Focal Points in Public Policy: Evidence from Voluntary Regulation

Numerous studies argue that law affects behavior “expressively”—such as when states create focal points that overcome the coordination difficulties firms face. We argue that governments help firms overcome coordination dilemmas by explicating a preferred strategy for firms weighing investment in voluntary regulation. Firms would prefer to coordinate on a common strategy as a way of reducing the costs of voluntary regulation and increasing its benefits. We test our hypothesis about the efficacy of focal point selection with the European Union's (EU) advocacy of the Eco‐Management and Audit Scheme (EMAS) over a rival environmental management system, International Standards Organization (ISO) 14001. EU nations have statistically significantly lower rates of ISO 14001 certification than comparable countries at least in part due to their advocacy of EMAS. These results emphasize the role the state plays in coordinating business behavior even when such policy is simply expressive.     

Public Management Policymaking in Spain: The Politics of Legislative Reform of Administrative Structures, 1991–1997

This case study focuses on extending research knowledge about the politics of public management policymaking in Spain. The case involves legislating to change politically sensitive features of the central government and administration. The study explains such analytically significant event conditions as: an agenda‐setting process that made a policy issue of the formal, structural attributes of state administration, an alternative‐specification process that proceeded without complication, and a decisional process that lasted five years and in which political leaders' positions on the issue flip‐flopped. Broadly speaking, the case analysis demonstrates that when policy proposals take the form of legislation, the politics of public management policymaking in Spain are highly influenced by political stream factors, themselves reflecting Spain's parliamentary form of government and relations between statewide and regional political parties.     

政策终结议程设置中的社会行动者:现象图景、知识介入及理论修补

政策终结议程设置是政府对问题政策进行识别及认定的过程,日益受到非政府组织、大众传媒、行业专家以及普通公众等社会行动者的影响。这种影响深刻地揭示了知识生产的社会弥散这一新的知识生成模式,社会行动者会自己寻求一些新的知识,加深对政策终结议程的理解并对政府的表现做出更明智的判断,政府很难再按传统的做法对其进行操控和限制。这就要求对政策终结议程设置的规则进行变革。尽管政策科学家提供了多样的规则方案,但大都以工业社会的个人主义假设为起点,忽视了以伦理特征出现的个人。因此,除了对政策终结议程设置个人主义假设进行理论修订以外,政府及其公共行政人员应秉持开放合作的视野,将社会行动者看作政策终结议程设置的助推因素,以此来发现公共利益并推进社会治理能力提升。     

Where Judicial Politics Are Legislative Politics: The French Constitutional Council

Judges on France's ordinary and administrative courts make law and policy by interpreting and applying statutes, but the Constitutional Council is overtly involved in policy‐making. The Council serves as a type of ‘third’ chamber of the French parliament, where it may annul unconstitutional legislation, ‘constitu‐tionalise’ various legal principles, and sometimes even prescribe the precise terms of legislation. This ‘court‐like’ body, thus, plays a significant and growing role in French policy‐making.     

Package Deals in EU Legislative Politics

This is an article about package deals in EU legislative politics and their effects on policy outcomes. It analyzes interchamber exchange between the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament. The main argument is that package deals allow Member States control over the financial aspects of legislation and ensure its timely adoption. In exchange, the Parliament gains access to some of the EU's most expensive policy areas. Intercameral logrolling is analyzed across all EU legislation completed in the period 1 May 1999–30 April 2007, including 2,369 issues, 1,465 legislative proposals, and 19 policy areas. The results indicate that package deals in the EU are conditional on the distributive nature of proposals and their urgency. In turn, through logrolling, the Parliament extends its influence in distributive policies.     

Aids, Policy and Politics: East Africa in Comparative Perspective

Policy analysis in developing country contexts poses special challenges. Very little is known about the policy process in these countries. Trying to rein the cultural, organizational and political factors that affect problem solving becomes an inductive search beyond the logic of conventional models of analysis. Using the AIDS issue as a case study, this article tries to throw light on the policy process in the three East African countries of Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda with a view to highlighting the challenges of policy analysis in developing country contexts.     

Protecting Sovereignty,Protecting the Planet: State Delegation to International Organizations and Private Actors in Environmental Politics

As global interdependence grows, states often use international organizations to achieve both domestic and foreign policy goals. One way states respond to demands for cooperation is to delegate to international organizations and private actors. In this article, we use new data spanning a century of international environmental law to understand when and why states delegate to international organizations to manage environmental problems. We find that delegation is a persistent phenomenon that facilitates the implementation of states' preferences. However, they make this decision with care: States tend to delegate functions with lower sovereignty costs, such as implementation and monitoring, but rarely delegate rule making and enforcement. We also find that heterogeneous preferences among states increases the likelihood of delegation. Overall, our results suggest that states seek to delegate out of a motivation both to reduce transaction costs and to establish credible commitments.     

Sex Workers and Cultural Policy: Mapping the Issues and Actors in Thailand

This article deals with the deeply controversial side of cultural tourism in mapping the position of the sex industry. In doing so, it places sex tourism in two epistemic contexts: one context expands the notion of cultural policies, the other notes the implicit and explicit origins and effects of cultural policies affecting sex work, although these positions are not mutually exclusive. Sex tourism, we argue, poses a particular challenge to the understandings embedded in these contexts. The sex industry points us to the limits of cultural policies, both in terms of expanding the scope of cultural industries and also in documenting their effects. So far, while we expand the list of cultural industries, the sex industry remains as the industry that must not speak its name. Officials do not want to name it; neither do they do much to stop it. Naming and mapping sex tourism is then a useful place to start. For empirical substantiation, Thailand is our case study. We document the cultural and economic importance of sex work. In doing so, we also remain sensitive to the context of racism, stigma, trafficking, and HIV/AIDS issues that intersect sex work.     

Coalition Government,Legislative Institutions,and Public Policy in Parliamentary Democracies

Most democracies are governed by coalitions, comprising multiple political parties with conflicting policy positions. The prevalence of these governments poses a significant question: Which parties' electoral commitments are ultimately reflected in government policy? Recent theories have challenged our understanding of multiparty government, arguing that the relative influence of coalition parties depends crucially on institutional context. Specifically, where institutions allow credible enforcement of bargains, policy should reflect a compromise among all governing parties; where such institutions are absent, the preferences of parties controlling the relevant ministries should prevail. Critically, empirical work has thus far failed to provide direct evidence for this conditional relationship. Analyzing changes in social protection policies in 15 parliamentary democracies, we provide the first systematic evidence that the strength of legislative institutions significantly shapes the relative policy influence of coalition parties. Our findings have implications for our understanding of coalition government, policymaking, and electoral responsiveness.     

Civil Society Actors and EU Fundamental Rights Policy: Opportunities and Challenges

This paper examines how civil society actors in the EU utilize the political and legal opportunities provided by the EU’s fundamental rights policy to mobilize against discrimination, notably racism, and xenophobia. It emphasizes the multiple enabling roles that this policy provides to civil society associations engaged in judicial activism, political advocacy, and service delivery both at the EU and Member State levels, and assesses their effectiveness. It describes several factors that hinder the implementation of EU fundamental rights policy and reviews the strategies of civil society to overcome them. It highlights the reluctance of parts of public opinion to combat ethnic prejudice, considers reactions against what at a time of crisis is perceived as a costly project of social regulation, and examines civil society responses. The data sources consist of interviews with bureaucratic and civil society actors at EU level.     

Policy Change,Policy Feedback,and Interest Mobilization: The Politics of Nuclear Waste Management

Many of the leading theories of the policy process are aimed at providing insights into the factors that make policy change more (or less) likely. In general, policy change is seen as a result of shifting dynamics within policy subsystems. However, building on theories of policy feedback and interest mobilization, this article examines whether policy change, apart from being an effect of subsystem dynamics, can be a cause of shifting dynamics as latent actors are motivated to participate in the subsystem as a result of policy change. Two hypotheses regarding post‐policy change mobilization are developed and tested using data on participation in congressional hearings concerning the management of nuclear waste. The findings suggest that policy change can activate latent policy actors, specifically those actors that view themselves as “losing” as a result of the policy change. These results point to the need for scholars to examine the potential impacts of post‐policy change dynamics on policy development.     

Social Policy and Politics

Social policy is central to current political debates. The framework in which social policy is discussed remains largely a social services or micro-social policy framework. The contribution of the social services has been reappraised. The importance of the 'private' behaviour of individuals and families that has social consequences is being increasingly realised. There is a growing need for a new 'macro-social policy' approach that extends to all the actors or agents that are relevant to social objectives.     

Partisanship and Preference Formation: Competing Motivations,Elite Polarization,and Issue Importance

An enduring and increasingly acute concern—in an age of polarized parties—is that people’s partisan attachments distort preference formation at the expense of relevant information. For example, research suggests that a Democrat may support a policy proposed by Democrats, but oppose the same policy if proposed by Republicans. However, a related body of literature suggests that how people respond to information and form preferences is distorted by their prior issue attitudes. In neither instance is information even-handedly evaluated, rather, it is interpreted in light of partisanship or existing issue opinions. Both effects are well documented in isolation, but in most political scenarios individuals consider both partisanship and prior opinions—yet, these dynamics may or may not pull toward the same preference. Using nationally representative experiments focused on tax and education policies, I introduce and test a theory that isolates when: partisanship dominates preference formation, partisanship and issue opinions reinforce or offset each other, and issue attitudes trump partisanship. The findings make clear that the public does not blindly follow party elites. Depending on elite positions, the level of partisan polarization, and personal importance of issues, the public can be attentive to information and shirk the influence of party elites. The results have broad implications for political parties and citizen competence in contemporary democratic politics.     

Gender, Policy, Politics, and Work: Feminist Comparative and Transnational Research

abstract This article reviews feminist comparative and transnational research on workplace policy, politics and the state. The first section examines a range of theoretical approaches to the topic. We then present a variety of methodologies for conducting comparative and transnational research on policy developments. Informed by a number of case studies included in the symposium, we explore the dynamics and determinants, both national and supranational, of policy formation and its impacts. Finally, we tease out the implicit and explicit notions of gender equity for future policy analysis.