The dispute settlement mechanism of the World Trade Organization tends to give verdicts for the plaintiff much more often than verdicts for the defendant. Simple logic suggests that this is a puzzle: it is not immediately obvious why defendants do not settle out of court if they are likely to be found guilty. I argue that there are three alternative explanations for this puzzle: imperfect enforcement, asymmetric information, and domestic constraints. By examining three major WTO cases, I find the domestic constraints explanation the most persuasive.

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.

The article explains economic policy in Germany with a model that takes partisan theory as its starting point, but supplements it with the impact of party competition and veto players. During the 1980s the low internal cohesion of the Christian democrats along with a positive economic performance kept the coalition from introducing coherent reforms. With the loss of the majority in the second chamber, compromises with the opposition were necessary which further diluted reforms with few exceptions. When the government faced worsening economic conditions which put its re-election at risk, it introduced more radical reforms. Because of an opposition majority in the second chamber, however, those reforms ran the risk of failing. In sum, Tsebelis' veto player theory is corroborated with some qualifications, the most important of which is that it must also take into account strategic orientations of actors.

This comparative study analyses how the state alcohol monopoly systems in Finland, Norway and Sweden were affected by interaction with the European Union (EU). Pressures from the EU, as well as the contrasting domestic responses in this process, are viewed in relation to how these institutions were integrated in terms of consistency, interdependence and structural connectedness. The article goes beyond the frequent observation that external scrutiny and pressures challenge national policy coherence to show that domestic public policies also may emerge more coherent and integrated. It is suggested that the relationship between the way public policies are integrated, categorized and re-categorized provides important insights towards our understanding of the dynamics of public policy.

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.

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.

The article provides a structural and political account of financial intervention in Spain, Portugal and Greece and examines competing explanations for financial liberalization. It focuses on the economic and political objectives underlying financial reform, and the costs and benefits for government, central bank, and the banking sector. It argues that financial liberalization was, to a significant extent a necessary prerequisite for the central banks' programmatic effort to achieve effective disinflation. This challenges the dominant arguments viewing financial liberalization exclusively within the framework of the European financial integration program or as a result of interest group pressure. At a subsequent stage, a stabilization strategy based on monetary austerity entailed the significant political advantage of allowing governments to avoid a more radical pace of fiscal adjustment. Both financial interventionism and liberalization displayed a state-driven policy pattern.

The creation of agencies is a growing feature of contemporary governance yet key questions about agency autonomy and their influence on policy making remain unanswered. This article operationalises a policy network approach to explore the impact of agentification in three British government departments. It argues that the transfer of resources from departments to agencies created differing power-dependent networks between minister, department and agency. The networks have had both intended and unintended impacts on policy outcomes. Agencies have input to policymaking, the network's level of integration affects how well policies are delivered, networks have developed policy preferences and acted to impede further institutional change. These findings assist in understanding the nature of agencies' autonomy, the diversity of their impact on the policy process, and provide insights for other forms of alternative service delivery.

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 assesses the impact nationalism has on public policies in ethno-linguistically divided societies. In particular, focus is on the institutional changes from nation-wide systems to Flemish and Francophone halves in Belgian education and mass media. The explanation is a society-based one, which highlights the impact of society on institutions rather than the more common opposite. Evidence demonstrates the role played by the ethno-linguistic structure in promoting the direction of change. Many issues which divide societies and engender political partisanship were subsumed under the question communautaire until a sufficient degree of congruence between the underlying social structure and political institutions was attained.

Researchers examining regulatory enforcement have found that enforcement styles tend to be contextually determined in Western countries, which has resulted in a divergence in regulatory approach at both the national and local levels. Given the dearth of regulation research in non-democratic regimes, this paper makes an initial attempt to fill the gap by studying the impact of regional variations in regulatory enforcement in China. Accordingly, the effects of external support and organizational factors on the preferences for enforcement styles of environmental officials in three Chinese regions were examined. It was found that the strength of these influences on enforcement style dimensions is more variable than was anticipated. Generally, the patterns of relationships for Guangzhou and Chengdu were similar, while those for Dalian appear to reflect its unique environmental, economic and political conditions. Public support appears to promote several dimensions of enforcement style (i.e., education, prioritization, coercion) in Guangzhou and Chengdu; however, in Dalian the influence of government was greater than that of public support. The effects of internal factors were even more variable and probably reflect unique characteristics and priorities within each agency. Overall, the results suggest that caution is warranted when interpreting current findings about China that have used samples from a single region and that enforcement agency directors in nondemocratic regimes must take into account a complex array of contextual factors in attempting to promote a particular style of enforcement.

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.