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.

How might public policy changes affect electoral support for authoritarian regimes? Missing from the existing scholarship, which focuses mostly on regimes generating political budget cycles and manipulating electoral rules, is an exploration of how non-fiscal and non-electoral policies may impact incumbent support. We examine this issue with electoral and census data from one of the world’s most prominent authoritarian regimes – Russia – to evaluate the regime’s 2017 change to the policy governing native language instruction, which curtailed minority students’ ability to learn their native languages and faced opposition in some ethnic regions. Examining panel data on presidential elections using fixed effects models, our results reveal that the regime’s support decreased in titular minority areas in 2018. The results also indicate that some of these patterns emerged in previous national legislative elections and thus cannot be solely attributed to the policy change.

Policy change is not an instantaneous or linear process. In fact, change includes several mechanisms working in tandem and even against one another. This article examines the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on homelessness policy in Canada. In a sector that is already plagued with emergency responses – rather than long-term solutions – the pandemic has initiated a critical juncture where policy change is possible, but not guaranteed. Although the existing failures to alleviate homelessness in Canada make policy failings even more obvious, aspects of the pre-existing Canadian response to homelessness negate change. The pandemic, however, has led to temporary solutions and created a setting where long-term change is possible. Using over 150 primary sources, this article analyses mechanisms of change and path dependence in the pandemic response to homelessness. The presence of such mechanisms is tested in three major Canadian cities.

Do seniors have different public spending preferences than younger people? The literature on this topic has been limited so far to a few policies or to short periods of time, which makes it difficult to provide a comprehensive answer to this question. Using data from Canadian surveys conducted between 1987 and 2019 and covering fifteen policies, this paper shows that seniors, as compared to younger adults, are slightly more favourable to the status quo when it comes to government spending. Results also show that support for education spending decreases extensively over the life cycle, while support for environment spending decreases until middle age, then stabilizes. In contrast, support for transportation spending is more widespread in older age, while support for elderly services takes an inverted U-shape over the life cycle. These findings broaden our understanding of the influence of age on government spending preferences and allow us to reflect on the consequences of a growing senior electorate on government budgets.

This article develops the concept of policy advisory system (PAS) management in recognition of the need to better theorise and empirically study how governments approach the complex systems of advice around them. In our analysis, we go beyond the conceptualisation of degrees of government’s “control” over advisory sources. We use the dimensions of government agency and discretion and argue that PAS management falls into four forms: authoritative, dependent, laissez-faire, or absent. Using evidence from Australia, Canada, Britain, and New Zealand, we explore how governments operationalise these approaches through a range of choices and practices. The analysis points to the need to recognise that attempts to manage these systems occur both proactively and reactively with clear differences in the broad or narrow scope of management efforts.

Strong climate policy is vital to tackling climate change, but even the best proposals can get watered down when lobbying occurs. This article analyses which interest groups lobby on EU climate policies and under which conditions these groups achieve their policy goals. We expect that both economic and political resources are important. Economic resources give groups the capacity to mobilise expertise, but an interest group’s success also depends on its congruence with public opinion, especially in a politicised area such as EU climate policy. To test our hypotheses, we focus on six EU climate policy issues for which we conducted expert surveys with lobbyists and a content analysis of 737 media statements in eight European news outlets, combined with Eurobarometer data. Our results show that interest groups with higher economic resources and with public opinion on their side are more likely to achieve their preferences on EU climate policy issues.

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) was intended to reduce inequalities in access to healthcare resources. However, a 2012 Supreme Court decision allowed states to opt out of a key component of the policy, leading to even greater variation in Medicaid’s implementation. Using this variation, we estimate the effect of the ACA Medicaid expansion and racial dynamics on federal Medicaid-CHIP transfers received by states at the county level. To do so, we use a difference-in-differences specification and allow the expansion effect to vary across counties with different population shares of Black Americans. We find that Medicaid expansion increases the funds that are sent to counties, but additional analyses show that the racial demographics of a county also serve to influence how federal resources are apportioned. Specifically, the analyses reveal a curvilinear relationship between the proportion of Black residents and the dispersal of funds.

The government plays first fiddle in European Union (EU) decision-making processes, but a role in EU governance is also performed by the national parliament, which has gained additional competence to submit reasoned opinions based on the subsidiarity principle and participate in the political dialogue with the European Commission. The authors trace the policy-shaping and policy-taking processes and explore the impact of parliamentary and government involvement in EU policy-making on belated and timely transposition of EU directives in the Czech Republic. This comparative analysis of six directives, of which three were transposed on time and the other three from the same policy areas not, shows that the connection between ex-ante and ex-post stages still seems weak, and thus, greater involvement by parliament in EU affairs does not alone affect the time of transposition. Instead, the capacity of the government, determined partly by the salience of the legislation and its characteristics, is the main explanation for the transposition delays.

Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) was born out of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act in the backdrop of highly racialised and otherizing fears about the mythical “welfare queen.” However, the perception of Black exploitation of public benefits to White detriment is not exclusively a modern phenomenon. One of its original manifestations can be found in White reactions to the Freedmen’s Bureau during the post-Civil War period of Reconstruction. We therefore argue that state decisions to allocate spending towards cash assistance and coercive programmes designed to motivate work participation and regulate private behaviour are shaped by the imprint of this historic institution. Using TANF spending data from 2001 to 2019 and data on Freedmen’s Bureau field offices, we find evidence of a link between these offices’ historic prevalence and contemporary, coercive allocations. However, we find little evidence that this link extends to spending towards cash assistance.