Explanatory models accounting for variation in policy choices by democratic governments usually include a demand (by the public) and a supply (by the government) component, whereas the latter component is usually better developed from a measurement viewpoint. The main reason is that public opinion surveys, the standard approach to measuring public demand, are expensive, difficult to implement simultaneously for different countries for purposes of crossnational comparison and impossible to implement ex post for purposes of longitudinal analysis if survey data for past time periods are lacking. We therefore propose a new approach to measuring public demand, focussing on political claims made by nongovernmental actors and expressed in the news. To demonstrate the feasibility and usefulness of our measure of published opinion, we focus on climate policy in the time period between 1995 and 2010. When comparing the new measure of published opinion with the best available public opinion survey and internet search data, it turns out that our data can serve as a meaningful proxy for public demand.

My aim is to explore an important feature of public policy that has been somewhat neglected: many policies are largely made by the way of making other polices. To examine this idea and tentatively explore some of its implications, I shall employ the notion of ‘policy by the way’. What I wish to convey with the help of this concept is the reality of many areas of concern which are touched by public policy entirely or primarily by the way of focusing on other areas of concern. The notion of ‘policy by the way’ is anticipated in some key concepts of policy research and policy analysis, but its specific features still seem to deserve more focused attention. I gradually build up the notion of policy by the way with the help of well-known contributions to the field and a few examples from Israel, albeit no claim is made that Israel is in any way representative of other western democracies. It is quite possible, however, that the reality of public policy as a byproduct, which I believe is universal, is more easily discerned due to the special politics of Israel, basically, a fragile coalition government with strong turf orientation and weak coordination.

Spain's newspapers are characterised by strong partisan identities. We demonstrate that the two leading newspapers nonetheless show powerful similarities in the topics of their coverage over time. The media system is strongly related to the policy process and it shows similar levels of skew (attention focuses on just a few topics) and friction (attention lurches rapidly from topic to topic) as others have shown for policy processes more generally. Further, media attention is significantly related to parliamentary activities. Oral questions in parliament track closely with media attention over time. Our assessment is based on a comprehensive database of all front-page stories (over 95,000 stories) in El País and El Mundo, Spain's largest daily newspapers, and all 7,446 oral questions from 1996 to 2009. The paper shows that explanations of friction and skew in governmental activities should incorporate media dynamics as well. Political leaders are clearly sensitive to media salience.

The theory of regulatory competition suggests a race to the bottom of environmental standards. This theory, however, has not found much empirical support. Several attempts to account for this theoretical failure have been made in the literature, which mainly refer to the underlying assumptions of the theory. In this article, we present an alternative explanation. We argue that in reality regulatory competition is overlapped by other mechanisms affecting the adjustment of national policies. Most important are the effects emerging from regulatory cooperation at the level of the European Union (EU). To arrive at more precise theoretical predictions, we therefore not only analyze the individual effects of competition and cooperation on national policies, but also the impact of their interaction.

Pressman and Wildavsky's Implementation occupies center stage in the developing literature about policy implementation, in part because of the analogy they drew between implementation processes and the multiplicative model from probability theory. This paper takes the relevance of probability theory further and considers the additive model from probability theory and conditional probabilities as well as the multiplicative model. This expanded coverage of probability theorems (1) leads to markedly increased optimism about the likelihood of successful implementation, (2) encompasses empirically reasonable tactics such as persistence, packaging of clearances, engineering bandwagons and policy reduction, and (3) generates advice to hopeful implementers – some of it non-obvious.

In the past, green taxation has become a widespread tool in pollution control in Europe. This new type of state intervention is based on an idea developed by environmental economists and diffused internationally through various channels of information exchange. We argue that the idea itself does not inform us about the way in which green taxation is designed because sectoral policy networks influence power relations, which in turn influence the actual design of green tax schemes. Thus, policy networks are the intervening variable explaining why an internationally diffused policy idea is implemented differently in various national settings. This argument is supported by a comparison of pesticide taxation and CO2 taxation in Denmark, Norway and Sweden.

Affected by the ideological symbolism and political controversy surrounding privatization, much of the work on this subject is marred by definitional uncertainty; what should be included in the concept? To get away from this, and to prepare the ground for meaningful comparative analysis of the phenomenon, I propose both a definition and a taxonomy. I argue that it is the active and conscious transfer of reponsibility from the public to the private realm that should form the core of the concept. Furthermore, I argue that neither the principles for, nor the level of, provision of goods and services should be included in the definition. Finally, I propose that the taxonomy should be based on the public/private dichotomy of responsibility allocation included in the definition, as well as on three main activities in goods and services production which the government could privatize; regulation, financing, and production.

This paper examines the extent to which diffusion mechanisms have been important for the privatization of telecommunications in the OECD world. It analyzes a panel dataset for 18 OECD countries between 1980 and 2007 using spatial econometric techniques. The sample includes 18 OECD countries between 1980 and 2007. The empirical findings strongly suggest that spatial interdependencies are significant for privatization policies. First, closely related countries from a geographical or economic perspective influence each other to a greater extent than non-related countries. Second, there is no evidence that governments adopt policies of countries with a similar cultural background or the policies of those countries where privatization has been shown to lead to the intended economic results at the company level. Third, the importance of diffusion is highly influenced by national characteristics such the openness of the economy.

In times of an alleged waning of political business cycles and partisan policy-making, vote-seeking policy-makers can be expected to shift the use of political manipulation mechanisms towards other policy domains in which the macro-institutional environment allows them greater leverage. Public employment generally, and police employment specifically, are a promising domain for such tactics. Timing the hiring of police officers during election periods may increase votes, as these are “street-visible” jobs dealing with politically salient issues. Law-and-order competence signalling makes police hiring especially attractive for conservative parties. Testing these electioneering and partisanship hypotheses in the German states between 1992 and 2010, we find that socio-economic variables such as population density strongly determine police employment. But incumbents also hire more police officers before elections, while conservative party power increases police numbers. Subjectively “immediate” forms of crime (issue salience) and perceived causes of crime such as immigration are also positively associated with police numbers.

This article looks at the impact of multilevel governance structures on state-society relations. It contends that rather than focusing on relations between state actors and societal actors, it is more useful to look at shifts between competing advocacy coalitions in a given issue area. It argues that the impact of multilevel governance structures on domestic advocacy coalitions depends on the political opportunity structure provided at the international level, the types of policy outputs international institutions can deliver, and the extent to which members of an advocacy coalition have the organizational capacities to be active at the international level. These factors are explored in two cases of public health policy: anti-smoking policy and alcoholism policy. Moreover, both cases show that multilevel governance structures offer better opportunities for challengers than for defenders of the domestic status quo.

This article investigates the politics of reforming mature, pay-as-you-go pensions in the context of austerity. In both Sweden and Germany the Social Democratic party leadership advocated reform in response to similar financial and demographic pressures, but the Swedish reform was more successful in correcting perceived program weaknesses and in defending social democratic values. To explain this difference in outcomes, we focus on policy legacies and the organizational and political capacities of labor movements. We argue that existing pension policies in Germany were more constraining than in Sweden, narrowing the range of politically feasible strategies. By contrast, in Sweden, existing pension policy provided opportunities for turning vices into virtues and financing the transition to a new system. In addition, the narrow interests of German unions and the absence of institutionalized cooperation with the Social Democratic Party hindered reform. By contrast, the Swedish Social Democrats' bargaining position in pension reform negotiations with non-socialist parties was formulated with blue collar union interests in mind. The encompassing interests of Swedish unions and their close links with the Social Democrats facilitated a reform compromise.

Progressive taxation is an effective redistributive tool in times of growing inequality. However, like all public policies, an increase in tax progressivity is unlikely if it lacks popular demand. Has the financial crisis affected the demand for progressive taxation? Building on research that has identified fairness beliefs as the main factor pushing for taxes on the rich, I argue that the Great Recession and states’ reactions to it have caused a general shift in tax policy preferences. As a consequence, demand for tax progressivity is higher in crisis countries. Multilevel analyses using survey data for 32 countries show support for my argument. These findings have important implications for our understanding of the politics of redistribution in the 21st century.

In mainstream welfare state theory the new institutional approach has explained incremental changes as institutions gradually adjust at the margin. However, big and sudden changes remain outside the scope of this theory. The article uses the theory of punctuated equilibrium to argue that politics is characterized by long periods of stability followed by dramatic bursts of change. The theory is tested on policy data from 18 Western countries, 1971–2002. It confirms that the degree of non-incrementalism depends partly on the institutional friction in a country and partly on the type of welfare programme in question.

In the last decade regulatory reforms have focused increasingly on efforts to improve regulatory quality. As part of that development policymakers have been encouraged to consider fiscal, socio-economic and administrative effects of proposed legislation when making policy choices. The Central and East European EU member states have adopted regulatory impact analysis (RIA) mechanisms but so far there has been little analysis of their implementation. This article first compares the manner in which RIAs have been institutionalised in the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia. Second, it explores how differences in institutionalisation have affected RIA performance. The paper concludes that there are marked differences in the RIA quality across Central and Eastern Europe, notably as a consequence of national differences in institutional and administrative contexts and capacities.

The Policy Agendas Project (PAP) was developed in the United States in the early 1990s as a means of collecting data on the contents of the policy agenda. The PAP coding method has subsequently been employed in the United Kingdom, a number of European countries, Canada, Israel, New Zealand, as well as the state of Pennsylvania (http://www.comparativeagendas.org/). What does PAP measure? How does it measure it? What does it find? How does it explain what it finds? We use these questions to structure our review.

Because the American states operate under balanced budget requirements, increases in spending in one area typically entail equal and opposite budget cuts in other programs. The literature analysing the correlates of government spending by policy area has mostly ignored these trade-offs inherent to policymaking, failing to address one of the most politically interesting and important dimensions of fiscal policy. Borrowing from the statistical literature on compositional data, we present more appropriate and efficient methods that explicitly incorporate the budget constraint into models of spending by budget category. We apply these methods to eight categories of spending from the American states over the years 1984–2009 to reveal winners and losers in the scramble for government spending. Our findings show that partisan governments finance their distinct priorities by raiding spending items that the opposition prefers, while different political institutions, economic conditions and state demographics impose different trade-offs across the budget.

Policy actors tend to misinterpret and distrust opponents in policy processes. This phenomenon, known as the “devil shift”, consists of the following two dimensions: actors perceive opponents as more powerful and as more evil than they really are. Analysing nine policy processes in Switzerland, this article highlights the drivers of the devil shift at two levels. On the actor level, interest groups, political parties and powerful actors suffer more from the devil shift than state actors and powerless actors. On the process level, the devil shift is stronger in policy processes dealing with socio-economic issues as compared with other issues. Finally, and in line with previous studies, there is less empirical evidence of the power dimension of the devil shift phenomenon than of its evilness dimension.

State capacity is a key concept for research in public policy and political science. Despite its importance, there is no broadly accepted measure of state capacity in the existing literature, and frequently used measures of capacity have not been examined for their validity. We begin with an explicit definition of state capacity – the state's ability to implement public policy – and connect this definition to a measurable outcome of state capacity – the state's taxation of income. We show that this measure, income taxes as a percentage of total tax revenue, is a useful indicator of state capacity and meets higher standards of measurement validity than other tax-based indicators. We also compare our measure to the most common existing indicators of state capacity to show that income taxation is a better theoretical and statistical measure of states’ effectiveness in policy implementation.

The literature on risk regulation often assumes a direct link between public pressure and regulatory responses. This article investigates whether the direction of regulatory response is related to public argumentation as expressed in the national print media. Three approaches are explored: national policy patterns, political panics expressed in Pavlovian politics, and policy responses shaped by universal policy paradigms. It assesses these three approaches in comparative perspective by looking at scandals in food safety regulation in Denmark, Germany and the US, looking at argumentation patterns in the national print media and using a coding system derived from grid-group cultural theory and regulatory responses. While all three countries display mostly hierarchical argumentation patterns, their actual regulatory responses point to diverse patterns.

Numerous authors have highlighted utilitarian considerations as sources of public support for the European Union, suggesting that support results primarily from cost-benefit calculations of the gains and losses associated with integration. Benefits accrue, not only to different member states, but also to individuals. Within this discussion it is often suggested that the gains and losses are unevenly distributed across social groups, with the higher status groups being privileged and the lower status groups disadvantaged. This paper challenges arguments that assume a clear division between lower social strata and higher social strata in terms of winning and losing in Europeanization; it looks more closely at how Europeans rate the integration process as it affects them personally, and how this influences their support for integration. The results show that socio-economic characteristics cannot fully explain people's perceptions of being winners or losers, and a large proportion of EU citizens do not consider themselves either winners or losers. The paper also demonstrates that the winner/loser self-characterization is indeed a major determinant of support for the EU, but that it only partly coincides with people's socio-economic position.