When Western counties seek to reform welfare so that recipients have to work in return for aid, this poses implementation as well as policy problems. This study of work requirements in Wisconsin illustrates the challenges. It also confirms success of a top-down model of implementation. Wisconsin's welfare work programs had little impact on dependency through the mid 1980s because work was not a priority and work programs were underdeveloped. From 1985-6, however, the state increased funding and built up the employment bureaucracy. It required that more recipients participate in work programs, enter jobs rather than education, and avoid welfare if possible. It attuned the bureaucracy to its goals through funding incentives. These measures along with strong economic conditions then drove the welfare rolls down, with largely good effects. Wisconsin's achievement rested on its good-government traditions. Not all regimes have the same capacity.

Despite all the rhetoric, efforts to reform environmental regulation in the United States offer little promise of relief. Incapacitating the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and shifting responsibilities to the states hardly insures a less burdensome situation for the business community. At best, basic reform strategies merely add on various efficiency devices (bubbles, cost-benefit analyses, etc.) without addressing issues of overall regulatory performance. Moreover, none of the reform strategies, thus far, get at the underlying statutes and processes of environmental regulation which tend to generate a highly combative milieu. This discussion explores these weaknesses, and forwards an alternative approach, which is similar to regulatory processes in Europe and Canada (involving reduced litigation and increased negotiation).

We seek to understand the incentives facing Congress members to hold executive agencies accountable. Specifically, we explore whether Congress members are rewarded for taking politically costly oversight actions. We evaluate the effect of oversight activities on citizens’ evaluations of Congress members, taking into account the member’s partisanship, the citizen’s partisanship and agency ideology. Using a survey experiment, we find evidence that citizens’ evaluations of members are affected by the members’ oversight activity, with both copartisan and cross-party members rewarded for oversight efforts. Politically costly actions against ally agencies, however, do not appear to be rewarded to a greater extent by copartisans. These results provide insight into the way in which citizens interpret oversight activities by Congress members, suggesting that while good governance actions hold value for citizens, costly oversight actions aimed at ally agencies are not rewarded by copartisan citizens more than politically expedient oversight actions.

Who foresaw the UK banking crisis? This paper addresses this issue through detailed empirical work on the content of the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s speeches, Bank of England Financial Stability Reports, Financial Service Authority reports and speeches by Bank of England officials, editorials in the Times and Financial Times, bank annual reports and financial statements, credit rating reports, share price movements, Parliamentary questions, Treasury select committee reports and the output of academic economists. We find that few people inside or outside government recognised the existence of significant financial vulnerabilities in the financial system in the years prior to the collapse of Northern Rock in September 2007. We use the conceptual lenses of individual, institutional and paradigmatic pathologies to provide explanations for this failure to detect looming crisis conditions. We argue ultimately that regulators and commentators were blinded by faith in market forces and the risk-tempering properties of securitisation.

This article aims to map the political economy of top personal income tax rate setting. A much-discussed driving factor of top rate setting is the corporate tax rate: governments may prefer to limit the differential between both rates in order to prevent tax-friendly saving of labour incomes inside corporations. Recent studies have highlighted several other driving factors, including budgetary pressure, partisan politics, and societal fairness norms. I compare these and other potential determinants in the long run (1981–2018) by studying tax reforms of 226 cabinets in 19 advanced Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries using regression models. I find little evidence for the effects of economic, political, and institutional factors; instead, the main determinant of the top rate is the corporate tax rate. As corporate tax rates are still declining under competitive pressure, the recently set minimum rate of 15% will not stop tax competition from constraining progressive income taxation.

This paper examines the labour standard-setting capacities of the EU and NAFTA. The social dimension to the EU is depicted as being organised along the principles of deliberative supranationalism. The North American Agreement on Labour Cooperation (NAALC), sometimes referred to as the Labour Side Accord, which is the labour standard-setting arrangement for NAFTA, is regarded as a tri-national institutional arrangement which grafts formal international procedures onto domestic labour market regimes. The paper seeks to describe and explain how the different types of activities in which the two social dimensions are engaged can be traced back to their overall institutional design. The paper argues that EU social policy is the stronger of the two arrangements and that NAALC has significant shortcomings. Yet it also argues that NAALC holds out interesting lessons for other regional trading blocs and other global experiments in labour market standard setting as its decentralised and `horizontal' character is more in keeping with the broad institutional design of these arrangements.

A “bureau-shaping model” is adapted to explain how the head of a control agency can shape its culture by agenda-setting, strategic recruitment and engaging staff in “expression games” through which their reputation depends on the impression they develop of competence and commitment to the core beliefs of the agency. The postwar shaping of a “culture of balanced evaluation” at the New Zealand Treasury (NZT) reflected the hegemony of a market failure paradigm. The NZT reinvented itself in the 1980s so that it would be aligned with a reformist advocacy coalition committed to impose and institutionalize a government failure paradigm. The accumulation of a number of threats to the NZT's authority appear to be prompting another reinvention as its current secretary seeks to bring it more into line with the appreciative leadership style of its centre-left government.

Relying on social choice theory, this paper argues that uncertainty regarding future public policies is likely to be related to party institutionalization and legislative organization. The argument is evaluated using survey data from businesses in eight EU member states in East Central Europe. It finds that firms report lower concern over policy uncertainty in systems with higher party institutionalization. There is also some evidence, although less robust, that restrictive parliamentary agenda control leads to lower perceptions of policy uncertainty and this effect mediates the influence of party institutionalization. These results tend to hold if one controls for the effect of other national and firm-level factors.

This paper challenges the mechanical application of inflation accounting to public sector deficits as it has been suggested in recent years. Although the theoretical considerations underlying the proposed adjustment for the inflation premium of interest payments are well taken, the new approach has fundamentally focused on measurement issues with little attention paid to the behavioral aspects of microeconomic adjustment. This paper, therefore, raises skepticism about the usefulness of inflation accounting, if such a correction is not accompanied by a conceptual model that links behavioral responses of individuals to balance sheets and other stock variables. In a departure from previous investigations, the paper also points out the possibility that inflation accounting might have more relevant implications for public, rather than private, spending.

As implementers, public officials have historically enjoyed substantial influence in the public policy process, but little attention has been paid to the effect of psychological elements on their attitudes towards implementing policy instruments. The authors argue that from a behavioural public administration perspective, public officials’ attitudes towards implementing certain policy instruments are not rational, but instead biased. Using two survey experiments on 1,024 Chinese public officials, this study examines the cognitive and motivational bias of public officials’ attitudes towards implementing policy instruments. The findings indicate that when public officials are presented with risk information in a negative framing, they are more reluctant to implement indirect policy instruments than direct ones, and this phenomenon becomes more pronounced when their public interest orientation is activated, rather than their personal interest orientation. The findings contribute to the theoretical understanding of the effect of psychological biases on public officials’ attitudes towards policy implementation.

Recent research on morality policy has focused on policy change, morality framing and the presence of favourable cultural opportunity structures (COSs). The resulting literature describing various aspects of morality policy has failed to discuss the impact of multilevel dynamic in this field. This contribution examines gambling policy in Italy, applying a multilevel approach to detect the presence of favourable COSs, and whether policymakers frame policies morally. Italy offers a particularly fertile field for the study of morality policy, featuring a liberal national approach versus local restrictive policy. By applying a methodology based on semistructured interviews and secondary sources, we examine the national and local political spheres, demonstrating that morality framing, when detected, is more likely to be found at the local level where the influence of experts and interest groups on legislators may result in the transformation of a health policy based on paternalistic considerations.

Within the advanced capitalist world, Japan and France have normally been the main examples of strong, interventionist states. From the 1960s onwards, government policy in each nation attempted to cultivate a domestically based computer industry in response to American dominance. This seemed to be parallel cases of strong states attempting to target an industry in order to catch up. However, by the start of the 1980s it was clear that French policy had failed, whereas Japan was relatively successful. We explain this difference by stressing that Japanese policy was ultimately more market conforming. This occurred because Japanese companies were less dependent on government financing and procurement for their business compared to French counterparts. In short, the Japanese state had less power over its domestic computer companies than did the French state. This national difference in ‘state strength’, i.e., state-business power relations, accounts for a negotiated pattern of industrial restructuring in Japan compared to the predominantly state-led pattern in France.

Drawing on data for 60 Australian Commonwealth government bureaucracies 1976–86, this paper explores what measurable consequences for bureaucratic structure can be associated with staffing and spending cutbacks. It looks at cutbacks both at government-wide and at individual-bureaucracylevel, on the basis of a casualty list intended to portray the different dimensions of relative bureaucratic ‘suffering’ more systematically than has hitherto been done in the cutback management literature. It then explores associations between measures of cutbacks and indicators of structural consequences, both at government-wide and departmental level, relating that to the debate as to whether ‘leaner means weaker’ in government cutbacks. The ‘leaner means weaker’ view of bureaucratic cutbacks is hard to sustain from these data.

Despite promises by European Union (EU) policymakers to “fundamentally change” cybersecurity certification, they have recently created a regime that is strikingly similar to already existing certification arrangements. How can we explain this puzzle? Through a process-tracing analysis based on 41 documents and 18 interviews, this article traces the development of the EU cybersecurity certification regime over the past two decades. It deconstructs certification into standardisation, accreditation, certification, and evaluation; analyses how each regime component changed over time; and discusses to what extent causal mechanisms that are derived from classic theories of EU integration explain the limited nature of policy change. The observed dynamics uncover a “Europeanization on Demand” model that allows national authorities to completely control the extent of integration. This study challenges the dichotomous understanding portrayed by EU integration literature, of mutually exclusive dynamics of market or core state powers integration, highlighting intriguing political dynamics in EU cybersecurity policymaking.

With the outbreak of the financial crisis in 2008, European governments extensively intervened to avert a severe economic recession. Taxation is a crucial instrument to achieve such economic objectives, but it also represents a redistributive tool in democratic societies. Generally, left-wing parties are more supportive of progressive taxes and redistribution than right-wing governments. As a crisis response, one could assume that European governments, especially social-democratic ones, reinforced a redistributive stance to compensate for the substantial amounts of public money used to bail out financial institutions. Based on the tax reforms introduced between 2008 and 2010, the paper explores the tax strategies adopted by European governments. The findings do not reveal a direct effect of party politics on taxation but rather show that pressures from the capital markets significantly restrained governments’ policy capacities to act.

Policymaking and policy outcomes are not necessarily the result of a carefully designed process but can result from intertwined political and institutional dynamics that are often difficult to predict from the outset. This article examines such a policy process, the dramatic rise in the uptake of private health insurance (PHI) in Denmark. In a comprehensive welfare state, founded on the principle of universalism, its success is puzzling. The explanation suggested here is that the rise in PHI is an example of policymaking without policy choice. The article reviews the intended and unintended effects concerning equality in health care and public finance. It also notes that the introduction of a private alternative to the universal health care system has not weakened the support for the public services.

In this article, we describe two experiments measuring the impact of a collection of interventions informed by behavioural sciences to reduce unemployment. In a small-scale pilot study (n = 2,383) run in partnership with a Jobcentre in the UK, we found that small changes to the way jobseekers interacted with employment advisers showed promising effects. Based on these findings, we refined our intervention and tested it in a second, larger trial (n = 88,033) across 12 Jobcentres in the UK. We found that our intervention significantly increased off-flow from benefits. These experiments demonstrate that policies and programmes aimed at reducing unemployment can benefit greatly from a deeper understanding of the behaviours of jobseekers and employment advisers. Further, we suggest that this approach could have positive implications for other areas of public policy.

The landmark United States healthcare reform law – the Affordable Care Act – provides an opportunity to study the dynamics of implementation for complex, politically contentious policies. Matland’s Ambiguity-Conflict Model suggests that bottom-up models will dominate in such cases. I exploit variation across states in the implementation of online health insurance marketplaces to test whether the federal- (top-down) or state-managed (bottom-up) implementation model produced better outcomes. Specifically, the study examines if state, federal or partnership exchanges were most effective at offering generous plans for consumers based on premiums, deductibles and copayments in 2014, the first year of operation. The results unambiguously indicate that state exchanges were most successful. The findings provide evidence for what Matland suspected – that bottom-up models, by providing more discretion to local implementers to adapt to contexts and build coalitions, are superior for high-conflict, high-ambiguity policies.

Welfare is traditionally understood as social security decommodifying labour markets or as social investment policies. In the domain of housing, however, welfare for homeowners is largely hidden in the tax codes’ fiscal exemptions. Based on a content analysis of legislation, this article introduces a novel yearly database of 37 countries between 1901 and 2020 to uncover the “hidden welfare state” of taxes on imputed rent, deductibility of mortgage payments, housing capital gains tax, and value-added tax on newly built dwellings. Summary indices of homeownership attractiveness and neutrality of the tax code show that fiscal homeownership policies have been in decline until the 1980s and risen ever since. They are in place where finance is liberally and labour restrictively regulated. Contrary to the classical welfare state, they are not associated with an economic logic of industrialism or left-wing governments. They rather are an alternative to rent regulation used by Common-law jurisdictions or smaller countries. As welfare for property owners, the logic of fiscal homeownership welfare diverges from the classical welfare for the labouring classes.