This article offers a novel defence of participation income (PI). It claims that there are pragmatic and normative reasons to prefer PI over alternative redistributive policies, such as an unconditional basic income and workfare programmes. In particular, it argues that PI should be conceived as a particular type of civic service programme designed to address a large number of unmet social needs that are not met by entrepreneurs in the marketplace. The article ends by addressing five objections that can be raised against its argument.

Much of the literature on affirmative action is normative. Further, in scholarship that takes an empirical approach to examine this topic, the object of inquiry is typically the ramifications of such provisions – most notably the extent to which they foster social transformation. Yet, we know surprisingly little about the antecedents of affirmative action. This work examines what variables systematically predict affirmative action. We focus on the policy feedback literature and compensatory justice frameworks to examine the effects of democracy, modernisation and globalisation on affirmative action programmes. Time-series cross-sectional analyses of data for hundreds of groups from all over the globe for the period 1985–2003 confirm our hypotheses. This is the first work to examine affirmative action programmes in a large-N framework of such scale. We find that such programmes systematically correlate with democracy, modernisation and globalisation.

How are civil servants and politically appointed advisers likely to respond to policy proposals that they believe will harm their countries severely even if they are legal? Based on the different loyalties and roles of political advisors (PA) and civil servants (CS), we hypothesise that (1) PAs are more likely to voice internally, (2) CSs are more likely to voice externally and (3) CSs in functionally politicised systems are more likely to stay silent. These hypotheses are tested on – and partially supported by – data collected through two surveys directed to the ministerial staffs in Denmark and Sweden. PAs are more likely to voice internally, but none of the two groups is particularly keen to voice externally. The propensity to voice concerns in case of perceived harmful policy proposals depends on the kind as well as the level of politicisation.

This article studies local processes of policy feedback by analysing citizens’ fairness perceptions of public childcare fees in a German town. Employing an experimental vignette study, we uncover complex feedback effects: first, citizens in the study regard a fee level as fair that is close to the actual fee level in the city, suggesting self-reinforcing feedback effects. Second, citizens strongly support a fee structure in which fees vary according to parental income. As this preferred fee structure differs from the local fee structure in the town itself, we interpret the citizens’ preference as evidence for self-undermining policy feedback. Finally, the actual characteristics of the respondents matter less than the fictitious characteristics of the parents in the vignettes, which points to the importance of interpretive rather than resource-based feedback effects. In concluding, we highlight the relevance of these findings for broader debates about policy feedback.

Monitoring the implementation process in domestic settings of multi-level policies like the EU gender directives is dependent on interactions among a diverse set of policy stakeholders. However, there is no clear understanding of which factors determine the structure of these monitoring networks and what benefits effective exchange. Drawing on insights from social network theory, literature on information politics in transnational networks and policy network analysis, this study analyses what drives information exchange among actors in the monitoring network of women’s groups in the Netherlands. Using Exponential Random Graph Models, the analysis reveals distinctive structural features facilitating efficient information exchange and significant brokerage in the monitoring network. Moreover, the results demonstrate that interactions that serve the purpose of monitoring EU policy implementation occur among a diverse set of actors in a multi-level structure. These findings indicate that effective monitoring requires resourceful and broad-based information exchange to increase transparency in the implementation process.

Prior to 1974/5 the industrial problem of Italy was clearly seen as that of trying to industrialise the South. However, the end of cheap labour and cheap energy meant that Mezzogiomo industrialisation could no longer be seen in isolation from the rest of the country. Underpinning the new policy was the compromise set of measures approved at the end of 1977 to deal with the problem of ‘industrial reconversion and restructuring’. It is not clear that the more general approach now in effect adds up to a coherent industrial strategy. However, a quantitative evaluation of past investment policies reveals a considerable flexibility in the policy response to the new economic conditions.

This paper presents an analytical framework for comparing patterns of devolution to subnational governments and autonomous social insurance institutions in social security systems. The framework has two components. One is an analysis of financial structures along the dimensions of financial autonomy (indicated by the extent to which the administering institution raises its own revenue or depends on central grants) and financial responsibility (indicated by whether marginal costs are borne by the administering institution). The other component of the framework concerns the assignment of policy-making power; in particular, we contrast the effects of competitive and cooperative modes of devolution. The discussion uses examples from Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands and the USA. While we looked for ‘principal-agent’ relationships between central governments and administering institutions, we found that more complex multi-level governance structures prevailed in most cases.

This study analyses the contradictory effects of decentralisation on public spending. We distinguish three dimensions of decentralisation and analyse their joint and separate effects on public spending in the Swiss cantons over 20 years. We find that overall decentralisation has a strong, significant and negative effect on the size of the public sector, thus confirming the Leviathan hypothesis. The same holds for fiscal and institutional decentralisation. However, the extent to which political processes and actors are organised locally rather than centrally actually increases central and decreases local spending. This suggests that actors behave strategically when dealing with the centre by offloading the more costly policies. The wider implication of our study is that the balance between self-rule and shared rule has implications also for the size of the overall political system.

Theories of public policy change, despite their differences, converge on one point of strong agreement: the relationship between policy and its causes can and does change over time. This consensus yields numerous empirical implications, but our standard analytical tools are inadequate for testing them. As a result, the dynamic and transformative relationships predicted by policy theories have been left largely unexplored in time series analysis of public policy. This article introduces dynamic linear modelling (DLM) as a useful statistical tool for exploring time-varying relationships in public policy. The article offers a detailed exposition of the DLM approach and illustrates its usefulness with a time series analysis of United States defense policy from 1957 to 2010. The results point the way for a new attention to dynamics in the policy process, and the article concludes with a discussion of how this research programme can profit from applying DLMs.

The association between income inequality which creates psycho-social stress and longevity is of a curvilinear, concave nature. Low levels of income inequality are connected with shorter life expectancy. As inequality increases so does life expectancy until a point is reached where further increases in inequality lead to decreases in life expectancy. This finding is consistent with general theories of the effects of stress on performance as found in the fields of social psychology and sports medicine. In addition, we found that the life expectancy of populations is driven by factors such as perceived political control, the generosity of the welfare state, life-styles, GDP per capita and the poverty rate. Independently of which measure of income inequality was used or which statistical method was applied, these findings remained robust even when a number of alternative explanations were controlled for.

The failure of attempts at neoliberal social security reform in Brazil since 1990 demonstrates the limited political influence of seemingly powerful economic forces, especially private business and international financial institutions. Besides power-dispersing constitutional structures, the fragmentation of social forces, the weakness of political parties, and the internal segmentation of the state apparatus have hindered the efforts of Brazilian governments to gain the political support necessary to cut entitlements and thus stem the rapid rise in pension spending.

The monetary implications arising from EMU for Swiss monetary policy show up primarily in the exchange rate. As of yet, fluctuations in the Swiss franc against the euro have been surprisingly moderate. The Swiss franc has thus tracked the euro's decline against the US dollar without experiencing strong inflationary pressures and a convergence in the interest-rate differential: a paradoxical result for a small open economy. This paper examines critically whether the recent record reveals information about a change in SNB monetary policy. It also attempts to shed light on the SNB's ability to implement an independent monetary policy with the new landscape defined by EMU. Four hypotheses of euro tracking are considered.

A country is on the carbon efficiency frontier if its per-capita emissions of CO2 are at least as low as any state that was at least as economically developed at a period when technology was no more advanced. Building on earlier work employing Data Envelopment Analysis to benchmark performance, we argue that a useful measure of whether a state adopts “good practice” in relation to climate change is how near it is to this frontier. We calculate efficiency scores for a sample of developed countries between 1994 and 2011, and model the impact of green taxation, next to a series of political and economic controls, on performance. We find that higher levels of environmental tax revenue are positively and significantly associated with higher carbon efficiency. The central contributions of this research are the introduction of an innovative measure for environmental quality and assessing how this is driven by green taxation.

Social indicators have not fulfilled their promise, or at least have not lived up to the expectations held of them in the late 1950s and 1960s. Despite the continued growth of social statistics, produced both by governments and other organisations, the aim of producing precise, concise and evaluatively neutral measures of the state of society and of change in society has apparently eluded some of the best minds of the social science and governmental statistics communities. Whereas a wide range of economic indicators and data are readily available, if not without their problems (cf. Johnson, 1988), and integrated into the concepts of economic theory, standard measures of crime, health, well-being, education and many other social characteristics have proven much more difficult to construct and establish as standard yardsticks of social conditions. This note considers some of the reasons for these difficulties. It relates specifically to the aspiration to construct social indicators, not to social statistics more generally (as reviewed in, for example, Carley, 1981).

Two frameworks for understanding the debate on regulation are discussed. In the first, an economizing perspective, various institutional arrangements are seen as instruments and the question posed is which is the most efficient in achieving public objectives. The second, a political perspective, begins from economizers' lack of interest in the basic organizing principles of the political structure within which the choice of regulatory arrangements occurs. Conceptions of such principles in the American case are considered and the implications of each for the choice of regulatory institutions are addressed. A parallel discussion is undertaken for the United Kingdom. The paper concludes by noting, among other things, that from a political perspective, an extensive regulatory sector looks more attractive than it does from an economizing perspective.

Important and controversial changes have recently taken place in industrial training in the United Kingdom. Training is a complex policy area – industrial, economic, educational and social objectives may be pursued through it. For the most part it has been policy formation which has been dominated by professionals and thus there has been a ‘closed system’ into which outsiders rarely intrude. But outside influences have become more powerful; consequently the professionals are careful about which issues they place on the agenda for discussion. However, the most striking impression made by the training system is its lack of coherence and this may undermine its effectiveness.

This article looks at whether political ideology matters for enforcement of the nation’s tax laws. An analysis of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) budget and personnel suggests that the party affiliation of the President makes no difference to the overall level of IRS resources. However, there are significant increases in the number of IRS employees devoted to criminal investigation and revenue collection under Democratic administrations. Audits of tax returns filed by corporations, individuals and estates are also significantly more likely under Democratic administrations. The body of evidence points in the direction that while Congress has a greater influence in determining the overall level of resources available to the IRS, the President has a more pronounced influence on the allocation of those resources.

We're told a story of how American Indians taught their young to swim: They tied a rope around the youngster and tossed him in the water. Social indicators were tossed into the water without the rope! Without the rope of adequate Federal or private funds for support, social indicators were forced to learn to swim. And swim, they did.

What leads states to adopt more restrictive labour policies? The conventional wisdom is that unified Republican states, with help from conservative political networks, are more likely to adopt restrictions on labour unions. We argue that party control of government matters but is constrained by voter preferences and the power of organised labour. We create new estimates of state-level public support for unions by income thirds using dynamic multilevel regression and poststratification. Using this measure, we predict the adoption of restrictive labour policies, such as right-to-work and minimum wage preemption laws. We find that Republican governments are less likely to adopt restrictive policies when unions are strong and when union support among middle- and low-income earners is high. Interestingly, these results run contrary to much of the literature on the unequal representation of the wealthy in public policy.