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This chapter discusses the reintegration of the need for Humanities Research Council back onto the public agenda and into the policy stream of the UK government. The issue of the Research Council for the humanities came into public and governmental attention when it was fastened to the dilemmas of financing higher education, which itself was tied to the uncertainty of the UK economy. In May 1996, the Secretary of State for Education and Employment together with Secretaries of State for Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland appointed Chairman Ron Dearing to create a body that would inquire into the higher education system of the UK. In 1997, the committee produced a report, Higher Education in a Learning Society, or the Dearing Report. The report charted a course for higher education in the UK for the next twenty years. This so-called intellectual capital called for a higher quality of teaching and the need for researchers and research facilities. It offered 93 specific recommendations, among which was a recommendation advocating the immediate establishment of a new Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). In 1998, the government recognized the need for the establishment of a research council for humanities and announced the provision of £8M in 1998–1999 for arts and humanities research, albeit after lengthy considerations.

Within two decades EU energy policy has risen from one of the Community’s major failures to a major area of EU policy activity, overcoming significant obstacles to Europeanization endemic to the energy sector. At least in terms of discourse and policy activities - if not always in practice - the EU today has a comprehensive energy policy, underpinned by a constitutional foundation in the Lisbon Treaty and equipped with some hard instruments to liberalize Union energy trade, regulate greenhouse gas emissions, and promote renewable sources of energy. External drivers such neo-liberal economic policies, Eastern enlargement and the political salience of climate change did create necessary – but not sufficient conditions for EU policy expansion. This chapter argues that Commission entrepreneurship has a key role in explaining policy change. The Commission has skillfully exploited dramatic changes in the energy (and broader economic) landscape that opened windows of opportunity for EU policy expansion. Informed by a strategic-constructivist perspective, the chapter identifies three complementary avenues or strategies of policy change: ‘relentless incrementalism’ in politically astute, small but path-dependent steps; informal modes of governance and transnational institution-building to circumvent obstacles to a formal transfer of powers to the EU; and the shadow – and bite – of hierarchy (competition law and policy) to break reform stalemates and accelerate sector changes. However, Europeanization in terms of policy outcomes and performance has been much less of a success story. An important reason, in addition to the usual suspects such as red lines of member state sovereignty, has been the divergent market and political dynamic of the three goals or sub-areas of energy policy: energy security; economic efficiency (competition) and market integration; and environmental sustainability including climate change.

This chapter traces the evolution of policy responses to health inequalities research in Great Britain. It explores the government's response to the recommendations of the Acheson Report and analyses what might be referred to as mid-stream policies in the form of area-based initiatives (ABIs). It also highlights how commitments to evidence-based policy have shaped the policy response and particularly the relative emphasis placed on downstream interventions.

In a properly-functioning democracy, public opinion should not only be correlated with, but also a major determinant of, public policy. Is that the case in the United States? In this chapter, we address that question by covering the major lines of empirical research on the relationship between American public opinion and public policy. We begin with early work that emphasized the limits of popular thinking about government, creating the apparent need for democratic elitism in governmental action. More recent literature includes perspectives from the public policy field, and research on democratic responsiveness at both the national and state levels. Major lines of work emphasize the existence of rational public opinion at the aggregate level which ‘smooths out’ the inconsistencies that may exist within individual policy attitudes. Seminal studies have considered both the degree of correspondence between opinion and policy (i.e., ‘the rational public’), and models that specify how policy responds to opinion (thermostatic responses and the macropolity). Recent methodological innovations have led to new insights about democratic responsiveness in the American states. Our general conclusion is cautiously optimistic: Policy generally does follow the contours of citizen preference, but elites also have opportunities to shape manifestations of public opinion.

The proliferation and persistence of online tracking of consumer behaviour through different technologies for the purpose of collecting information and constructing targeted advertisements based on the profiling of the interests and preferences of users, at surface level, seems relatively harmless. From a marketing perspective, such activity is crucial for both profit and online content. However, the broader impact and implications of such activity is much more wide-ranging, in particular given that much of it lacks transparency and can result in the violation of a plethora of individual rights. This chapter assesses development of the Do Not Track standard (DNT) in the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as a response to tracking behaviour that has sought to ensure that users have a choice on whether or not they are tracked online. It explains how different interests and stakeholders converged on its conception and diverged in its development with focus on the role of privacy advocates.