POLICY DIFFERENCES WITHIN THE UNITED KINGDOM: THE CASE OF HOUSING POLICY IN NORTHERN IRELAND 1979–89

This article examines, through a case study of housing, the extent to which national housing policies under the Thatcher government were modified or deflected at the N. Ireland regional level. Three aspects of housing policy - housing expenditure, public sector rents and the 'right-to-buy' legislation are considered and the roles of key actors within the territorial community described. Although similarities with GB housing policy emerge, there is evidence of a distinctive regional approach. Factors which influenced a N. Ireland-specific policy approach are considered and the potential for variance in the future outlined.     

Ideas and Coordination in Policymaking: The Financial Crisis of 2007–2009

Policy change occurs because coalitions of actors are able to take advantage of political conditions to translate their strong beliefs about policy into ideas, which are turned into policy. A coalition's ability to define a problem helps to keep policies in place, but it can also cause coalitions to develop blind spots. For example, policy subsystem actors will often neglect the need for coordination between governmental actors. We examine the financial crisis of 2007–2009 to show how entrenched policy ideas can cause subsystem actors to overlook the need for policy coordination. We first analyze the prevalent idea that policymakers should aim to keep inflation low and stable while employing light touch regulation to financial markets. We then demonstrate how this philosophy led to a lack of coordination between monetary and regulatory policy in the subprime mortgage market. We conclude with thoughts about the need for coordination in future economic policy.     

SOUTH AFRICAN LAND REFORM: CASE-STUDIES IN 'DEMAND' AND 'PARTICIPATION' IN THE FREE STATE

This article offers an ethnographic cross-section in one provinceof South Africa's new land reform programme. ‘Demand’and ‘participation’ are the rhetorical keywordsof the programme. Demand for land redistribution, however, cannotbe understood in abstraction from the political and economicconditions of its supply. Similarly, ‘participation’is a managed process involving many institutional intermediaries.A series of illustrative case-studies is presented, relatingto the allocation of state-owned land; state-facilitated ‘market’access to privately-owned land; the reconstruction and partialprivatization of a para-statal development agency, which havebrought into question the viability of a ‘community conservation’project and also exposed the agency to political cross-fire;and, finally, some intricacies of the possibility of land restitutionto people dispossessed under apartheid, which raises the questionof whether the concept of indirect racial discrimination maybe applied in the South African context. Several contradictionsof the process of land redistribution are analysed: for example,the massive financial costs, direct and indirect, of bringingprojects to fruition in the short term, without resolution ofthe need for long-term support; the divergence between nominaland actual beneficiaries; political and institutional conflicts,both inside and outside the state; and routine incompatibilitybetween the diverse aspirations of beneficiaries and the ‘businessplans’ required by bureaucrats and suppliers of credit.     

Regulating the computer: comparing policy instruments in Europe and the United States

Abstract. The introduction of information technology to governmental agencies has raised considerable concern for the erosion of personal privacy in most advanced democratic states. This article compares and tries to explain the choice of policy instrument in four key countries (Sweden, the United States, West Germany and the United Kingdom) to enforce the protection of personal data. Five options were available from the 'international repertoire' of solutions: voluntary control, subject control, licensing, a data commissioner and registration. The Swedes opted for licensing, the Americans rely on subject control, the Germans established a data commissioner and the British chose a registration scheme. In no state, however, were these decisions made from a synoptic analysis of all possible options. Nor did a process of policy diffusion occur. Rather, a combination of domestic constraints seemed to filter out unacceptable options and produce a bias in favour of the resulting policy instrument. In the United States and Sweden, this bias resulted from perceived constitutional imperatives; in West Germany and Britain, the position and power of the respective national bureaucracies produced stiff resistance, a conflictual policy process and resulting policy instruments with few, if any, precedents in their respective systems.     

Books: British Politics

P. Cosgrave, Thatcher: the First Term (London, The Bodley Head, 1985)
A. King (ed.), The British Prime Minister (second edition) (London, Macmillan, 1985)
A. Ranney (ed.) Britain at the Polls 1983 (Durham, N.C., Duke University Press, 1985)
D. S. Bell (ed.), The Conservative Government 1979–84: an Interim Report (London, Croom Helm, 1985
S. Fothergill and J. Vincent, The State of the Nation (London, Pan, 1985
Philip Norton (ed.), Parliament in the 1980s (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1985
Leo Pliatzky, Paying and Choosing: the Intelligent Person's Guide to the Mixed Economy (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1985)
John Grieve Smith (ed.) Strategic Planning in Nationalised Industries (London, Macmillan, 1984)
E. Durbin, New Jerusalem (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985)
Geofrey Foote, The Labour Party's Political Thought (London, Croom Helm, 1985)
D. Selbourne, Against Socialist Illusion: a Radical Argument (London, Macmillan, 1985)
J. Grigg, Lloyd George—From Peace to War (London, Methuen, 1985)
David Dutton, Austen Chamberlain: Gentleman in Politics (Bolton, Ross Anderson Publications 1985)
Norman Flynn, Steve Leach and Carol Vielba, Abolition or Reform? The GLCand the Metropolitan County Councils (London, George Allen & Unwin, 1985)     

HOW POLICY‐MAKERS (REALLY) UNDERSTAND GLOBALIZATION: THE INTERNAL ARCHITECTURE OF ANGLOPHONE GLOBALIZATION DISCOURSE IN EUROPE

There is a growing acceptance in the literature of a potentially significant causal role for ideas about globalization in shaping the trajectory of policy and institutional reform in contemporary Europe. Yet we still know remarkably little about policy‐makers' understandings of globalization, save those they choose to declare publicly. This paper contributes to the important task of operationalizing empirically this key set of ideational variables. Using factor analysis of new survey data collected by the authors it maps and compares UK and Irish policy‐maker's understandings of, and orientations towards, globalization. The analysis reveals considerable similarities in the ordering of assumptions and attitudes towards globalization between the two country cases and between civil servants and parliamentarians. Yet it also shows some subtle and intriguing differences between policy‐makers' responses in the UK and Ireland and between elected and unelected officials. Intriguingly, it also suggests a significant disparity between politicians' private understandings and public discourses of globalization, with the former less necessitarian in tone than the latter. Above all, it suggests that Anglophone globalization discourse in Europe is principally structured in terms of a number of dimensions which relate to the acceptance or rejection of a series of core neoliberal premises. In effect, the terms and internal architecture of globalization discourse in the UK and Ireland are defined by neoliberal assumptions, to the extent that they provide the core point of reference and orientation for even the most sceptical and critical of views.