Studies of multi-level blame avoidance strategies generally assume that (1) governments prefer to shift responsibility to other levels and (2) an unclear distribution of formal responsibilities complicates blame allocation to a single actor. Considering the temporal location of such strategies – in anticipation or as a reaction to adverse events – the article tests these assumptions. Drawing on the case of air quality policy in Mexico City, the article uses causal process tracing to develop the mechanism leading to an anticipatory strategy and its unfolding. If the distribution of responsibilities on connected policy instruments is clear and major political actors share power, then government levels from different parties engage in a joint anticipatory strategy to avoid crisis and keep stability. The mechanism breakdown leads to reactive behaviour and policy change. Contextual changes redistributing power can destabilise the arrangements, leading to reactive blame games, fostering policy change.

When considering taking over public projects, executives assess their perceived credit-claiming opportunities against potential blame attribution. The balance of these perceptions may shift under crisis. Meanwhile, the literature has mostly explored project uptake in delegation contexts when decisionmakers hold certain control powers over delegees, but not when such controls are absent. Amid one of the largest migrant crises worldwide, we conducted a survey experiment with 238 sitting Colombian mayors. We explore issue visibility, salience of project beneficiaries, and policy stage (formulation versus implementation) as drivers of mayors’ preferences for project uptake or cession to upper-level governments. Results reveal mayors are less likely to cede implementation to the national government when presented with a more visible project. Neither visibility nor beneficiaries’ salience affects mayoral preferences for project formulation on its own. However, mayors are less likely to delegate both formulation and implementation when beneficiaries are more salient to their constituents.

Although the amount of policy-relevant academic research has grown in recent years, studies still find that policy practitioners seldom employ such research in their decisionmaking. This study considers potential methods for increasing government officials’ use of academic studies (impact evidence). We investigate how administrative accountability mechanisms as suggested by principal-agent approaches – screening, monitoring, autonomy and sanctions – correlate with practitioner engagement with impact evidence. Original survey data from 300 government officials in two developing countries, Peru and India, suggest that all four mechanisms are correlated with self-reported interest in or use of impact evidence. When we measured the actual use of such evidence on a website we created to facilitate that outcome; however, we found that only sanctions (income) correlate with actual use. These findings highlight the potential of administrative accountability to increase bureaucrats’ use of impact evidence but also warn of possible limitations.

Inflation targeting is the monetary strategy of all EU member states; whether in the euro area, the two euro-outs, Sweden and the United Kingdom. The latter are now faced with two alternatives to achieve price stability: either remain outside the euro area or join it as full-fledged members. This paper examines this policy choice starting from the views of Knut Wicksell, who considered it in his 1920s analysis of an international monetary system based on price level targeting. Price stability could be achieved either within every country by maintaining flexible exchange rates or jointly on a global scale through a system of fixed exchange rates, that is through a monetary union. To him this was a choice between two ‘evils’: fluctuating price levels in the member states of a global monetary union while the average price level is maintained constant versus fluctuating exchange rates in the absence of a monetary union. To Wicksell, the choice of the proper route towards price stability was less complicated than today because he analysed it solely in monetary terms. The current choice for Sweden and the United Kingdom involves other crucial dimensions, such as the existence of nominal rigidities, and the politics of domestically issued money. Political aspects concerning the euro will be the ultimate determinants of the future monetary path for both countries.

The dramatic overseas expansion of Japanese banks during the 1980s provoked major policy debates within the European Community. Fears that Japanese firms in the banking industry might replicate earlier successes in other industries, together with charges that Japan did not grant reciprocal access to European banks, raised important questions for EC member states committed to the implementation of common banking policies. Adoption of the crucially important Second Banking Coordination Directive and other public measures enabled the Community flexibly to impose strong controls on Japanese banks in the region. The nature of these public measures toward Japanese firms in the Community's banking industry, together with related EC policies toward local Japanese competition in other industries, suggested the emergence of a more general EC policy model for confronting the vaunted ‘Japanese challenge.’

An important issue in the discussion of fiscal policy is the contention that the public sector could expand only at the expense of the private sector, which must contract to provide the necessary room. This paper is concerned with ‘financial’ crowding out, which relates to the financing of public expenditure, rather than resource crowding out, which relates to the size of public expenditure. The paper attempts to determine empirically, using the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) macroeconomic model of the UK economy, whether fiscal actions under different modes of finance affect some strategic economic variables. The paper utilises techniques of optimal control, which are considered superior to simulation. The main conclusion of the paper is that there is no significant crowding out in the NIESR model; it is, nevertheless, important to distinguish between money-financed and bond-financed increases in government expenditure.

Policy piloting has become a popular form of organization in implementing public policies. However, the current literature surprisingly discusses little about its management. This study investigates how two policy-pilot attributes – ambiguity and compatibility – shape policy-pilot management. To accomplish this, we developed an analytic framework consisting of four management strategies: experimentation, refinement, upscaling, and institutionalization. We chose a representative policy pilot in Chinese health governance, the New Rural Cooperative Medical Scheme, to examine the adoption of these four strategies. Our finding that, at various junctures, the Chinese state adopted these four strategies to manage policy piloting demonstrates the applicability of the analytic framework constructed in this study. This study contributes to the existing public policy literature by providing new insights into policy implementation in temporary organizing settings.

What makes immigration a salient issue among Latinos? We focus on immigration – one of the most pressing issues facing the United States (US) – and evaluate the factors that motivate immigration salience among Latinos over several election cycles. Although immigration policy has been linked with the Latino electorate over the period of our study due to high foreign-born rates and mixed-status families within this community, immigration policy has actually not been the dominant issue for the majority of Latino voters over this time period. Using survey responses from the 2008, 2012 and 2016 elections, we test multiple theories of issue salience by exploring social, political and individual determinants of policy salience among Latino voters. We find that in addition to nativity, consumption of ethnic media and group identity are associated with reporting immigration as a salient issue. These findings provide a valuable addition to literature of public opinion on immigration and the origins of policy issue salience among ethno-racial minorities in the US.

Policymakers hold and seek to act on beliefs concerning trade strategies as well as those concerning trade tactics and instruments. In contrast to prominent hypotheses in the literature, this article argues that constraints placed on specific dimensions of trade policy by societal groups and state institutions appear to play a greater role in shaping the impact of beliefs on policy choices than overall shifts in discretion accorded to policymakers. Insights into the resurgence of the retaliatory tariff in U.S. trade policy during 1985–88 are at the interaction of policy beliefs and variation in executive discretion. Although lending support to scholarship focusing on the interaction of ideas and institutions, these findings raise questions concerning prominent claims about the significance of policy beliefs.

The census is a social fact, the outcome of a process that involves the interaction of public laws and institutions and citizens' responses to an official inquiry. However, it is not a ‘hard’ fact. Reasons for inevitable defects in the census count are listed in the first section; the second section reports efforts by the US Census Bureau to identify sources of error in census coverage, and make estimates of the size of the errors. The use of census data for policy purposes, such as political representation and allocating funds, makes these defects controversial. Errors may be removed by making adjustments to the initial census count. However, because adjustment reallocates resources between groups, it has become the subject of political conflict. The paper describes the conflict between statistical practices, laws and public policy about census adjustment in the United States, and concludes by considering the extent to which causes in America are likely to be found in other countries.

Fiscal decentralisation theory calls for enhanced local revenue and spending responsibilities to promote the efficiency of public service delivery. However, some have pointed to the danger of local capture cancelling out these effects. I examine the argument that organised crime violence (OCV) intensifies as mafias fight for access to local government resources, which they consider an attractive income source. I regress violence on local spending (LS) in Mexican municipalities over the period 1995–2015. I find a significant relationship between LS and the intensity of violence: higher levels of LS per capita are strongly related to higher homicide rates, conditional on them being positive. However, LS does not determine the probability of OCV taking place in the first place. The results suggest that caution should be exercised when initiating decentralisation reforms in the context of local capture and OCV.

Major social reforms affect the extent to which social rights are granted widely and equally or selectively and in a manner re-enforcing social stratification. Thus, they affect the amount of institutionally sanctioned inequality in a welfare state. This paper seeks to explain the politics of making decisions about unequal social rights. It emphasizes the importance of studying the substantive contents of the policy changes that are on the reform agenda; the kind of actors involved in reform controversies; and the kind of demands they raise. Which actors involved prevail in these controversies, however, is a function of the dynamic of political competition at the time of legislative decision-making. That dynamic tends to be centrifugal; it empowers groups at strategic positions in the political constellation. The paper develops analytical categories for capturing both typological distinctions of substantive policy contents and the empowering dynamic. It demonstrates the significance of this model by analyzing four instances of major welfare reform in Germany.