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The paper deals with deriving an appropriate theoretical approach to central government fiscal policy making towards territorial units. Using the example of 1979-1999 fiscal policy making in the United Kingdom, the paper attempts to establish a model for fiscal analysis of centre-periphery relations which is time- and place-specific yet flexible to modify it to the specific governmental arrangements and political realities of other nations. Using elements of structural and public choice approaches, the paper asserts that academic conclusions on fiscal allocations should focus on the central government interests rather than mainly or exclusively on territorial demands. In the British context in the period discussed, the priorities of a Prime-Minister-Chancellor ?axis? are determined to be closest to the priorities of the central government at large, while the continuously shifting ordering of government priorities is determined to be based on some specific features of public policies, such as the policy?s relevance to the government support groups, the policy?s electoral and political visibility, the policy?s convenience for the central government and the ideas and individuals pursuing those ideas present in a specific public policy area. The paper has substantial theoretical significance in that it goes beyond evaluation of specific fiscal arrangements to discern the factors most relevant to the analysis of public policies at large and fiscal policies in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ‘New Labour’ Party came into office in 1997 committed to ‘modernise’, among other institutions, UK local government. A ‘flagship’ policy in its modernisation agenda was to replace the traditional committee system with, for the first time in the UK, executive-based local government, headed preferably by directly elected executive mayors. The first section of this paper outlines the origins of this mayoral policy, its legislative embodiment in the Local Government Act 2000, and its implementation. It outlines the three executive models that constituted the restricted choice available to most local authorities and the consultations that councils were required to undertake, including the statutory referendums required prior to the introduction of a directly elected mayor. It concludes with the recent election of the first eight of these English mayors and the political embarrassment that several of the elections produced for the Government. The second main section of the paper reviews these events with reference to the main programme theme of APSA 2002: the contribution (or lack of it) of political science research to policy development. Its conclusion is that two obvious opportunities for lesson-drawing - learning from experience in other countries, including the US, and learning through experimentation and the piloting of different executive models in selected UK authorities - were largely ignored, and that this resistance to lesson-drawing has been at least one of the major reasons for the low and generally negative impact of the Government’s mayoral policy to date. As for the rhetorical question in the sub-title, there was a moment when it looked possible that the chance injection of a ‘Giuliani factor’ following the events of 9/11 might stimulate public interest and acceptance of the idea of elected mayors … but it didn’t! [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Work exploring the relationship between public opinion and public policy over time has largely been restricted to the US. A wider application of this line of research can provide valuable insights into how representation varies across political systems, however. This paper takes a first step in this direction using a new body of data on public opinion and government spending in the UK. The analyses reveal that the British public appears to notice and respond (thermostatically) to changes in public spending in particular domains, even more so than in the US. At the same time, the magnitude and structure of UK policymakers' response to public preferences is less pronounced and more general. The findings are suggestive about the structuring role of institutions on opinion representation across countries. Check author’s web site for an updated version of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A large and growing body of research demonstrates a correspondence between public opinion and policy behavior. Almost all of this research has focused on the US, however. Do similar patterns obtain in other countries? Or is the US unique? This paper represents one step towards answering these questions. We extend previous research on the dynamics of spending preferences and budgetary policy in the US, using comparable longitudinal measures of public preferences and government spending in the US, UK, and Canada. The nature and magnitude of opinion-policy connections vary across both policy functions and countries. We explore this variance here, and suggest several possible explanations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper problematizes the path dependency approach. Unlike the accounts of neo-institutionalists and power theorists where causal arrows run from the state and dominant interests or from structural determinants, our explanation features more complex forms of political, strategic and symbolic interaction. Our approach combines insights gleaned from the public policy paradigm shift literature with feminist inspired analyses of the state and social movement organizing. We outline the Canadian and British governments’ politicization of new problems (e.g., social inclusion, child poverty) and the policy innovations and new institutions that go with them. In our view, this takes place in a Third Way context and reflects the materialization of a new "social investment state." However, we argue that a wider range of political players than is commonly acknowledged has helped to promote and even produce these new developments. Thus, we examine the increasing reliance on different actors and discourses to legitimate such measures. These diverse actors, through their multiple socio-political interactions, are implicated in what we identify as a child-centred strategy of welfare reform. Taken together, all this amounts to much more than states behaving as usual and may add up to a markedly different citizenship regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines homogeneity and heterogeneity in preferences for public policy, across income and education levels and party identification, and across policy domains in the US, UK and Canada. Do preferences differ across segments of the public at particular points in time? What about over time - do we observe a uniform swing across different groups (parallel publics), or does the flow of opinion differ across party, income, and education? Our data on public preferences for government spending show cross-sectional heterogeneity across sub-aggregates, but very high levels of over-time homogeneity in trends across subgroups. The structure of preference change across subgroups is fairly similar; most notably, thermostatic responsiveness to policy holds generally across the subgroups. This is especially true for broad domestic aggregates of opinion and policy. There still are some differences in feedback, particularly across education levels, as the highly educated are significantly more responsive to spending change over time. People with low and middling levels of education still do change their preferences for spending in response to what policymakers do, just to a lesser extent, at least in certain policy domains. This fits with the large and growing literature that demonstrates real differences owing to information levels. There also are significant differences across partisan subgroupings in various domains. The implications of these findings are considered in the concluding section. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyze the conditions that lead to the political power position of business by developing a signaling model of corporate lobbying in democratic capitalist societies. Abandoning the traditional dichotomy of structural economic determinants versus business’ political action, the model predicts under which conditions elected political decisionmakers modify their policy pledges to accommodate business’ political preferences, and when they take their chances and override business’ lobbying messages. Our results show that the structural power of business over public policy is contingent on three variables: the relative size of the reputation constraints of business in relation to the costs of lobbying, the ratio of the policymaker’s reputation constraints from pre-election policy commitments to the electoral costs from adverse economic effects, and the likelihood that the policy in question has negative electoral consequences on the side of the policymaker. The model is evaluated in the context of qualitative data from case studies of business lobbying on tax reform and environmental and financial services regulation in Britain and Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]