Major social reforms affect the extent to which social rights are granted widely and equally or selectively and in a manner re-enforcing social stratification. Thus, they affect the amount of institutionally sanctioned inequality in a welfare state. This paper seeks to explain the politics of making decisions about unequal social rights. It emphasizes the importance of studying the substantive contents of the policy changes that are on the reform agenda; the kind of actors involved in reform controversies; and the kind of demands they raise. Which actors involved prevail in these controversies, however, is a function of the dynamic of political competition at the time of legislative decision-making. That dynamic tends to be centrifugal; it empowers groups at strategic positions in the political constellation. The paper develops analytical categories for capturing both typological distinctions of substantive policy contents and the empowering dynamic. It demonstrates the significance of this model by analyzing four instances of major welfare reform in Germany.

The paper investigates the changes to the Fund's bilateral surveillance policy in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2007–09 asking about the factors that caused the quick and deep shift to a systemic surveillance approach. In answering this question, the paper argues that the causes of the quick and deep transformation of IMF surveillance lie in the preceding two decades of incremental accumulation of knowledge and small transformations in policy instruments and organizational practices. In identifying the causes of present policy choices in the lessons drawn from past experience, the paper provides an example of lagged learning because the lessons drawn from the 1990s emerging market crises exerted their full impact only as a response to the global financial crisis. These findings therefore contribute to the literature that aims at showing the importance of temporality and process sequencing to explain policy change.

In this final JPP issue from the Centre for the Study of Public Policy, I review its distinctive aim of publishing articles applying relevant concepts from the social sciences to problems facing contemporary governments. The aim is illustrated by reprinting five articles from past issues and a Symposium (1986) discussing different ways in which social science journals are edited. The articles are Bowen (1982); Weaver (1986); Rose (2002); Silvia (2004); Bruner and Abdelal (2005).

Policy responses to the tumult of the global financial crisis of 2007–9 prompt a consideration of the critical dimensions in specifying policy change. UK monetary policy between 2007 and 2009 is characterised by a remarkable degree of innovation yet counts as a ‘normal’ period of policy making under the Hall (1993) framework of policy change, the enduring workhorse of the comparative public policy field. This exposes its lack of conceptual refinement in describing significant but within paradigm policy change. This paper traces this failing to the notion of a policy paradigm, both its scale and the ideational mechanisms which bind policy change. The paper develops the UK monetary policy case to consider the potential of the recently-minted concept of a thermostatic policy institution for the development of Hall's framework; but finds analytical limitations in coping with significant policy spillovers. Suggestions are made to meet this important challenge for future research in policy studies on the specification of policy change.

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.

Irrespective of the level of government, public officials increasingly face the challenge of evaluating and making choices between more instruments. Agencies are intended to be a new and different type of governance instrument offering prospects for stronger input from experts, greater transparency and depoliticised decisions. Using ‘legitimacy’ as the framework, this study compares an agency (European Aviation Safety Agency) to comitology and its predecessor (a sui generis intergovernmental regulatory network). Although EASA is often heralded as a major change, the conclusions here are that its predecessor was quite effective and that comitology has been greatly improved and could have been explored as alternative instrument. Therefore, the agency solution was neither unavoidable nor necessarily better.

The budgetary response of Estonia to the 2008 global financial crisis poses a puzzle. While many other countries increased public expenditure and ran high deficits in 2009, the Estonian government was different: it undertook fiscal retrenchment, combining expenditure cuts and tax increases, despite a large drop in economic output. This article explains why the Estonian government opted for fiscal consolidation during the crisis. The ideological position of the governing parties and their desire the join the euro-zone played an important role in driving fiscal discipline. It also argues that the key to understanding Estonia's fiscal decisions in 2009 is what happened in the 1990s: fiscal policy choices became path-dependent as a result of positive feedback loops from previous periods of fiscal consolidation. Path-dependency was further reinforced by institutional capabilities (or lack thereof) created by initial macroeconomic policy choices.

Based on extensive new empirical fieldwork (via a case study of the reform of the territorial State in 2007–2010), this article interrogates the meaning of the prefectoral institution in France. The central puzzle this article addresses is the survival of a pre-democratic institution – the Prefect in – a democratic, decentralizing and Europeanised Republic. Changing conditions have required institutional resilience and adaptation in a period of state restructuring and rescaling. The case study of the prefectures as old institutions is framed using language and tools of new institutionalism across three dimensions: the timing and sequence of decision-making, the logic of appropriateness, and interaction. Beyond the narrow case of the prefectures in France, the article makes the case for combining modes of institutionalist analysis in order to penetrate generalities about the black box of institutions.

Interest in participatory governance recognises that communities can make valuable contributions to governance, but attempts to strengthen community participation encounter obstacles theorised as failures or incompleteness of participatory governance. This paper offers an alternative approach, drawing on ethnographic field data from a decade of work in rural Australian communities. It shows the nature of the community agency that is at the heart of policy interest in participation and how it differs from government efforts at community engagement. These insights suggest a need to rethink participatory governance, not as a single process with multiple participants, but as the juxtaposition of different ways of governing. Doing so opens up the possibility of governments and communities working together in new ways, with governments not only valuing what communities can contribute in theory, but also recognising how diverse communities work in practice.

Changes in the regulatory state, the privatization of network industries in Europe and in air transport have led to a redefinition of how airports are regulated. The French model of state ownership and regulation of airports became progressively out of step with a broader European market-oriented frame of reference. A new French sectoral frame of reference was developed and became public policy in 2005. A cognitive analysis identifies the key factors and actors responsible for this shift. This article explores the nature of the changes made to adapt the French model to a European framework and examines the influence of foreign models of regulation on the design of the French model. Finally, it suggests that features of the European frame of reference for regulatory structures have been adapted within France.

Numerous governments have adopted innovative policy instruments to deal with important environmental policy challenges and negotiated instruments offer the potential to improve performance beyond what regulation alone can accomplish. Dutch covenants, which represent negotiated agreements with sectors of industry as targets of behavioral change, provide useful evidence of the determinants of success. For improving environmental performance, certain features of the policy setting explain much of the variance in ambitions and outcomes: attitudes of decision makers in the affected businesses, attention to cost minimization, and possibly the degree of ambition built into the agreement. Modeling to explain the extent of ambition and compliance offer further insights. While some Dutch lessons may be restricted to more corporatist policy settings, others may help improve the effectiveness of negotiated agreements in many national settings.

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.

Independent agencies are exempted from the accountability mechanisms inherent in the ministerial hierarchy. To compensate for this, politicians incorporate all kinds of information and reporting requirements into the statutes of the organizations. However, the degree to which this occurs varies considerably, which raises the question: Why are some agencies are made more accountable than others? This study examines the impact of political salience on degrees of accountability, controlling for other potential explanations. Using original data on 103 independent agencies in the Netherlands, the analysis demonstrates that salience has a twofold effect. First, agencies dealing with more salient issues are made more politically accountable. Second, agencies whose statutes are written when the issue of accountability is more salient are also subject to higher degrees of accountability. Other explanatory factors are the number of veto players and the legal basis of the organization.