers a single case plausibility probe supported by indicative evidence from other policy studies.