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This chapter considers what happens after parties negotiate a government. How far do they succeed in carrying out their original intentions and thereby effectuating the preferences of the median voter? The analysis of government declarations gives mixed signals about who is in control of policy. On a general Left-Right orientation, the policy position marked by a country's median voter is the most reliably consistent indicator of what a government intends to do. If this effect is causal, it would have to be due to parliaments and governments looking over their shoulders at what the election communicated about the median voter Left–Right position and anticipating policy benefits at the next election, as opposed to the median voter effectively selecting a median parliamentary position that then takes control of the general tenor of policy. If the parliamentary median were the major influence, it would be the variable that withstood controls for the government and electorate. It does not come close to this however. And, while the government's Left–Right position nearly withstands statistical controls, the magnitude of its effect pales in comparison to that of the electorate's position.

Manifestoes and declarations state priorities for policy rather than getting down to the nitty-gritty. Actual decision-making involves the allocation of scarce resources, and this is examined in this chapter. The policies selected are those that square with those investigated in government declarations. One involves two sets of indicators of the size of a country's public economy — one for 1982 and another for 1992 — measured by central government spending as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP). These are analyzed in relationship both to the Left–Right positions of electorates, parliaments, and governments as well as to the planning versus market orientation of parliaments, governments, and finance ministries. A second set comes from two indicators of support for welfare. One is Esping–Anderson's (1990) scoring of welfare provision from the early 1980s; the other is the level of social spending as a percentage of GDP from the early 1990s. The third policy is covered by another two indicators, of a peaceful versus militarist orientation to international affairs. One is the level of foreign economic aid as a percentage of GDP from the early 1980s, and the other the ratio of foreign economic aid to defence spending from the early 1990s.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the three major trends affecting the major industrialized nations following the Second World War. It then discusses the success of American manufacturers in IT, and the attempts of European and Japanese governments to construct a national champion to compete against IBM. Factors affecting IT policy are then assessed.

This chapter examines the dominant role of government agencies in providing support for computing during the last four decades. By extending the discussion over three phases, the chapter enlarges the historical appreciation of the role of government in R&D for computing. This 50-year analysis also illustrates similarities in approach to selecting problems and funding R&D over the three phases. The changes discussed resulted both from sophistication within computing and from altered attitudes and circumstances in the society around the computing enterprise.

This chapter presents the history of policies and practices in the supply of IT workers, especially as they relate to policy for higher education and computing research, in the United States. There is no direct worker policy that mandates how many workers of various types need to be trained. Instead, policy about the supply of IT workers is vested in other kinds of policy: national research output, education, defence, social welfare, immigration, national economic competitiveness, and taxation. Concerns about the national supply of IT workers is tied directly to scientific research and higher education policy, and these are the topics that are investigated most extensively in this chapter. Both the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Academies of Science and Engineering have been key players in this.

The fortunes of the American computer industry illustrates a remarkable economic success story in terms of global performance. What is especially striking about the industry is its resilience — its ability to sustain dominance across a series of technical watersheds. Proponents of virtually every theory on economic activity and from every school of political economy have found some basis for support in the experiences of the computer industry. This chapter adds one more element to the story: government competition policy, specifically antitrust, and its close cousin, intellectual property law.

The empirical evidence examined in this book is highly supportive of the idea that economic rents play a key role in determining the degree of association between partisanship and corporate governance change in nonliberal market economies. Economic rents are the key factor that mould the preferences of political parties vis‐à‐vis corporate governance policy, and determine the ability of such policy to translate into changes in firm‐level corporate governance outcomes.

The overall levels of social capital in Great Britain appear to have remained robust since the 1950s. However, disparities in the social capital available to the working and middle classes appear to have widened. Government policies on education and social service delivery have been central to sustaining levels of social capital.

The recent rise in inequality in the distribution of disposable income in many, although not all, countries has led to a search for explanations, particularly since for much of the postwar period falling income inequality has been the norm. In the OECD countries, on which this chapter concentrates, the cause has been identified as rising wage dispersion, coupled with persistent unemployment in Europe. However, a number of factors need to be brought into any explanation of the extent and timing of changes in income distribution, including movements in factor shares, changes in real interest rates, and the impact of the government budget. This chapter focusses on the last of these. It has five sections: Introduction; Redistributive Impact of the Government Budget in selected OECD countries—a review of the statistical evidence from five OECD countries where a time series of studies covering the 1980s and the 1990s is available (UK, Canada, West Germany, Finland, Sweden; The Government Budget in Principle and Policy Reaction to Demographic Shifts—a simple framework within which the distributional implications of different government policy responses to changes in economic conditions and the different elements influencing the choice of response are explored; Policy Changes in Redistributive Taxes and Transfers: Case Studies of Unemployment Benefit and Personal Taxation—in the five European countries already studied, and in the US; and Summary of Conclusions.