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Central bank independence (CBI) has been one of the most significant regulatory state developments of the last three decades. Following the 2008 financial crisis, many central bank mandates were extended to include a responsibility for financial stability. Some commentators claim this jeopardizes CBI by drawing central banks into contested political issues that can impact financial stability, in what we term an independence in decline thesis. Through a detailed study of the Bank of England's financial stability communications employing the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) codebook, we subject this independence in decline thesis to scrutiny. We show that since the extension of the Bank's mandate in 2011, Bank officials have discussed a wider range of more contentious policy issues. However, these communications appear to date to have largely reinforced the Bank's reputation for technical competence and political neutrality. In this sense, central bank "communicative agency" can be deployed to protect CBI performatively, while CBI can in turn be studied and understood as an ongoing communicative performance act. We find that repoliticization is a more contingent process than much central banking literature has allowed for, while financial stability communications are a potentially powerful regulatory instrument deserving of more scholarly attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We argue that the everyday language distinction drawn between power and influence is meaningful and significant. There is good reason to believe that much corporate lobbying activity which is currently described under the heading of business power is better understood as attempts to secure negotiated agreements based on exerting influence rather than power and that the latter is usually used only when attempts to use influence have failed. We develop an analytical distinction between influence, understood as successful efforts at persuasion, and power using Keith Dowding's work on power. Drawing upon findings from interviews with corporate professionals operating at the coalface of business and government interaction in Australia, we show that lobbyists generally seek "quiet" behind-the-scenes accommodations with governments via attempts to exert influence rather than power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the Second World War, the Labour Party has alternated between periods in which it has been positioned further to the left and others when it has been further to the right. The standard explanation for those oscillations is electoral–ideological. Labour moves to the right (towards the political centre) when it prioritises electoral considerations, usually after a period in opposition. It moves to the left when it prioritises ideology, usually after periods in government. Against this we propose a political economy–policy explanation. Labour moves to the right and a redistributive economic strategy when the economy is performing reasonably well. It moves to the left and adopts a structural economic reform programme when the economy is perceived to be in crisis. We argue that the political economy–policy explanation offers a more satisfactory account of when and why Labour has changed its spatial policy positioning in this period. By acknowledging the role of what we term 'policy reasoning' in the processes by which political parties (and the public) adopt and change spatial policy positions, our approach provides an alternative to the mechanistic models deriving from Downsian rational choice theory. It suggests that, contrary to general expectation, the Labour Party under Keir Starmer does not need to react to its 2019 election defeat by shifting significantly to the right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Large corporations in Australia have shifted from limited to more fulsome engagement in political activity (CPA) in recent decades. The paper argues that this reflects corporate institutional change in response to wider changes in the environment that have included growing government intervention, increased industry concentration and intra-sectoral competition, and a more complex and challenging discursive and issues environment. Quantitative and regression-based analysis of the drivers of CPA are employed and the analysis is extended and deepened with material drawn from interviews with twenty-five corporate government relations professionals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How pluralist is political studies? How are resources distributed across the discipline? In this article, we turn one of the fundamental questions of politics – who gets what, when, and how – back on to the study of politics itself. Our focus is on two areas that are central concerns to pluralism: gender and sub-discipline. We pose two specific questions: What is the gender and sub-disciplinary composition of political studies? And how are various resources – ranging from jobs to prizes – distributed along gender and sub-disciplinary lines? In addressing these questions, we draw on a pilot and partial audit of departments, journals and other key indicators from 1998 to 2018. The article contributes to long-standing debates about the character of political studies and the extent to which the field is pluralistic or not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are the largest global banks now safer in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis? Focusing on a ‘before’ (2005) and ‘after’ (2015) balance sheet analysis of 21 of the largest American, British and European banks, we assess post-crisis banking performance. Much of the literature focuses on post-crisis regulation, but we argue instead that the main driver of change since the crisis has been structural conditions in banking and financial markets, particularly high levels of competition, bleak profit and share price conditions, and the largely unsolved too big to fail problem. Older as well as new forms of systemic risk thus prevail and many of the global banks still face major vulnerabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 2010, the incoming Coalition government announced that it would publish details of meetings between ministers and outside interests. We have collated and coded these data and, in this article, describe patterns of access between 2010 and 2015. In some respects, access is notably fragmented. No single organisation attends more than 2.5% of the 6292 meetings held by ministers. On the contrary, business, collectively, attends fully 45% of all meetings: more than twice the share of any other category of organisation. We alsofind evidence of distinctive policy communities characterised by high levels of access between particular interests and ministers within specific departments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes and explains a significant tightening in bank capital regulation in the United Kingdom since the 2008 financial crisis. The banks fiercely resisted the new capital regulations but in a novel theoretical contribution we argue that the structural power of business was reduced due to the changing ideas of state leaders, by changing institutional arrangements within the state and by wider open politicisation of banking reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The given article is a reply to Adams' and Jones' reviews on the research carried out by Keith Dowding, Andrew Hindmoor and Aaron Martin on the policy agendas in Australia, Europe and United States. It states the motivation behind the research, conceptualization and methodology followed. It also clarifies certain facts that may have been misunderstood.

The Policy Agendas Project (PAP) was developed in the United States in the early 1990s as a means of collecting data on the contents of the policy agenda. The PAP coding method has subsequently been employed in the United Kingdom, a number of European countries, Canada, Israel, New Zealand, as well as the state of Pennsylvania (http://www.comparativeagendas.org/). What does PAP measure? How does it measure it? What does it find? How does it explain what it finds? We use these questions to structure our review. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We are increasingly learning more about the contingencies and independent variables that shape the structural power of business and financial interests. This paper contributes to this research by analysing factors that led to weakening in the structural power of financial interests in the City of London in the aftermath of the 2007/2008 crisis. We focus on under-researched mediators of structural power dynamics, especially the context of action and the agency and ideas of state leaders. Prior to the crisis, closed regulatory policy and a prevailing discourse premised upon the notion of market efficiency, helped to reinforce the structural power of the UK banking and financial sector. After the crisis heightened politicisation, more assertive state leadership, and especially ideational revision, has increasingly challenged the power of the City. We illustrate this through an examination of the Independent Commission on Banking's proposals in relation to the ‘ring fencing’ of investment and retail banks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Who foresaw the UK banking crisis? This paper addresses this issue through detailed empirical work on the content of the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s speeches, Bank of England Financial Stability Reports, Financial Service Authority reports and speeches by Bank of England officials, editorials in the Times and Financial Times, bank annual reports and financial statements, credit rating reports, share price movements, Parliamentary questions, Treasury select committee reports and the output of academic economists. We find that few people inside or outside government recognised the existence of significant financial vulnerabilities in the financial system in the years prior to the collapse of Northern Rock in September 2007. We use the conceptual lenses of individual, institutional and paradigmatic pathologies to provide explanations for this failure to detect looming crisis conditions. We argue ultimately that regulators and commentators were blinded by faith in market forces and the risk-tempering properties of securitisation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Research Highlights and Abstract This article focuses on the banking crisis in the US and UK., It is essential to understand banker agency and the institutional and structural contexts which shaped such agency., Bankers experienced variegated patters of constraint and opportunity. At one level institutional theories that emphasise institutional constraint cannot easily account for the authority and agency enjoyed by key bankers., On the other hand, bankers were heavily influenced by institutional change in the shape of market 'liberalisation', which produced intense levels of competition and pressures to achieve higher profit returns: an exacting form of market discipline., Bankers and financiers in the US and UK modified institutions and revolutionised the banking industry prior to the 2007-8 crisis. These agents were however heavily constrained and eventually overwhelmed by institutional pressures and wider structural forces that encouraged high-risk leveraged trading and which generated systemic risk. To account for this, institutional theory needs to incorporate a broader canvas of conditioning contexts, particularly the impact of structural or systemic forces on agents and the way in which these are actualised as a form of 'ecosystem power'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whether or not policy is responsive to public opinion is central to questions of representation. Democracy by many accounts is premised on there being a strong correspondence between public opinion and policy. This link has not, however, been examined in detail in Australia. This article examines the policy–opinion link in a more robust way than that has previously been achieved in Australia, through the use of legislative data from the Australian Policy Agendas Project (APAP) and public opinion data from Roy Morgan. The article asks: is policy congruent with public opinion in Australia? In addressing this question, we examine to what extent policy accords with the preferences of the public. This in turn provides us with some answers about how representative Australian democracy is, as well as contributing to an international debate about the responsiveness of policy to public opinion. 政策是否要对舆论负责，这是代表制的核心问题。民主的前提往往就在于舆论和政策之间的息息相通。但在澳大利亚，人们并没有仔细地研究过二者间的关联。本文根据澳大利亚政策议题计划提供的立法资料以及罗伊摩根提供的舆情资料，对政策—舆论关联做了比以往充分多的研究。本文试问：政策与舆论在澳大利亚是否一致？我们考察了政策在多大程度上符合民意。这也为澳大利亚民主在多大程度上具有代表性的问题提供了答案，对于国际上争论政策对民意的回应问题也具有参考意义。。 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is a reply to David Marsh and Chris Lewis' response to our paper ‘The Structural Power of Business and the Power of Ideas: The Strange Case of the Australian Mining Tax’. In this paper, we respond to the points their arguments raise about our theoretical framework and empirical case-study. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article extends a recent line of research arguing that the power and capacity of political actors (including states) is not just the product of particular fixed attributes but is also the outcome of political relations between key interlocutors, including ideational relations. State elites, especially government leaders, have persisted with a mindset that still values the economic centrality of a large and complex banking sector. This way of thinking has conditioned the relationship between, on the one hand, the US and UK governments and, on the other, Wall Street and the City of London and has led to a form of ‘dysfunctional embeddedness’. Government leaders may have been able to win high-profile policy victories over the banking sector in the post-crisis period, but in accepting a large, complex and constantly evolving financial system with high levels of systemic risk, they have unwittingly placed themselves at a continuing disadvantage in the regulatory arena. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 2010 the Australian federal government fought and lost an intense and very public battle with the country's mining industry over the introduction of a new ‘super-profits’ tax. The proposed tax was withdrawn and the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, was removed from office. Why did the government lose this battle and what can this episode tell us about the nature and determinants of business power? We argue that business power is not an objective condition but is shaped subjectively and inter-subjectively. What counts in the power equation is not whether business investmentisessential for growth or whether businesswilldisinvest if a new tax is imposed, but whether actorsbelievethis to be the case. One reason why the structural power of business varies is because actors’ normative and causal ideas about the value and determinants of business investment vary. In the Australian case ministers did not believe that the introduction of a new tax would jeopardise investment. Ministers did however come to believe that the mining industry had successfully persuaded a large number of voters that the introduction of a new tax would jeopardise investment, employment and growth. This is why the tax was eventually abandoned. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The authors reflect on the views of commentator Ian Marsh on an article published in the issue of the journal that they have edited which surveyed the development of the policy agenda in Australia since 1963. They oppose on the comments of Marsh citing that they overlooked the importance of political parties in the country. They assert that Marsh's views failed to note the role of other significant factors interacting with the party system to drive the policy agenda of Australia.

Keith Dowding argues that business is systematically lucky in a capitalist society because it often gets what it wants without trying due to the way society is structured. But what ought to count here is not only how society is structured but why it is structured in certain ways and this means grappling with the dynamics of the structure-agency dialectic. Dowding overestimates the degree to which business is systematically lucky and underestimates the degree to which it is powerful because he fails to recognise the way in which business can shape the structures whose existence allows it to get what it wants without trying. We examine the position of two very different groups: British farmers and US bankers. British farmers were systematically lucky in the post-war years in the sense that they benefited from events outside their control. The US banking sector was lucky in 2008 because it was 'too big to fail'. But the banks had previously used their power to shape this outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the immediate aftermath of a crisis, one of the most damning and penetrating questions asked of political leaders and senior state officials by the media, opposition parties and other actors is: 'why didn't they see it coming?' The question is often rhetorical, the implication being that warning signs were clear and should have been acted upon. In this article we identify the assumptions underpinning the 'why didn't they see it coming?' narrative as it has been expounded in relation to the global financial crisis in the UK and US. Since 2008 commentators have routinely argued that warning signals of an impending financial crisis were ignored by political elites, treasury officials and financial regulators. Such arguments are made in hindsight and we refer to them as backward mapping perspectives. In this article we advance a counter-narrative, from a forward mapping perspective, where the focus is on placing such 'failures' in the context of the time, without foreknowledge of the crisis that would happen. Accordingly, we argue that warning signals that, with the benefit of hindsight, now seem obvious, were actually ambiguous and fragmented because they were received and interpreted within a very different ideational environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including changing policy content and implementation styles for policies in the Australian Commonwealth from 1960 to 2013, Australian economic policy, and the lack of partisan changes for Australian foreign policy agendas.

In Australian politics, narratives have developed around the ideological lineage of prime ministers from the same party so that, for example, Howard is often compared to Menzies and Hawke to Whitlam. In this article we examine the extent to which the ideology (left–right) of prime ministers from the same party has changed over time. We analyse the contents of speeches the Governor-General delivered at the opening of parliament between 1946 and 2010. We validate a number of narratives around the ideological lineage of prime ministers in relation to their party predecessors, and invalidate others, by analysing the speeches using the Comparative Manifestos Project coding scheme. This article also argues that parties do matter and shows how the addition of coding for ideology can complement the Policy Agendas Project method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evidence-based policy-making (EBPM) has become both a catch-cry and aspiration of governments. Drawing on ‘the evidence’, governments seek to focus on ‘what works’ and so avoid the pitfalls of policy driven by ideology or values. Critics of EBPM remind us that the policy process remains messy and uncertain and that while research may deliver the latest scientific evidence, it is not always translated effectively into policy. We argue that the problems with EBPM run much deeper. This is not only because of the way in which knowledge is employed by policy-makers but because of the way in which knowledge is collected and communicated to policy-makers. It is well understood that policy actors are boundedly rational and this impacts upon the way in which evidence is used in the policy process. What has not been clearly articulated and is the focus of this article is that bounded rationality applies equally to the production of evidence. Drawing on the work of Polish microbiologist Ludwick Fleck we discuss how the process of systematically collecting and communicating evidence can undermine the aspirations of EPBM. We illustrate this argument with reference to recent policy debates about obesity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between state and non-state actors has been the subject of extensive debate within the governance literature. During this time two influential but very different accounts of governance have emerged: a society-centred account which talks of governance without government and a state-centric perspective which maintains that governance largely occurs by and through governments. There are of course alternative and more nuanced positions on offer. These two have nevertheless served to frame the debate around governance by engendering a zero-sum understanding of the relationship between state and non-state actors which obscures the way in which the presence of non-state actors can enhance the policy capacities of state actors and vice versa. The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) has been lauded as an exemplar of governance without government and has indeed, on occasions, had to overcome the indifference or even outright hostility of governments. But the society-centred account does not do justice to the range of very different and sometimes mutually beneficial relationships between the FSC and state actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arguing about rational choice theory remains a popular pastime. Following the publication of Green and Shapiro's Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory, a backlash against the use of rational choice theory within political science gained momentum. This article shows how, since 1994, sceptics have refined and extended the critique of rational choice and how practitioners have defended their approach, and a more general argument has emerged. In the 1990s, attitudes towards rational choice theory constituted a fundamental fault-line within the discipline, but changes to the way in which rational choice is practised and defended, together with some broader changes in the social sciences, have created more areas of common ground and taken some of the urgency out of this debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The banking crisis and the recession it induced provide a salient backdrop to domestic and international politics. The estimates that total banking losses between 2008 and 2010 exceeded US$2.3 trillion. This article uses grid-group theory to review the existing literature on the causes of the banking crisis and, in doing so, distinguishes between hierarchical, individualist, egalitarian and fatalist accounts of what went wrong and of what needs to be done to prevent another crisis from occurring. It is argued that the existing reform agenda is underpinned by a hierarchical analysis of the causes of the crisis and that this risks narrowing the support base for the reform process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Policy Agendas Project collects and organises data from official documents to trace changes in the policy agenda and outputs of national, sub-national and supranational governments. In this paper we use the policy agendas method to analyse the changing contents of those Australian Governor-General's speeches delivered on behalf of incoming governments between 1945 and 2008. We suggest that these speeches provide an important insight into how the executive wishes to portray its policy agenda as it starts a new term of government. In mapping the changing agenda in this way we address four questions: which issues have risen or fallen in importance? When and in relation to what issues have there been policy 'punctuations'? How stable is the Australian policy agenda? How fragmented is the policy agenda? We find evidence of a number of policy punctuations and one turning-point: the election of the Whitlam government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Debates about governance and the relationship between governance and government have focused upon markets, hierarchies and networks as principal modes of governance. In this paper we argue that persuasion constitutes a further and distinctive mode of governance, albeit one which interpenetrates other modes of governance. In order to assess the nature, limitations and scope of persuasion and the complex relationships between markets, hierarchies, networks on the one hand and persuasion on the other, we interpret persuasion through the prism of two theoretical perspectives on governance. We argue that the society-centred perspective usefully draws our attention to the role played by non-state actors in the exercise of governance through persuasion but that a state-centric relational account can help us to better understand important facets of persuasion as a mode of governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses internships within the academic field of political science. The author focuses on the benefits of creating internship schemes and challenges related to establishing and sustaining internships. The effect of internships on social mobility and in bridging the gap between work and study is noted. Several political science programs are briefly described at institutions such as the University of Adelaide, the University of New South Wales, and Queensland University. Emphasis is given to the idea of internships helping students to find employment and practical applications for the academic study of politics.

Following Green and Shapiro's critique, debate about the value of rational choice theory has focused upon the question of its relationship to what we call ‘external’, largely quantitative, empirical evidence. We argue that what is most striking about rational choice theory is, however, its neglect of interpretive evidence. Our survey of 570 articles, published in the American Political Science Review and the American Journal of Political Science between 1984 and 2005 employing rational choice theory, revealed that only 139 made even the most cursory use of interpretive evidence. Does this matter? We argue that the absence of interpretive evidence undermines rational choice's explanatory credentials. However, we also argue that the admission of interpretive evidence risks rendering redundant the rational choice element of any explanation. This is the rock and the hard place between which rational choice is caught. In the final part of the article we distinguish those cases where rational choice may prove useful, namely those circumstances in which interpretive evidence either cannot be relied upon or does not subsume that which an explanation is intended to achieve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Government and governance are frequently treated as synonyms. Governing is what governments do in formulating and implementing policies. A burgeoning political science literature uses the term governance in a different way to describe the growing tendency of governments to govern in partnership with a range of non-state actors and, as a purported consequence, the marginalization of governments within policymaking processes. Here, some writers go so far as to talk about 'governance without government'. In a forthcoming book, Rethinking Governance: Bringing the State Back In, Stephen Bell and I argue that this dominant 'society-centred' perspective on governance is flawed. In our view whilst governments are indeed now more likely to forge relationships with a larger range of non-state actors, they nevertheless remain the central players in governance arrangements. Indeed we argue that governments have been strengthened through the relationships they have developed. This article reviews some of the extant literature on governance and specifies the basic terms of our 'state-centric relational' approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many recent reports on the UK parliament have paid tribute to the House of Commons' Select Committees. Select Committees have limited formal powers. But as a rare source of 'unbiased information, rational debate, and constructive ideas', ministers are nevertheless said to heed their advice routinely. The evidence used to support expressions of this argument is, however, largely anecdotal. This paper offers a more formal assessment of the influence of the Education and Skills Committee through a mixture of proxy empirical measures of influence and interviews with committee members, ministers and officials. These indicators do not constitute a flawless measure of committee influence. They can, however, help progress the existing debate on committee influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an ongoing debate about whether and how the existence of policy networks can be used to explain policy outcomes. Making use of the concept of priming, it is argued here that network structures create differential opportunities for interest groups to persuade decision makers to act in particular ways. In conditions of uncertainty where there is a pressure to take immediate decisions, priming can help us to understand why some groups are more persuasive than others. This argument is developed against the backdrop of a particular puzzle: the British government's refusal to use emergency vaccination during the outbreak of foot and mouth disease in 2001. This decision is routinely accounted for in terms of the bargaining strength of the National Farmers Union. Against this it is argued that farmers' influence over government policy ought to be explained primarily in terms of the way they were able to prime particular arguments and so help persuade the government to act in particular ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first part of this article develops a critique of Anthony Downs’ An Economic Theory of Democracy and, more generally, of rational choice theories of party competition. Drawing on and adapting Joseph Schumpeter's critique of general equilibrium theory, it is argued that the use of the equilibrium method within rational choice theory precludes the analysis of policy innovation. Having developed this theoretical argument, the second part of the article offers a ‘Schumpeterian’ account of the dynamics of British electoral competition between 1950 and 2005. Drawing on an analysis of 1,984 policy commitments within Conservative, Labour and Liberal general election manifestos, the fate of 758 policy innovations is tracked. Policy innovation, it is argued, generates an ongoing process of divergence and convergence between the political parties very different to that predicted within rational choice equilibrium analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Downs’ median voter theorem parties can only increase their vote by changing their policies and moving towards the electoral centre ground. This theorem has been used to sustain a particular and, I will argue, one-sided interpretation of New Labour's actions and political trajectory. There is more to An Economic Theory of Democracy than the median voter theorem. Downs argues that voters and parties operate in conditions of uncertainty and that this gives parties the opportunity to persuade voters to revise their beliefs. Parties can win elections not only by changing their policies but by changing voters’ minds. Downs’ arguments about persuasion can be used to generate an alternative and very different interpretation of New Labour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New Labour's political development has been punctuated by the appearance, endless repetition and eventual disappearance of a series of catch-phrases: 'stakeholding', 'the third way' and 'social exclusion' and, more recently, 'partnership', 'joined-up' governance and the 'opportunity society'. In 2004 the Prime Minister began to talk about the need to promote choice. This article looks ahead to a possible third term in office for New Labour by looking at the concept of choice. It examines the similarities and important differences between Blair's arguments about choice and those offered by the Conservatives. It looks at the ways in which the general principle of promoting choice has so far been spelled out in specific policy terms within health and education and at the ways in which Blair's choice agenda clashes with that favoured by Gordon Brown and the Treasury. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public policy continued to happen during 2003, but for large parts of the time relatively few people seemed to notice: this was a year in which Iraq and the search for weapons of mass destruction grabbed the headlines and public policy was largely relegated to the sidelines. Yet important policy developments occurred. A White Paper on higher education was published in January 2003 proposing wider access to universities for those from poorer backgrounds and the introduction of top-up fees. A Health and Social Care Bill providing for the creation of foundation hospitals was pushed through the House of Commons in May 2003. Meanwhile, further measures deigned to curb anti-social behaviour were introduced and a debate about national identity cards stirred. The article examines these developments in a broader context and then briefly assesses the state of Conservative policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The foundations of the government's second term were formally laid in July 2002 with the completion of the Treasury's Spending Review, Opportunity and Security for All. This sets out departments' spending limits and performance targets for the next four years. Given the likely determination of the Treasury in general and of the current Chancellor in particular not to countenance any revisions to it, the Spending Review is likely to set the basic parameters of public policy up to the next general election. This article reviews some of the key provisions of the Spending Review as they relate to the overall level of public expenditure and to expenditure on and performance targets for health, education and transport. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the public policy in Great Britain. Review of the second-term policy agenda of the Labour Party; Priority of the government on public policy reforms in health and education; Summary on the objectives and specific measures on the reform process.

Discusses the progress made by the British government, in terms of public policy-making, in 1998-99 against the `early pledges' made by New Labor. Status of welfare reforms; Government efforts to improve the education sector; Modernization of the healthcare system; State of the economy.

Discusses the role of Thatcherism and barriers to entry in the economics of Austria. Merits and meaning of the market process; Barriers to entry to its economic market; Conclusion.

Examines the origin of the term rent seeking. Brief account of Gordon Tullock's original model of rent seeking; Characteristics of the concept of rent seeking; Reasons why rent seeking is pernicious; Construction of the epistemological critique of rent seeking.

Discusses pledges and progress in British government policies governing various sectors in 1997-1998. Health; Welfare; Education; Law and order; Economy.

Focuses on the success of the Mondragon group's co-operative ULGOR as an argument against critiques of co-operatives and market socialism. Distinguishing of two different forms of entrepreneurship; Political feasibility of market socialism; Achievement of market socialism through the gradual displacement of capitalist firms.

Transaction cost economics is used to defend and develop policy network theory. Networks, like markets and hierarchies, are a form of governance structure. As one form of network, policy communities develop and survive because they reduce transaction costs that would otherwise threaten the exchange of resources between government and pressure groups. Policy communities alter outcomes and should be an important part of the explanation of public policy. Whilst of general relevance, the argument is illustrated with particular reference to the frequently hostile but ultimately successful negotiations between the British Medical Association and the Ministry of Health prior to the creation of the National Health Service in 1948. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the relationship between the public choice description of social processes and the normative conclusion drawn for them. Information on rational choice socialism and political theory.

An introduction is presented in which the authors discuss changes involving the journal which include the periodical's move to Sheffield, England, and it mentions the outgoing editors Vivien Lowndes and Mark Wenman, Managing Editor Rene Bailey, and newly hired editorial board members.