Familiar theories of market failure have diagnosed shortcomings in the economy, but theories of government failure argue that the state is incapable of correcting them. More than that, many criticisms of government implicitly or explicitly see failure as due to fundamental shortcomings of democracy. This paper argues that democratic forms of governments are not necessarily inefficient relative to other types of decisionmaking, for example, authoritarian government, and that if individuals are as rational in their actions and expectations as voters as they are meant to be in the market, then failures attributed to democracy lessen or disappear altogether. The paper demonstrates how more democracy, i.e. the use of the initiative and referendum, may actually improve the efficiency of government by giving the mass of citizens the information and opportunity to frustrate efforts of the classe politique to form a coalition against the voters. Empirical examples are drawn from the experience of Switzerland.

Multiple knowledges are available for utilisation in policy choice. The rank ordering of knowledges for use in decisionmaking is thus a fundamental predecision. This article shows how this predecision necessarily constrains the processes associated with a politics of ideas, using cases from American international commodity policy. Even when the supposed preconditions of this sort of politics are present, policy change did not occur when the proposed ideas arose from a knowledge accorded secondary status in policymaking circles. Several implications are discussed for the influence and the study of ideational politics. Ultimately, the politics of ideas, so often portrayed through cases of innovation, may be quite conservative, contained by knowledge hierarchies which reflect prior political circumstances.

Whether corporatism matters or not is one of the most difficult and intriguing questions confronting policy analysts. One approach to the problem not previously adopted is to use systems analysis as a means of teasing out the implications of general structural differences between corporatist and pluralist polities. By using a framework derived from the systems analysis of Easton but incorporating elements of political competition and accountability, it is shown that corporatist and pluralist states differ significantly in the ways in which they process information and generate support. The combination of centralisation and consensus proves to be the key to the apparently greater learning capacity of corporatist systems. The analysis suggests that policymaking may itself be better understood as a learning mechanism rather than as an allocative process.

This paper tries to integrate and generalise research results from selected comparative policy studies in the fields of economic, social, educational, environmental and health and safety policies. The countries included are Britain, Sweden and the United States. The concepts of institutional and organisational structure, culture orientation and policy style are applied in order to develop descriptive taxonomies to suggest how these factors might influence ultimate policy outputs.