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This chapter examines the EU’s policy towards Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs). It argues that the EU’s collective identity includes the notion of a ‘special responsibility’ towards CEECs. It involves purely self-interested behaviour by policymakers acting on behalf of the EU, and prescribes a degree of accommodation for CEECs’ preferences in EU policy. This component of collective identity limits the range of available policy options by precluding certain options as inappropriate, and reinforcing the legitimacy of others.

This chapter begins with a brief overview of the EU’s policymaking processes in comparison with national processes. It then outlines the EU’s impact on the macro patterns of its member-states’ national policymaking and its impact on the micro patterns of member-states’ sectoral policymaking. This is followed by an extensive illustration of both macro and micro patterns of policymaking in France, Britain, Germany, and Italy. Although Europeanization has been equally (although differently) disruptive to the statist patterns of policymaking of France and of Britain, Britain has had a harder time accepting EU-related changes but an easier time in influencing their formulation. Europeanization has yet again been least disruptive to Germany’s corporatist and legalistic patterns of policymaking, and most salutary to those of Italy, by reinforcing corporatism while denying clientelism.

This chapter examines what can be said about the new developments in financial politics since 1995. It considers the case of the Financial Diet of 1998, an extraordinary legislative session held to deal with the bad debt problem in banking. It is shown that the new developments observed in the case of the Big Bang represent a more general trend in financial politics, evident since 1995. This trend is one in which the public matters more than ever in the policymaking process.

This chapter examines the applicability of the study’s findings to other cases in the political economy, generating hypotheses about the determinants of regulatory reform. It discusses the policy implications of the analysis and identifies issues for additional research. It argues the need to shift the emphasis from ‘stability’ to ‘change’ in conceptualizing Japanese politics today. This shift should take place not only at the level of theory but also at the level of practice, given the fast pace of technological innovation, the deepening global integration, and change in the institutional environment. Accordingly, public administration must be carried out with the assumption of ‘change’ rather than the assumption of ‘continuity’, and the long-established emphasis on following precedents in policymaking abandoned.

Executive and regulatory agencies are decentralized state organizations that implement policies. When the law clearly defines the policy, we have a state policy; when it leaves the precise definition to the incumbent administration, we have a government policy. Regulatory agencies are supposed to execute state policies and be more autonomous from the administration, whereas executive agencies will be less autonomous politically but equally independent in administrative terms. Policies introduced by executive agencies are supposed to change the moment that the opposition political party or political coalition wins an election and a new administration begins, whereas the policies introduced by regulatory policies do not change so easily. Government policies may be changed either by the parliament or by the executive, whereas state policies may be changed only by the parliament. Executive agencies are supposed to have administrative autonomy, regulatory agencies, decision autonomy, but policies are not or should not be their responsibility.

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 presents an empirical analysis of contemporary Norwegian innovation policy with a particular emphasis on research and development (R&D). It investigates whether and to what extent the ‘national champions' strategy’ identified in the historical analysis in Chapter 4 persists in more recent policymaking. In the analysis, it is found that national champions are more inclined to get access to both development and research subsidies from Norwegian technology programs. The results also suggest that subsidies for ‘research’ within firms increase firm-financed R&D spending while subsidies for ‘development’ substitute such R&D.

This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of the prohibition of alcohol, which was global in scope. Coinciding with the outbreak of World War I, prohibition was adopted in ten countries in addition to the United States, as well as countless colonial possessions, all with similar disastrous consequences, and in every case followed by repeal. It considers the basic histories of three vital countries in the global prohibition drama: the most famous (or infamous) prohibition in the United States; Russia as the world's first prohibition country; and Sweden as the source of numerous policy alternatives to prohibition. The chapter then discusses the notion of a “bad policy” and an institutional framework for analysis. An overview of the subsequent chapters is presented.

This chapter examines the most famous statutory prohibition, that of the United States. It considers how prohibition came to dominate the public discourse at the expense of rival alcohol control options such the Gothenburg system, through the concerted framing efforts of temperance organizations. As elsewhere, the pending crisis of a European war created a “policy window” for the reframing of prohibition as congruent with patriotic sentiments of sacrifice for the greater good. This reframing, combined with the dynamics of positive policy feedback and the altered locus of decision making, helps explain the most baffling historical question of how such an overwhelming majority of Americans could support such a disastrous policy option, to not only ratify a prohibition amendment to the Constitution, but to do so in record time. From there, the chapter looks at the ultimate repeal of prohibition, with reference to the same mechanisms of competing ideas, actors, and feedback processes, which best explain how a supermajority of Americans and their representatives so overwhelmingly — and even more rapidly — defeated a policy that a supermajority comprised of virtually the same pool of citizens adopted just years before.

This chapter asks why Sweden never adopted prohibition, though it seemed almost foreordained at the time, opting instead for a novel alcohol-rationing system. Particular attention is paid to the role of the official Temperance Committee, and the efforts of its most active and influential member, Ivan Bratt. Ultimately, much of the reason that Sweden adopted a stringent system of alcohol control rather than prohibition was the influence of ideational brokers such as Dr. Bratt, who mediated between prohibition and antiprohibition forces and developed new options through bricolage of existing elements of alcohol control, working within the corporatist structure that provided the institutional space for such policy experimentation.

This chapter begins with a brief historical overview — from the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 through the Bol'shevik Revolution of 1917 and into the brutal, autocratic reign of Joseph Stalin, who ultimately repealed prohibition in the Soviet Union — before it addresses the domestic structure of policy decision-making in both late imperial and early Soviet Russia. While it is difficult to imagine a more stark contrast in the political ideology of the ruling classes, the basic structure of policymaking both before and after 1917 exhibits significantly more similarities than differences. The chapter considers the evolution of temperance and prohibitionist sentiments in imperial Russia, and their surprising resilience through the February and October Revolutions of 1917. These disparate threads are woven together into a new interpretation of the Russian experience with prohibition, which embeds consideration of the enormous weight normally given to Tsar Nicholas II within a deeper understanding of the role of autocratic policymaking institutions.

This chapter weaves together the transnational temperance movement in Chapter 2 with policymaking at the national level in Chapters 3 through 5, by examining the extent to which alcohol control policy ideas and experiences in one country influence policy developments in another. By focusing on the invocation of foreign ideas — anchored in experience beyond the control of national policymakers and requiring explicit investigation and comparison of foreign conditions — we can trace the influence of ideas within different institutional contexts at different stages in the policy process. While transnational ideational influences are broadly similar with respect to agenda setting in society-dominated, corporatist, and autocratic governance structures, these similarities disappear with the shift to policy debate and adoption that comes with the opening of a window for policy change. Society-dominated structures, such as in the United States, are predisposed toward the influence of normative ideational elements — frames and public sentiments — whereas corporatist structures, as in the Swedish case, are predisposed toward the influence of cognitive ideational elements: policy programs and paradigms. In autocratic structures, as in Russia, the elements at the forefront of the policy debate — policy programs and frames — are more salient.

This chapter provides a more explicit comparison of the institutional differences in feedback mechanisms, highlighting the features inherent in each institutional arrangement that predisposed decision makers in each country toward or away from a particular policy, while also enhancing the understanding of how different institutional arrangements respond to crises by accelerating the policy debate, and thereby altering the political discourse to impact the course of policy development. In drawing together such diverse insights, the chapter also poses an explanation for the international alcohol control/prohibition policy “wave” of the early 20th century. In brief, the wave can be explained only with reference to a combination of transnationally diffused temperance ideas, varyingly translated into policy through institutionalized channels of decision making, with a common external stimulus of a world war. War explains the timing of the policy wave, transnational temperance information networks explain the direction of the policy change, and domestic institutional constraints explain the ultimate form of that change.