THE BUREAU-POLITICS OF CRISIS MANAGEMENT

Bureau-political tensions and competition are an often neglected, yet crucial element in crisis management. Bureau-politics in crisis management runs counter to pervasive notions that portray centralization and concentration of power as the dominant mode of administrative response to crisis. This article presents empirical evidence suggesting the importance of bureau-politics in the planning, response and post-crisis stages of crisis management at both strategic and operational levels of action. Again contrary to conventional wisdom, it is argued that such interagency tensions may fulfill various positive functions: they put crisis agencies to the test; they serve to counteract 'groupthink tendencies; they foster a certain degree of openness; and they may facilitate democratic control of far-reaching crisis management policies.     

Welfare expansion revisited: policy routines and their mediation by party, class and crisis, 1957–1982

Abstract. Post-war welfare effort (i.e., welfare spending as a share of national income) in advanced capitalist political democracies is proposed to result from policy routines emphasized in the traditional academic literatures complemented and mediated by class-linked factors stressed in the 'new political economy' literature. Both sets of factors are integrated into a single conception of state policy-making. In this, self-interested elite and administrative state personnel respond to their environments by means of relatively discretionary and relatively automatic policy routines, respectively. Left and non-Left governments mediate these routines and do so differently in different long-term institutional (strong-union versus weak-union) and macroeconomic (expansionary versus crisis) contexts. Welfare expansion is found to be amply explained by the proposed processes, differentiated by context. Left parties and militants are found to matter primarily in contexts marked by 'Left corporatism'(or strong unions) and/or by relatively 'expansionary economic climates'. Ironically, Left-party governments in Left corporatist contexts are found to be particularly sensitive to inflation where transfer spending is concerned. Where unions are strong, policy making is generally less incremental and more flexible. After 1973, policy sensitivity to real economic growth or decline looms large, and working-class-linked politics are muted where unions are weak, most especially where they are decentralized.