DODGY KEBABS EVERYWHERE? VARIETY OF WORLDVIEWS AND REGULATORY CHANGE

In the study of risk regulation, grid-group cultural theory has attracted considerable interest. There has, however, been a lack of a systematic interest in its claims and in methodological issues. In this article, we present five claims that are drawn from cultural theory and assess them in the light of failure in meat inspections in Germany. These claims are assessed through the analysis of argumentation as recorded in newspapers. In the light of its empirical findings, this article argues that the claims and methodology employed offer a promising avenue for further work to investigate the usefulness of this particular theoretical approach.     

Quality of government and regional competition: A spatial analysis of subnational regions in the European Union

Building on previous work on competition networks and governmental performance among British local governments, this article investigates the diffusion of government quality across subnational regions of Europe through strategic interaction with neighbouring regions or competitor regions more generally. The article demonstrates the presence of spatial interdependence using standard spatial regression models and controlling for common explanations of quality of government. In particular for regions with high levels of autonomy from the national government, there is clear adjustment in government quality to be seen in response to disparities with competitor regions. The article further investigates the intensity of this geographical effect separately in the north and south of Europe in order to estimate the potential for virtuous or vicious cycles of good governance in the two regions, respectively. It is found that while regions in the north develop relatively independently of each other but respond to competitive pressure across Europe, in the south regions demonstrate a higher level of local interdependence, increasing the possibility of virtuous cycles – but also of vicious ones.     

English Councillors and Mayoral Governance: Developing a New Dynamic for Political Accountability

Much has been written about the arrival of directly elected mayors into the English political landscape. The responses of the councillors serving on those councils to the arrival of elected mayors, has by comparison, been neglected. Yet, the construction, by councillors of a new role as the guarantor of local political accountability within mayoral councils, requires councillors to develop new patterns of political behaviour which challenge long‐held assumptions about the role of the councillor as a political representative. The paper reports the findings of research conducted amongst councillors on England's mayoral authorities, which explored how councillors have responded to the arrival of an elected mayor and what mayoral government means for our understanding of the role of the councillor within English local government.     

Putting Neoliberalism in its Place

Neoliberalism is not as popular as its opponents seem so much to fear; in democratic politics it nearly always hides behind other ideologies and policy types, as its essential message that we should pursue no goals that cannot be achieved through the market is intrinsically unattractive to the majority of people. Its power lies in the wealth of its key supporters, and in the difficulty of raising coordinated opposition to it among post‐industrial populations that have little sense of their political interests. The main base for hope of change in this comes from the as yet unrealised potential of women's movements.     

The Dynamics of Top‐Down Organizational Change: Donald Rumsfeld's Campaign to Transform the U.S. Defense Department

Drawing upon interviews with 69 defense policymakers and close observers, this article develops an extrapolation‐oriented case study of Donald Rumsfeld's campaign to transform the development of the U.S. Defense Department's future capabilities. This reform effort, launched by President George W. Bush during his first presidential campaign, encountered difficulties in developing and promoting the content of the proposed transformation and in executing it. Following Eugene Bardach's work on institutional craftsmanship and Michael Barzelay's efforts to further develop Bardach's methodology for extrapolation‐oriented case studies, the article explores the sources of the transformation campaign's difficulties, identifying several mechanisms linking common process context factors, exacerbated by process design features, to these negative outcomes. It also offers suggestions for rendering the design of change campaigns more robust to these vulnerabilities.     

GOVERNANCE AS POLITY: AN INSTITUTIONAL APPROACH TO THE EVOLUTION OF STATE FUNCTIONS IN IRELAND

State institutions mediate the challenges of globalization for the domestic political community: the concerns of specialists in comparative politics and in public administration are increasingly converging round an interest in the nature and functioning of state institutions. This paper draws on preliminary findings from a time-series database of national-level political institutions in Ireland to track continuity and change in state functions through analysis of state agencies. It also identifies four modes of state action: developmental, regulatory, adjudicatory, and moral advocacy, each of which has a traditional and a modern manifestation. While the first two modes are familiar in comparative context, the latter two are likely to merit further analysis cross-nationally.     

European Union transgovernmental networks: The emergence of a new political space beyond the nation‐state?

Abstract. Does the European Union (EU) represent a new political order replacing the old nation‐states? The assessment of the real character of political orders requires the identification of political key actors and of the specific structure of their interactions. Transgovernmental networks have been considered to be one of the most important features of EU integration. Unfortunately, the network structures, processes and the impact of these informal horizontal inter‐organisational relations between nation‐states are mostly unknown. The main objective of this article is to measure and explain the selective pattern of informal bilateral relations of high officials of the EU Member States’ ministerial bureaucracies on the occasion of an EU Intergovernmental Conference. The quantitative data used rely on standardised interviews with 140 top‐level bureaucrats. The statistical estimation of network choices is based on recent developments of exponential random graph models.     

Legitimation as justification: Foregrounding public philosophies in explanations of gradual ideational change

In accounts of institutional change, discursive institutionalists point to the role of economic and political ideas in upending institutional stability and providing the raw material for the establishment of a new institutional setup. This approach has typically entailed a conceptualisation of ideas as coherent and monolithic and actors as almost automatically following the precepts of the ideas they hold and support. Recent theorising stresses how ideas are in fact composite and heterogeneous, and actors pragmatic and strategic in how they employ ideas in political struggles. However, this change of focus has, until recently, not included how foundational ideas of a polity, often referred to as ‘public philosophies’, are theorised to impact on institution-building. Drawing on French Pragmatic Sociology, and taking as a starting point recent efforts within discursive institutionalism to conceptualise the dynamic nature of public philosophies, this article seeks to foreground moral justification in accounts of ideational and institutional change. It suggests that public philosophies are reflexively used by actors in continual processes of normative justification that may produce significant policy shifts over time. The empirical relevance of the argument is demonstrated through an analysis of gradual ideational and institutional change in French labour market policy, specifically the development from the state-guaranteed minimum income scheme of 1988 to the neoliberal make-work-pay logic of the 2009 scheme, Revenu de solidarité active. The analysis shows that public and moral justifications have underpinned and gradually shaped these radical changes.