Look to Sweden: The Making of a New Renewable Energy Support Scheme in Norway

Two renewable energy support schemes have spread across Europe: green certificate schemes (GCSs) and feed‐in tariffs (FITs). After a decade‐long policy‐making process, Norwegian decision makers decided in 2011 to adopt a GCS compatible with the already existing one in Sweden and thereby establish a joint Norwegian‐Swedish GCS. The article explores this process of policy transfer, and asks to what extent competition and policy learning contributed to Norway's choice of a GCS. It finds that competition was a barrier to a joint Norwegian‐Swedish GCS rather than (as predicted by some scholars) a driver of policy transfer. In terms of policy learning, it finds that Norwegian bureaucrats systematically were searching for information about renewable energy policy instruments in a process characterised by rational learning. However, this information was not taken into account by elected policy makers, whose learning was unsystematic and almost exclusively influenced by Sweden – making it a process of bounded learning. Finally, domestic factors that facilitated and constrained the policy transfer process are identified in the article. A reluctant bureaucracy defending the status quo policies constrained the policy transfer process. GCS as a market‐based instrument independent of yearly allocations over the annual national budgets facilitated the process by securing strong support in a broad coalition of stakeholder groups and thereby cross‐partisan support. The latter finding may contribute to the literature by underscoring the importance of domestic political factors.     

A race to liberalization? Diffusion of economic policy reform among OECD-economies

Most OECD economies witnessed a liberalization of economic policies over the past thirty years. The present paper examines to what extent this development is caused by domestic political and economic factors on the one hand, and international policy diffusion via competitive interaction of governments on the other. Employing a comprehensive index of economic reform it can be shown that policy diffusion is a driving factor for economic liberalization. Especially in the fields of regulatory, monetary and trade policies we find significant interdependence of policy choices, as suggested by theories of policy diffusion.     

What drives the adoption of climate change mitigation policy? A dynamic network approach to policy diffusion

The requirement of bottom-up action from all the countries to deal with climate change makes it necessary to analyze the factors influencing policy adoption. This article contributes to the policy literature by shedding light on the conditions, which incentivize countries to adopt more climate mitigation policies. The theoretical argument builds on the integrated approaches to study policy diffusion, which include both internal and external determinants as explanations for the adoption of policies. While previous applications typically operationalize the latter by regional proximity, this study highlights the added value of network dependencies capturing political and cooperative interactions across countries. The article finds that the adoption of climate policies is a matter of social influence. Countries are more likely to adopt policies if they cooperate with countries that have adopted more climate policies and are in a similar structural position to countries that are active in climate protection. This article not only is an important theoretical contribution to the policy literature but also enriches our methodological and empirical understanding of climate policy diffusion.     

Regulating the retirement age—Lessons from Nordic pension policy approaches

The likelihood that longevity will continue to increase has generated a search for regulation that make people work longer as they live longer, and thus not just containing pension expenditure but also enlarging labor supply, economic growth, and tax revenue. In public pension policy, Nordic countries have led the world with three types of approaches aimed at making people retire later. The first came when Sweden, followed by Finland and Norway, installed life expectancy coefficients in benefit calculation formulas. The second followed as Finland introduced age-related accrual rates and the third when Denmark indexed the pensionable age to developments in life expectancy. Since economic incentive-based regulations failed to raise exit ages sufficiently, Finland and Sweden subsequently linked pensionable ages to life expectancy like Denmark. While this policy brings out inequalities in health and workability, the fact that countries found it necessary to index the pensionable age to longevity instead of just relying on economic incentives in regulating retirement behavior may hold lessons for other countries.     

Where Did the Bureaucrats Go? Role and Influence of the Public Bureaucracy in the Swedish and French Pension Reform Debate

This article has two key objectives. First, despite having been considered as a key element to favor the expansion and elaboration of the welfare state in industrial countries, bureaucrats have been largely ignored by the "New" Politics of the Welfare State. This article demonstrates that bureaucrats still matter in times of retrenchment, because they can facilitate or obstruct various phases of the policy process. The degree of independence of the bureaucracy vis-à-vis the government, the government's level of dependency and trust on public expertise, the locus of ministerial power, and political deadlocks contribute to either accentuate or decrease the influence of the bureaucracy in the retrenchment of social policies. Second, these elements are analyzed via a comparison of the pension reform processes in France and Sweden. This article argues that the French bureaucracy, despite its high degree of centralization and powers, has been far less successful than its Swedish counterpart. The Swedish institutional structure, the predominance of social ministries in pension affairs, and the trust given to an independent agency account for this puzzling outcome.     

The politics of policy diffusion

This article discusses the recent literature on policy diffusion and puts forward a new articulation of its political dimensions. Policy diffusion means that policies in one unit (country, state, city, etc.) are influenced by the policies of other units. The diffusion literature conceptualises these interdependencies with four mechanisms: learning, competition, coercion and emulation. The article identifies a model of diffusion that is dominant in the diffusion literature. According to this model, policies spread because decision makers evaluate the policy implications of the actions of other units. It is argued that the role of politics remains in the background in this model, and the article shows how going beyond a narrow focus on policy adoptions helps us to consider the politics of policy diffusion more explicitly.     

Foreign Policy Objectives: Left Socialist Opposition in Denmark, Norway and Sweden

Due to their foreign policy opposition, the left socialist parties in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden remain among the few parties in Western democracies that lack governmental experience. When political parties confront political issues, they can either choose a competitive or a cooperative strategy. The Norwegian and Swedish left socialists chose competition when the EU issue appeared on the scene in the early 1990s. The Danish Socialist People's Party, on the other hand, opted for a cooperative strategy and accepted EU membership and the 1993 Edinburgh Agreement. Drawing on coalition theory, this article asks why.     

Explaining Petroleum Policy in Britain and Norway, 1962-90

Petroleum policy in Britain and Norway provides comparativists with an opportunity to study policy formation, stability, and transformation on a cross-national basis. This study explains why British and Norwegian officials decided to intervene in the North Sea, why offshore policy in the two countries went through periods of stability and change, and why they adopted similar offshore systems in the 1960s and 1970s but diverged markedly in the 1980s. We develop an explanatory framework using insights from state-centric, group politics, rational choice, and institutional models of policy-making. The framework identifies three decision-making contexts in which petroleum policy-makers operate simultaneously: an oil context, a domestic political context, and an international context, Each context establishes objectives for policy-makers, indicates an acceptable degree of government intervention, and narrows policy options. Rational decision-making within each context, however, may yield conflicting results. These must be worked out through intrastate and/or state-society bargaining. The decision-making contexts in Britain and Norway produced similar policies in the 1960s and 1970s, but the similarities hid deeper differences. Norwegian officials consistently favored state intervention offshore, and Norwegian interest groups successfully lobbied the state for offshore favors, while British officials intervened more reluctantly and paid less attention to societal interests. Differences in decision-making contexts finally produced a major divergence in offshore policies in the 1980s when the Thatcher government dismantled the state's offshore participation policy.     

Politics,Fiscal Necessity,or Both? Factors Driving the Enactment of Defined Contribution Accounts for Public Employees

Recent conflicts over public sector defined benefit pension funding have inspired polarized debates about the need for reform, including the utility of replacing pensions with defined contribution accounts, which are popular throughout the private sector. Between 1996 and 2011, 15 American states enacted legislation to implement either mandatory or optional defined contribution accounts for certain public employees. What drove this process? This article investigates the role of political, budgetary, and contagion influences on the diffusion of defined contribution accounts for general state employees. Empirical results suggest that enactments were influenced by Republican legislative, but not executive, partisanship. Gains in state indebtedness also increased the likelihood of enactment independent of political and other factors. There is no evidence of policy learning based on neighboring state activity and no influence from two measures of organized labor power. Both quantitative and qualitative robustness checks largely reinforce these findings.     

The Rise and Fall of Radical Civil Service Reform in the U.S. States

Initiated by a 1996 Georgia statute, “radical” civil service reform quickly swept the United States. This article explains the wax and eventual wane of state efforts to increase the number of at‐will employees at the expense of the population of fully protected merit system employees. Using an event history approach to explain this policy diffusion with state‐level variables, the author shows that electoral competition and gubernatorial powers are the most significant determinants of this kind of policy diffusion. Whereas previous literature concluded that these reforms ceased spreading because the new programs were failing to create the promised governmental efficiency, this article argues that the institutional conditions for these human resource management policies have been less propitious in recent years. The article signifies an important contribution in that it brings civil service reform back into the scope of policy diffusion literature and identifies political insights into a perpetually important question.     

Nationhood and Scandinavian naturalization politics: varieties of the civic turn

The neighboring countries of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway represent three very similar societies that differ markedly with respect to naturalization policy. While the general trend of a civic turn has brought about some of Europe’s strictest residence and citizenship requirements in Denmark, it has left the liberal Swedish policy largely untouched and the Norwegian somewhere in between the other two. How might such divergence in otherwise very similar societies be explained? This article investigates the role different conceptions of nationhood have played. It is argued that different conceptions of nationhood have mattered, but that the national differences have less to do with the normative content of nationhood than with how politicians tend to conceive of the integration process that newcomers must commit to in order to develop a strong sense of national belonging.     

Housing and the Welfare State in Norway

This article discusses housing and the welfare state in Norway in 1980 and 2005 by applying Esping‐Andersen's theories of welfare state regimes to this sector. How should Norwegian housing policy be understood in light of Esping‐Andersen's conceptual framework, and what is the impact of post‐industrial change? In 1980, Norwegian housing policy was mainly characterised by social‐democratic traits such as market regulation, substantial public expenditure and universal subsidies for both renters and a large owner‐occupied housing sector. The effects of post‐industrial changes, including deregulation of the credit and housing markets, marked a major turn in housing policy and the housing market in Norway. By 2005, Norwegian housing policy was mainly characterised by traits that are typical of a liberal welfare regime: market economics, low public expenditure and subsidies for small, targeted groups, while other segments of the Norwegian welfare state remain characterised by social‐democratic traits. Esping‐Andersen's claim that the effect of post‐industrial transformation was different in different welfare regimes is thus not supported by the case of the Norwegian housing sector.     

地方政府医药价格改革的时空演进机理——以政策创新扩散为视角

在我国单一制政体和复杂的府际关系下,社会政策的创新与扩散是一个涉面广泛、多元博弈的复杂政治过程。基于政策创新扩散理论,对中央、23个省级政府和4个直辖市的医药价格改革制度进行了案例追踪和文本比较分析。研究发现,地方医药价格改革政策扩散效应显著,随时间进程扩散呈现全国互动模型下的"S"型曲线;空间维度上,整体表现为由经济发达的东部沿海地区先行,逐步向中部、西部等其他地区推进;区域扩散和邻近效应显著,扩散存在势能差且具有一定的梯度性,沿动力源向周围政策势能低的省份扩散,呈现等级制模型;垂直影响和层级效应明显,体现政策变迁的互动性、动态性与复杂性;扩散内容以跟风模仿为主,学习性与创新能力不足。为提高地方政府政策持续创新力,中央政府应完善顶层设计并适当放权,拓展地方政府创新空间;地方政府应审时度势,积极提升再创新能力,发挥垂直影响的积极作用,加快政策扩散进程。     

Recognition of innovation and diffusion of welfare policy: Alleviating urban poverty in Chinese cities during fiscal recentralization

This article explores the complicated triangular architecture among innovation diffusion, fiscal recentralization, and authoritarian welfare regimes. We argue that local governments' adoption of innovative welfare policies attracts the attention of central authorities who tend to recognize spontaneous local innovation by releasing central administrative signals. During the era of fiscal recentralization starting from the Chinese Tax‐Sharing System Reform in 1994, cities with higher fiscal dependency are more likely to behave innovatively by adopting a new welfare policy for potential fiscal transfer rewards. The central government's recognition of this innovation stimulates cities' adoption but would reverse the effects of fiscal dependency because of the loss of the “innovativeness” of the adoption and its effectiveness in attracting the attention of superior authorities. We test our theories on the dynamic diffusion with the case of China's Urban Minimum Living Standard Assistance system, an urban poverty‐alleviation policy implemented fully in 1999.     

Pension Reform in Germany and Austria: System Change vs. Quantitative Retrenchment

This article first outlines the differences in outcome of pension reform in Germany and Austria. The 2001 German pension reform cut benefits very little, but it started a system changing transformation process by strengthening the second (occupational pensions) and third pillar (private pensions). The 2003 Austrian pension reform, pushed through against major opposition from the labour unions, contains very few elements of policy innovation, but benefits have been cut back much more significantly than in the German case. The paper explains the difference in outcomes (system change in Germany, retrenchment in Austria) by looking at the structure of political institutions. The federal government in Austria is much less constrained by formal veto players than the German government, which had to engage in extensive coalition-building to get the pension bill through the second chamber of parliament. Therefore the influence of informal veto players (mainly unions) was much higher in Germany. The impact on the reform outcome was the positive discrimination of occupational pensions and less severe cuts in the benefit levels. The concluding thesis is that for successful and long-term sustainable welfare state reform, a small number of formal veto players is a valuable resource. A large number of formal veto players is an obstacle to retrenchment reforms, although it might encourage policy innovation, because political actors will look for other policy venues to increase their leverage.     

Breaking the rules and making the rules: Evasion, avoidance, and policy reform

Rule evasion and avoidance can have a significant impact on policy outcomes, and therefore on the design, implementation, and enforcement of policies. The purposes of this paper is to assess the causes and consequences of evasion and avoidance in general settings, including their implications for policy reform. Evasion of rules often serves a socially useful role, and can promote efficient policies. Small-scale evasion typically provokes one of three responses: it is either effectively ignored, enforcement is increased, or the rule is revised. Large-scale evasion, alternatively, tends to meet with major policy shifts. Avoidance and evasion frequently temper the anticipated impacts of policy reforms, but are unlikely to render reform futile. Indeed, ongoing processes of reform might be required to maintain effective policies.     

Variation in policy success: radical right populism and migration policy

How do radical right populist parties influence government policies in their core issue of immigration? This article provides a systematic analysis of the direct and indirect effects of radical right anti-immigration parties on migration policy reforms in 17 West European countries from 1990 to 2014. Insights from migration policy theory serve to explain variations in the migration policy success of the radical right. While previous studies mostly treat migration policy as uniform, it is argued that this approach neglects the distinct political logics of immigration and integration policy. This article reveals significant variations in policy success by policy area. While immigration policies have become more liberal despite the electoral success of the radical right, when the radical right is in government office it enacts more restrictions in integration policies. Accordingly, anti-immigrant mobilisation is more likely to influence immigrants’ rights than their actual numbers.     

Adjusting policy implementation frameworks for non‐pluralist conditions: A case study of Ukraine's single tax for small business

Traditional frameworks for assessing policy implementation have been developed almost exclusively in the context of market‐based, pluralist democracies. This research explores policy processes in more diverse contexts, testing the applicability of existing implementation measurement models in the socio‐political context of a post‐Soviet country. Fieldwork conducted in Ukraine examines the factors affecting implementation of the Simplified Single Tax policy and considers the impact of formal and informal institutions on policy processes and small business conditions. Results include an expanded model for assessing policy implementation in non‐pluralist conditions, an original contribution to the fields of policy, small business, and development studies. The research further contributes to the literature concerning policy transfer, policy advocacy, and tax reform in developing nations. For theoreticians, this research may inform design considerations when conducting policy research outside of a pluralist democracy. For practitioners, it may inform efforts to mitigate implementation obstacles in diverse socio‐political contexts.     

Institutional transfer,social learning and economic policy in Eastern Germany

This article applies a model of social learning to examine the pattern of economic policy change in eastern Germany since reunification. It argues that the virtually complete transfer from West to East of the institutions and policies for regional economic development locked eastern states into a process of largely incremental policy change. This is so despite the large ‘performance gap’ between economic policies pursued and progress in revitalising the eastern economy. Empirical evidence is drawn primarily from a case study of Saxony.     

Regulatory Agencies—The Challenges of Balancing Agency Autonomy and Political Control

In this article we focus on the dynamic interplay between increase in autonomy of regulatory agencies and political control of those agencies. The general research issues are the weak empirical foundations of regulatory reforms, the complex trade‐off between political control and agency autonomy, the dual process of deregulation and reregulation, the problems of role‐specialization and coordination, and the questions of “smart practice” in regulatory policy and practice. The theoretical basis is agency theories and a broad institutional approach that blend national political strategies, historical‐cultural context, and external pressures to understand regulatory agencies and regulatory reform. This approach is contrasted with a practitioner model of agencies. Empirically the article is based on regulatory reform in Norway, giving a brief introduction to the reform and agency context followed by an analysis of the radical regulatory reform policy introduced recently by the current Norwegian government. We illustrate how regulatory reforms and agencies work in practice by focusing on two specific cases on homeland security and telecommunications.