When and how can advocacy groups influence the diffusion of new technologies, such as wind power? We examine the relationship between two different strategies that advocacy groups can adopt: political lobbying and campaigns aimed at potential end users of the new technology. Our game-theoretic analysis shows that without the opportunity to engage in political lobbying, end user campaigns by an advocacy group have the counterproductive effect of reducing the government's incentive to subsidise the new technology. Instead of supporting the advocacy group's campaigning, the government free rides on the social movement's campaigning efforts. While political lobbying cannot prevent free riding, it increases the government's incentive to subsidise the new technology, and thus increases the advocacy group's payoff. These findings suggest that advocacy groups can promote technology diffusion if they can effectively deploy a dual strategy of political lobbying and end user campaigning.

We provide the first comprehensive study of lobbying across venues by studying interest group registrations in both the legislative and administrative branches. We present four major findings based on Federal and state data. Firstly, groups engage in substantial administrative lobbying relative to legislative lobbying. Secondly, the vast majority of groups lobby the legislature, but a large proportion of groups also lobby the bureaucracy. Thirdly, representational biases in legislative lobbying are replicated across venues: business groups dominate administrative lobbying at least as much as they do legislative lobbying. Finally, the level of interest group activity in one venue for a given policy area is strongly related to its level in the other venue. The findings potentially have important implications for the impact of institutional design on both the form and promotion of broad participation in policy-making as well as the ultimate content of policies chosen by democratic governments, broadly construed.

This study focuses on how voters and politicians rationally select a preferred policy-making venue (Politician or Agency), and its implications for the principal-agent relationship between voters and politicians in a representative democracy. This study allows for incomplete information, as well as solving for the comparative static conditions pertaining to the extent that a politician's policy-making venue choices mirror those preferred by a representative voter. The comparative static results highlight when a politician (1) chooses the representative voter's preferred policy-making venue (Active or Passive Political Responsiveness); (2) is able to choose freely either policy-making venue without committing agency loss (Political Discretion); and (3) willing to deviate from the representative voter's preferred policy-making venue (Political Shirking). In contrast to the study by Spence, this study analytically demonstrates that one cannot infer that the benefits accrued from agency policy-making will necessarily exceed those from electoral institutions.

Public agency executive jobs are temporary matches of individual bureaucrats with government employers. Together, the buyers and sellers of executive labour form jobs in ways that define critical links in the policy process: the relationships between agency administrators and their elected officials. This article argues that when the executive is hired from outside, the job typically carries a mandate for significantly greater engagement with elected officials than when the executive is promoted from within an agency. Analysis of three very different types of agencies demonstrates that individuals who were hired from outside interact with their elected officials more frequently than do those who were promoted from within. These results shed new light on bureaucratic executives’ roles in the policy process, their relationships with the governments that they serve, and the theoretical significance of bureaucratic jobs as units of analysis in public policy studies.

This article asks what shaped immigrant policy in the 50 states between 2005 and 2011. Theoretically, politicians are influenced by electoral considerations as they craft laws. Law-makers consider both current public opinion and how the electorate is likely to change, at least in the near future. Empirically, the article analyses an original dataset on immigrant-related laws enacted by the states with a Bayesian spatial conditionally autoregressive model. The analysis shows that state immigrant policy is affected primarily by legislative professionalism, electoral ideology, state wealth and change in the foreign-born population.

The importance of institutional trust for structuring welfare state support (WSS) has been advanced by several scholars. Yet, the thesis has not received convincing empirical support. We argue that the weak evidence observed by previous research is caused by the failure of not extending the analytical framework beyond the study of public institutions. Using Sweden as a test case, our analytical framework covers trust in public institutions (TPI) and market institutions (TMI). The main findings are: (1) TMI has a robust negative effect on WSS; (2) the expected relationship between TPI and WSS is strengthened controlling for TMI; (3) TMI mediates the relationships between socio-economic variables and WSS. These findings underline the importance of bringing in other institutional configurations that are seen as conceivable alternatives to the state for administrating social welfare, not the least in studies primarily interested in the link between TPI and support for state-organised welfare.

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.

Scholars of political parties frequently note that a party's candidates are aided by the presence of a consistent and favourable party brand name. We argue that partisan success in maintaining a consistent position on important policy issues hinges on how their role in the government motivates their strategies about public policy formation. Specifically, when parties share control of government institutions, parties need to balance their electoral interest in promoting a consistent brand name with the need to generate public policy that leads to effective governance. When control is held by one party, the costs and benefits of effective governance are born entirely by the majority, absolving both parties of the need to compromise on the substance of policy. By employing item response theory methods to assess patterns of party voting on deficit issues, we find strong support for these hypotheses.

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.

In a quantitative study using unique quarterly data across two decades, this article addresses the opposition's opportunities to influence policy; a topic that has been neglected in existing party-policy research. The idea that is developed is applied to a remarkable policy development on crime during the Danish leftwing government in the 1990s. Contrary to its policy position when it took office in 1993, the leftwing government repeatedly adopted severe restrictions to penal policy. The policy position of the rightwing opposition and its vehement and persistent criticism of the government provide an explanation, the article argues. Taking media coverage, public opinion, violence statistics, and the government's performance into account, the analysis shows that opposition criticism spurred the penal policy restrictions. Hence, by incorporating a policy agenda perspective, this article encourages a broadening of the perspective on parties’ policy influence. In particularly the opposition's opportunities to politicise issues and hereby influence policy.

This article examines the changes of the Lisbon Treaty to the rules on agreeing the European Union's (EU) annual budget and multiannual financial framework. The comparative budgets literature as well as theories of agenda-setting, veto players and empowerment of the European Parliament inform the analysis of how the EU's budgetary powers changed and the likely outcomes on spending. Overall, the powers of the European Parliament are reduced, the budget becomes more inflexible and, most significantly, the rules of the Lisbon Treaty have the effect of reducing the amounts available to spend. Although the Lisbon Treaty grants the European Parliament greater influence over ordinary EU legislation, national governments seem to have used the same treaty to send the Parliament's budgetary powers in the opposite direction and to curtail EU expenditure.

Research on the determinants of government performance has identified numerous factors bearing on effective governance and government's role in it. However, understanding of how these factors are causally inter-related is limited. We take as our point of departure a multi-level analytic framework termed a logic of governance (LOG), previously used to reveal patterns of causality in governance based on hundreds of published research publications. Using a revised LOG, we reinterpret the earlier analysis in terms of organisational effectiveness indicators, and identify patterns of causal interaction in 300 more recent research articles. We formulate a multi-level model of governance that postulates how public policy and management interact to affect government outputs and outcomes. We hypothesise that the exercise of hierarchical authority is more fundamental to performance than has been acknowledged by governance scholars. We challenge the argument that advanced democracies are moving towards “governance without government”.

Blame avoidance has often been claimed to be an important rationale behind changes in the organisation of the public sector, but very few studies have examined whether and how public attribution of responsibility is actually affected by such reforms. For instance, how do changes in the formal allocation of authority affect public attribution of blame when things go wrong? Is the effect immediate or delayed? To advance our understanding of such questions, this paper presents an analysis of blame and credit attribution in more than 1,200 newspaper articles about health-care-related issues in Norway before and after the major Norwegian hospital reform from 2002. The central empirical finding of the article is that central state-level authorities in Norway were attributed less blame in media coverage of health-care problems after the reform than before the reform. The shift is delayed, but substantial and robust to various modifications in model estimations.

Increasingly, governments and police agencies require evidence of effectiveness and efficiency with respect to law enforcement policies. The existing “what works” literature, specifically on drug law enforcement, focuses mainly on the effectiveness question when making complex choices between drug policy alternatives, but fails when it comes to incorporating empirical evidence and the experience of key experts in the decision-making process. In addition, little attempt has been made to employ sophisticated techniques to assist in complex policy decision making with respect to funding competing policing policy alternatives. We use the methamphetamine problem in Australia to illustrate a way of evaluating, using multi-criteria analysis, alternative policy options for developing better drug policy.