The generosity of maternity pay has been shown to be an important factor for mothers’ attachment to the labour market. In the UK, we can observe that the generosity of maternity leaves across universities varies greatly: some universities top up the statutory maternity pay with longer and better paid leaves, others are either less generous or only entitle academic women to the legal minimum. We want to understand why this is the case. Therefore, this article examines both theoretically and empirically how higher education employers decide about the generosity of the offered occupational maternity pay. We use a bargaining approach to model the supply and demand side of generous maternity benefits in universities with different characteristics and test the implications with a generalised negative binomial model. We find that universities’ income does not account for this variation while differences in terms of costs and benefits for employers do. Most importantly, our results show that more research intense universities with a higher previous share of female professors provide more generous maternity pay. We offer a range of explanations for these findings.

Governments pursue their goals by adopting various mixes of policy instruments. This article proposes a specific operationalisation of these mixes and applies it to the analysis of reforms that many Western European governments have pursued, as they have adopted a similar policy design in their higher education systems (HESs) over the last 20 years. In fact, although these policies have similar templates, performance indicators exhibit remarkable variation between countries. Thus, by applying Qualitative Comparative Analysis to a large data set containing all changes in policy instruments undertaken in the last 20 years in 12 HESs in Western Europe, this article explores the possibility that differences in performance across national HESs could be associated – ceteris paribus – with different policy mixes. This article finds not only that the common template has been applied through very different national policy mixes but also that only a few instruments are regularly linked to good teaching performance, regardless of the other components of the actual policy mix.

In the absence of partisan ownership of an issue, what factors shape public preferences for federal, state and local policy action? The Zika virus provides a unique context in which to examine this question, as it is a new threat to public health in the United States and lacks clear partisan ownership. We examine (1) which Zika policies do citizens support, (2) at which level(s) of government and (3) what factors explain citizen assignment of policy responsibility to different levels of government? Using nationally representative survey data, we find that the three most popular policy responses to Zika are travel warnings, research funding and public education, with the federal government being the preferred policy actor. In the absence of clear partisan issue ownership, we find that Republicans are significantly more likely to prefer state policy action, while partisanship has no impact on public preferences for federal or local policy action.

We analyse the importance of legitimacy on public policy support by comparing how drivers of public policy attitudes evolve across the policy process consisting of the input (the processes forgoing acquisition of power and the procedures permeating political decisionmaking), throughput (the inclusion of and interactions between actors in a governance system) and output (the substantive consequences of those decisions) stages. Using unique panel data through three phases of the implementation of a congestion tax in the Swedish city of Gothenburg, we find that legitimacy is indeed important in explaining policy support. Moreover, we find a lingering effect where support in one phase depends on legitimacy both in the present and in previous phases. Hence, our study takes us one step further on the road to understand the complicated dynamic mechanisms behind the interactions between policymaking, policy support, and the legitimacy and approval of politicians and political processes.

As far as local governments are responsible for the practical implementation of many European Union (EU) policies, they codetermine member states’ EU compliance records and the fate of EU legislation. Yet, they do so in remarkably different ways, as exemplified by the variegated implementation of the Ambient Air Quality Directive 2008/50/EC by Dutch municipalities. Taking guidance from the literature on EU compliance, in this article we explain the differences in local implementation performance based on the political and managerial approaches. Understanding which of the two approaches drives different local responses to EU policy bears consequences for the appropriate remedy for nonimplementation. Four municipalities were purposefully selected along with the two-by-two implementation performance scoring matrix in the realm of air quality. A comparative within-case analysis specifies how political explanations outweigh managerial explanations in accounting for variation in implementation performance and distils ‘policy saliency’ as the driving causal mechanism.

While the importance of political appointments is a matter of consensus, theorists and empiricists generally focus on different considerations, such as ideology and confirmation duration, respectively. More recently, there have been efforts to integrate empirical and theoretical scholarship but, to date, no empirical analysis assesses theoretical expectations about the relationship between temporal concerns and nominee ideologies. We fill this gap by examining theoretical predictions and related expectations about how the passage of time affects the President’s choices of nominees. We find that executives are disadvantaged as days pass and Presidents propose nominees with whom they are less ideologically compatible over time.

How are civil servants and politically appointed advisers likely to respond to policy proposals that they believe will harm their countries severely even if they are legal? Based on the different loyalties and roles of political advisors (PA) and civil servants (CS), we hypothesise that (1) PAs are more likely to voice internally, (2) CSs are more likely to voice externally and (3) CSs in functionally politicised systems are more likely to stay silent. These hypotheses are tested on – and partially supported by – data collected through two surveys directed to the ministerial staffs in Denmark and Sweden. PAs are more likely to voice internally, but none of the two groups is particularly keen to voice externally. The propensity to voice concerns in case of perceived harmful policy proposals depends on the kind as well as the level of politicisation.

This article studies local processes of policy feedback by analysing citizens’ fairness perceptions of public childcare fees in a German town. Employing an experimental vignette study, we uncover complex feedback effects: first, citizens in the study regard a fee level as fair that is close to the actual fee level in the city, suggesting self-reinforcing feedback effects. Second, citizens strongly support a fee structure in which fees vary according to parental income. As this preferred fee structure differs from the local fee structure in the town itself, we interpret the citizens’ preference as evidence for self-undermining policy feedback. Finally, the actual characteristics of the respondents matter less than the fictitious characteristics of the parents in the vignettes, which points to the importance of interpretive rather than resource-based feedback effects. In concluding, we highlight the relevance of these findings for broader debates about policy feedback.