Scholars have hotly debated the structure of group engagement in policymaking. Two aspects of this conversation are examined here. First, some claim that the “explosion” of organised interests brings with it increasing fragmentation but also policy “balkanisation”. Others suggest increasing fragmentation, but with overlap between subsectors. A second area of this debate concerns the existence and number of “central” or “core” groups. Although existing studies show that, in aggregate, there is no more policy specialisation among United Kingdom organised interests, we do not know whether this means that there are fewer or more central groups. In this article, we utilise public policy consultations in Scotland over a continuous 25-year period, and the tools of network analysis, to examine the above propositions. We find that the expanding system of policy consultation is not associated with more balkanisation or with a decline of central policy actors that span policy communities.

Cross-subsidization is a frequent topic in public debates and often stigmatized in the wake of deregulation. Public monopolies increasingly find themselves operating not only in regulated markets, but in non-regulated markets where they are accused of illegally using resources from the regulated market to stifle competition. Similar anticompetitive allegations can be made against private multiservice firms with market power. However, definitions of cross-subsidization are many and this affects the debate about the issue and possible strategic motives behind cross-subsidization, its possible consequences for competition, and measures that might be taken against it. This paper organizes definitions that regulators are likely to encounter into three types involving cost transfer, temporary loss or permanent loss. Based on these distinctions, a novel classification framework is developed according to underlying motivation and consequences for competition. The four cases arising from the framework are subsequently discussed in terms of relevancy for public and private firms, and consequences for competition and welfare.

This paper discusses the prospects of Greece, Portugal and Spain completing stage 1 of the Delors plan. Much of the academic literature on the removal of capital controls seeks to extend the experience of the ERM countries in the 1980s. We argue that its applicability for southern Europe is not straightforward, because these countries have not had the same experience of operating the ‘old’ ERM with capital controls, and examine the implications for these countries of removing capital controls for macroeconomic, and especially, fiscal policy. Intermediate institutional arrangements may be necessary and we consider how EC-wide measures may help these countries in this transitional phase. For the next phase of European integration, the focus of the EC should be on developing appropriate public institutions at the European level to promote positive integration.

Are the systems of collective labor relations in member countries of the European Communities converging towards a common European system of industrial relations? In this paper the hypothesis is put forward that the national systems have not been converging in the past and probably will not do so in the immediate future. The analysis is based on changes in procedural rules of collective labor relations and on data on labor unions, strikes, wage structure, and government employment.

This paper deals with the contribution of economic planning to French industrial policy and performance. This was highly significant until the mid 1960s but declined thereafter due to a combination of economic and political factors. The inherent problems of across-the-board regulation in a complex industrial economy reinforced the displacement of the planners from the traditional French elite. In the late 1970s, planning had begun again to provide an informational support to other policies for restructuring industry in the face of the world market. The paper ends with an evaluation of the Mitterrand government's aspirations for more dirigiste industrial planning.

This study examines the relationships between e-government service quality, perceived value, satisfaction, and loyalty toward e-government services. Survey data were collected from 340 randomly selected e-government service users in Vietnam. The results reveal that (1) e-government service quality consists of five dimensions: ease of interaction, fulfillment, citizen care, security and privacy, and trustworthiness; (2) among the five dimensions of e-government service quality, only trustworthiness and fulfillment are significantly related to perceived value; however, trustworthiness has a stronger association with perceived value than does fulfillment; and (3) both perceived value and satisfaction are positively associated with loyalty. The results indicate that the e-government can create value for the citizens by improving service quality, which may help satisfy citizens’ needs and build their loyalty.

Starting from the relative success of the Austrian economy in the 1970s the problems of industrial policy and the position of industrial policy in the context of economic policy are examined. Policies directed towards improving the industrial structure have had a lower priority than policies aimed at producing sufficient total economic growth to avoid unemployment and disputes over the distribution of the GNP. The structure of Austria's foreign trade shows that Austria still has not achieved the industrial structure appropriate for a small industrial country in an exposed geographical position. In Austria the problems of industry are regarded as legitimate affairs of government and, although there is criticism of the details of government intervention, the economic responsibility which is conferred on the government is an extensive one. Austria's political culture exhibits both consociationalist traits, with most laws being passed with the support of the two big parties,, and ‘social partnership’ in the form of voluntary co-operation between the unions and employers' associations. The political consensus means that discussion tends to revolve round technical rather than fundamental issues of industrial policy. Since the early 1970s the preservation of full employment has become the dominating industrial policy goal of the Austrian government; as a result, policy is mainly reactive rather than proactive. Fiscal investment aids are by far the most important industrial policy instrument, though their use has been criticised. There are also direct expenditure schemes, aimed at particular sectors as well as the general stimulation of investment; these aids have also been criticised. The prospects for the introduction of industrial policies more focussed on qualitative changes in industrial structure are not considered good, but political stability seems assured.

A long time ago I received a letter from Rex Stout inviting me to join the Authors' Guild, a letter no doubt sent to all who had books published. I didn't join because I didn't think of myself primarily as a writer, but as an aspiring scholar who merely set out the results of investigations that, so to speak, wrote themselves. Writing was incidental, not essential. Some years later a similar letter arrived. By then, having spent several hours a day writing most days, I joined. I had become a writer, if not by accomplishment, at least by occupation. Only recently, however, have I thought of myself as a writer by vocation, as a person who cares about the quality and craft of writing as inseparable from the content of whatever I am trying to communicate. Indeed, for me, writing has become an integral part of thinking.

There are good reasons to suppose that the non-poor will infiltrate welfare programmes originally targeted on the poor. This paper discusses this phenomenon of ‘creeping universalisation’ and provides a number of possible explanations for it. Evidence is used from Australia to show that creeping universalisation does indeed occur, and to test the competing explanations. It is concluded that the most likely explanation for the phenomenon is individual behavioural responses: that is, the non-poor respond to the imposition of a means-test by re-arranging their affairs, legitimately or illegitimately, so as to pass the test.

When does legislation trigger regulation? The US Congress regularly passes laws that authorise government agencies to write legally binding regulations. Yet, when this occurs, agencies may take years to act – or, at times – may never act at all. We theorise that the breadth of the congressional statutory delegation drives the timing of agency policy production. In particular, when Congress expressly tells an agency to promulgate a rule, we expect agencies to do so quickly. Yet, when Congress provides greater policymaking discretion to agencies, we expect other factors – and especially, internal agency considerations – to drive regulatory timing. We use data from almost 350 statutes spanning four decades, which are then matched up with thousands of regulations, to assess the argument. Using innovative methods, we find support for our hypotheses. Overall, we produce a deeper understanding of the link between delegation and discretion: suggesting when it occurs, as well as, importantly, why.

In the public debate on climate change in Europe, aviation transport has become a bone of contention and thus also a target of political regulation. While the actual available policy instruments, their designs and effects have been extensively studied, their political economy has remained a rather blind spot of research. Therefore, in this article we explore factors accounting for the instrument choice in aviation policy. Revealing most different evolutions in this matter, the Netherlands and Germany represent appropriately illustrative cases for a comparative exploration. Based on the Political Process-inherent Dynamics Approach, we shed light on a highly complex and limiting institutional environment for aviation policy-making and ultimately identify diverging conceptions of problem structures as well as different configurations of party competition as main explanatory factors for instrument choice and aviation policy evolution.

Mancur Olson and Richard Zeckhauser's ‘An Economic Theory of Alliances’ has been described as ‘the best known application of the theory’ of collective (or public) goods. In that article, Olson and Zeckhauser advanced the claim that America's Western European Allies (and by implication, Japan as well) are all, more or less, ‘free riders.’ Yet, more than twenty years later, the meaning of this claim remains very much in doubt. This article outlines Olson and Zeckhauser's basic argument and conclusions and the evidence against their argument; explains how application of the ‘free rider’ thesis to the problem of collective security can be revised in the light of contemporary thinking about the provision of collective goods; presents some preliminary tests of this formulation; and suggests a few of the implications of this analysis for the formulation of United States defense policy.

Environmental nonprofit organisations (ENPOs) have become crucial policy actors who have undertaken information campaigns to attract public attention and to gain public support for policies. However, the credibility of policy information released by ENPOs is understudied. To fill the gap, this study utilised Douglas and Wildavsky’s cultural theory (CT), to seek answers to two questions: 1) how do ENPOs’ public faces affect public perception of the credibility of the policy information released by their organisations? 2) how do the public’s worldviews affect trust in information released by ENPOs with different types of public faces? The evidence from an online survey confirms what CT predicted: Hierarchs tend to believe information released by policy actors with proper authority; individualists tend to believe information released by policy actors who favour economic growth over environmental protection; egalitarians favour all pro-environmental policy information even if the information is released by noncredible policy actors.

Scholars of political parties frequently note that a party's candidates are aided by the presence of a consistent and favourable party brand name. We argue that partisan success in maintaining a consistent position on important policy issues hinges on how their role in the government motivates their strategies about public policy formation. Specifically, when parties share control of government institutions, parties need to balance their electoral interest in promoting a consistent brand name with the need to generate public policy that leads to effective governance. When control is held by one party, the costs and benefits of effective governance are born entirely by the majority, absolving both parties of the need to compromise on the substance of policy. By employing item response theory methods to assess patterns of party voting on deficit issues, we find strong support for these hypotheses.

Japan has been characterised as the most successful industrialised country in its ability to attain growth in GNP, even during a world recession. This article explores the background to the Japanese economic success of postwar years. It emphasises in particular the part played in that success by the Japanese banking sector and cheap credit extended to expanding industries. The article discusses the respective roles of the Ministry of Trade and Industry and the Ministry of Finance. It concludes that both domestic and international pressures are producing changes within the Japanese economy which are reflected in alterations in the tasks and influence of these institutions.

The inauguration of Germany's grand coalition of Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) and the Social Democrats (SPD) raises questions about the public policy performance of a coalition of ideological opposite. This paper turns attention to influence of coalition governments on the size of government in the German Laender from 1992 to 2005. We investigate whether grand coalitions at the sub-national level in Germany systematically affect government spending for education (including cultural affairs) and internal security. The article argues that the effects of grand coalitions on the size of the public sector are moderated by partisan politics but sometimes in unexpected ways. For example, government spending in the field of education is reduced when leftist parties are powerful in the Laender.

Analytically, privatization and pluralization may be treated as separate economic and political phenomena, but in the actual conditions of a post-Communist society they are integrally related to the development of a middle-class society that was absent due to ‘deprivatization’ in a one-party state. The creation of a society of plural interests and private enterprise represents a shift from Sovietization to Europeanization. However, the process is extremely difficult, for there are many paradoxes in the logic of privatization. In addition, issues of ownership – past as well as future – are major political battlefields. Political strategies of privatization include a grand coalition; a new state-party; Latin-Americanization; creating a broad entrepreneurial class and/or a European working class; and a wide coalition. These complexities are examined with particular reference to the experience of contemporary Hungary.

This paper extends previous analyses of industrial policy from a corporatist perspective. We advocate a mid-level measure of group influence; the measure is based upon analysis of newspaper stories. A preliminary exploration of NewsBank data is reported, and several interesting trends in economic development policy are isolated. Business and education are heavily involved in policymaking whereas labor and political parties are not at all involved. On the whole, a meso-corporatist model in which business, state government, and education are partners seems to fit better than a business capture model. Some speculations are offered about this new American form of corporatism and its resemblance to the Japanese case.

At each stage of program implementation – strategic planning, systems design, development of the management control infrastructure, and project execution – different types of expertise are most critical to success. The civil service system, which is oriented toward the hiring of permanent employees, and personnel ceilings, which are often arbitrarily set in the budgeting process, interact to impede the transition from one implementation stage to the next. Cost overruns and long-run schedule slippage may result from attempts to expedite programs by beginning implementation stages in parallel, particularly if compensatory resources are not provided. These problems are illustrated with the history of the implementation of the strategic petroleum reserve program, a key element of US policy for reducing vulnerability to disruptions of the world oil market.

This paper examines long-term care insurance sales to assess whether state income tax subsidies are effective in encouraging the private purchase of long-term care insurance. Drawing from the most comprehensive available sales data on long-term care insurance policies, cross-state and over-time variation in sales data during the late 1990s and early 2000s are analysed. This analysis uses a panel model with fixed effects controls for potential endogeneity between state provision of tax subsidies and actual sales of long-term care insurance policies. Income, health and family support factors are significant determinants in the sale of long-term care insurance, but the tax incentives provided by many state governments do not induce any more sales of long-term care insurance than could be expected without such incentives. These costly subsidies have not been prudent uses of public dollars, and have not helped states cope with the challenge of long-term care costs.