THE WELFARE STATE: A REGULATORY PERSPECTIVE

The role of regulation and the regulatory state in social policy, redistribution, and the reforms of the welfare state are increasingly important but often underestimated and misunderstood. These problems are evident in Majone's highly influential work where the regulatory state and the ‘positive’ state stand as two alternative monomorphic forms of state. This article offers a polymorphic alternative where the regulatory state may come to the rescue of the welfare state, allowing independent extension, retrenchment, and stagnation of welfare via social regulation. The article extends a regulatory governance perspective into the core of the welfare state, clarifies the relations between fiscal and regulatory instruments, and demonstrates that the boundaries of the regulatory state are wider than are usually understood. It turns our understanding of the welfare state on its head, highlighting first the less visible regulatory layer, and then the more visible layer of fiscal transfers.     

ISSUE DEFINITION AND THE POLITICS OF STATE ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE POLICY ADOPTION

ABSTRACT

The past decade has witnessed an explosion of research regarding environmental justice. Nearly all of this research, however, focuses on documenting the proximity and exposure of poor and minority communities to sources of environmental risk. Researchers have yet to assess systematically governmental responses to inequities in the distribution of this risk. Our paper begins to fill this gap by examining the policy responses of state governments to charges of environmental injustice. First, we provide a brief overview of environmental justice policy activity at all levels of government. Second, we discuss how issue definition may help determine the politics of policy adoption in the area of environmental justice, and develop a theory to explain these policy adoptions. Third, we model state policy activity using probit and ordered probit analysis, testing to see whether these responses are best explained by the severity of the environmental justice problem in the state, state racial diversity, state political capacity, or state administrative capacity and evaluating whether these results are more consistent with redistributive or protective regulatory policy. We close by discussing what our results imply for issue definition in environmental justice and the prospects of adequate state policy responses to inequities in the distribution of environmental risk.     

THE NEW POLITICS OF MEDICINE

THE NEW POLITICS OF MEDICINE
Brian Salter
Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, 236 pp., £17.99 (pb) ISBN: 0333801121     

BUREAUCRATIC POLITICS AND POLITICAL LEADERSHIP IN BRUSSELS

Political leadership offers an exceptionally important vehicle for democratic control in modem political systems. In national political systems this may be exercised by ministers. In the European Community the closest equivalent to a national minister is the commissioner. How well equipped are commissioners to exercise political leadership? This article examines the backgrounds and careers of all 76 commissioners, past and present, and argues that a ‘democratic deficit’ within the Commission is at least as important as the democratic deficit more conventionally associated with the demand for increased powers for the European Parliament.     

THE POLITICS OF DECLINE: AN INTERPRETATION OF BRITISH POLITICS FROM THE 1940s TO THE 1970s

THE POLITICS OF DECLINE: AN INTERPRETATION OF BRITISH POLITICS FROM THE 1940s TO THE 1970s
Geoffrey K. Fry
Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, 307 pp., £55 (hb) ISBN: 0333726227     

THE POLITICS OF MARKETING THE LABOUR PARTY

THE POLITICS OF MARKETING THE LABOUR PARTY
Dominic Wring
Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, 262 pp., £16.99 (pb) ISBN: 0333689534     

THE POLITICS AND MANAGEMENT OF HUNG AUTHORITIES

Hung local authorities have grown in numbers in recent years. This paper analyses the experience of those authorities. First it reviews the growing body of literature and argues that it has largely been concerned with particular authorities. The authors then proposed a research-based classification of hung authorities, before examining both the nature of political behaviour and changes in management. Finally, the paper identifies factors leading to stability and instability in hung authorities and the characteristics of both situations.     

NIGEL BALCHIN AND THE POLITICS OF SOUNDNESS

The bulk of Nigel Balchin's fiction follows the same pattern – a sound male character observing an unsound one; his plots are occasionally more complicated, as when a character examines critically his own soundness or when scientific soundness is transformed into political unacceptability. The novels are therefore a good guide to soundness as a golden mean. But rulers need to balance sense and vision. Balchin questions the value of bureaucratic games in modern organizations which harm a balanced resolution. It is surprising that as a psychologist who understands the pragmatic of interpersonal politics in organizations he failed himself to acquire the depth of vision of a great political novelist.