A key component of any political strategy is finding a decision setting that offers the best prospects for reaching one's policy goals, an activity referred to as venue shopping. This article supports the theory of venue shopping as laid out in Baumgartner and Jones (1993), but presents a more complicated analysis of its practice than most empirical studies to date. First, venue shopping can be more experimental, and less deliberate or calculated, than is commonly perceived. Second, advocacy groups choose venues not only to advance substantive policy goals but also to serve organizational needs and identities. Finally, venue choice is shaped by policy learning. Advocacy groups choose venues not only for short-term strategic reasons, but also because they have embraced a new understanding of the nature of a policy problem. These factors shape the frequency of venue shopping and thus the pace of policy reform.

This paper examines political influences over U.S monetary policy, analysed quarterly from 1953 to 2000. We use indicators of presidential and congressional ideology as predictors of actor preferences and as representative of overhead democracy. We also include several economic variables predicting percent change in the federal funds rate. While not surprised to find that economic conditions are important in explaining Fed decisionmaking, we also find that the theory of overhead democracy also contributes to the explanation. Initially, both presidential and congressional ideology are important but in a combined model, presidential variables wash out influence of congressional variables. Thus, we conclude that overhead democracy must be included in models predicting Fed decisionmaking.

This article considers attempts to incorporate lessons and transfer policies from Britain in the reconstruction of Higher Education in Kosovo after 1999. In doing so, it employs aspects of the lesson-drawing framework developed by Rose (1991 and 2001) and the related concepts of policy transfer and policy diffusion. Drawing on contributions from anthropology and democratization studies, we suggest development of the public policy frameworks for lesson drawing and policy transfer in circumstances characterised by asymmetric interdependence, in which the tactics and strategies of policy resistance by ‘subordinate’ recipient actors can be crucial. This article details the nature of policy resistance and sets out hypotheses for future research.

This study presents an empirical investigation of differences in health care expenditure between the 26 federal entities of Switzerland in the 1990s. So far, demand and supply-related factors have dominated the debate, while political determinants have largely been neglected. Here, they will be assessed together with the usual indicators on the basis of a cross-sectional analysis of both public and private health care spending. It will be shown that no approach represents the whole truth, but each one a grain of it. Demand for health care is clearly a function of socio-economic factors. On the supply side, it is mainly the number of practitioners and the overall level of provision that drive costs. Finally, from the political factors, general state interventionism is decisive – though only so far as public spending is concerned.

The analytic framework used here to study welfare state change builds upon the distinction of two fundamentally opposed logics of social exchange: the logic of reciprocity and of solidarity. The approach enables to assess the complexity and ambivalence of policy change in advanced welfare states. Using recent social policy reform in Germany as an illustration of the analytical capacity of our approach, it is shown that change can be detected in two different dimensions. One type of change is in the overall mix between reciprocity-based insurance and solidarity-based assistance programmes which makes up the specific profile of a national welfare regime. Another type is in the balance between elements of reciprocity and solidarity within social insurance schemes. This approach can be replicated with any of the developed welfare states of the OECD world.