Most models of public opinion assign a fundamental role to ideological predispositions. Moreover, the literature usually portrays ideology as a stable phenomenon at the individual-level, one that is mainly shaped by socio-economic class experiences and pre-adult socialisation, and that is likely to grow stronger in intensity – rather than change – over the life-course. However, less is known about the scope of, or reasons for, ideological change in adult life. This paper uses Swedish panel data to investigate the interrelation between evaluations of government performance and ideological left–right related orientations. There is some support for ‘the socialisation school’, in that ideological positions and values display considerable short-term stability, although less stability over a four-year period. Moreover, there is evidence of short-run selective perception, with those close to the government at t1 being more likely than others to form more positive performance perceptions between t1 and t2. Interestingly however, over a four-year period this tendency was not statistically significant. Moreover, there is also clear support for a ‘revisionist’ interpretation of left–right ideology. Such orientations do change at the individual level, according to how people perceive incumbent government performance, an impact which does not depend on political sophistication.

National governments follow country-specific reform trajectories, which imply uniform preferences for specific types of quasi-autonomous organisations (quangos). However, at micro level there is little uniformity; similar tasks are charged to different types of quangos. This contradiction could be explained by the existence of styles of quango creation at the level of policy sectors. Do such styles exist? Using the literature on policy styles and administrative culture, four styles of quango creation are deduced: traditional, bureaucratic, professional and managerial. The analysis shows that the majority of Dutch policy sectors indeed have a dominant style of quango-creation. The bureaucratic style is found in ten out of eighteen sectors. Replication of this study may help to improve the explanation of quango creation in western countries.

The main question raised in this article is how educational reforms reflect convergence or divergence between the English, the Norwegian and the Swedish educational systems. We claim that the answer depends on how convergence is conceptualised. At the level of decisions on tools, the countries seem more similar than two decades ago. However, to explain policy changes our analytical perspective must be broadened. We demonstrate how values based on different welfare state models, political economies and different types of institutional evolution can explain processes of change in education over the last decades. In paying attention to broader processes of change, a certain degree of variation occurs. The countries seem to develop according to nationally specific trajectories: England has strengthened the liberal and elitist values of education while social democratic values of comprehensiveness and equality have impact on the aims and effects of policy tools in Norway and Sweden.

To analyse convergence and divergence in Natural Resource New Governance Arrangements (NRNGAs) two regimes in the environmentally-related areas of forest and fisheries management are examined. The findings reveal limited convergence across sectors and countries in the general aims and ideas behind NGAs and evidence of significant policy divergence in the tools and mechanisms created for their implementation. The reasons for the differences lie primarily in the policy formulation process. While the impetus for the adoption of both NRNGAs is in the international and regional realms, without the force of either international law or competitive advantage, pressure for convergence is weak. Aspects of the policy formulation process, especially the manner in which the changing capacities of domestic public and private actors active in the affected resource policy arena interact to influence policy design, are critical for explaining policy convergence and divergence. Specifically, the interplay between the effect of the internationalization of resource policy issues, tending to increase private capacities at the expense of the public one, and the declining importance of primary industries, which has the reverse effect, is shown to have played an important role in NRNGA policy dynamics.