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This article seeks to explain cross-sectional variation in public education expenditure levels and change since 1960. Five possible explanations are located: the incremental push of programme inertia, demographic and related pressures, economic resource growth, the impact of party and the cultural impact of Roman Catholicism. A multivariate analysis demonstrates that educational expenditure is an arena in which monocausal explanations are wholly inappropriate. With the exception of programme inertia, each of the explanations is seen to have an important bearing on this aspect of the people's welfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one on the distribution of income as an indicator of the level of welfare state achievement and another on the problems for social protection as result of the development of a dualistic labor force.

In concluding a recent analysis of the conditions for trade union wage restraint, Cohn Crouch asks 'what neocorporatist unions gain for their members in exchange for restraint'?. An attempt to answer this question is made, first by examining a range of policy outcome' which may be regarded as measures of possible union gains, and, second, by analyzing the problem in terms of indexes measuring possible trade-offs between union objectives. It is suggested that an analysis in these latter terms offers a far more cogent explanation of trade union wage restraint than can be provided by looking at policy outcome measures separately. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the link between party politics and social expenditure. The major components of welfare spending for the period covering the early 1960s to middle of 1970s include education, health and public income maintenance expenditure. Party politics is a major cause of all components of welfare expenditure. Disaggregation is considered to be vital, since there is no reason to suppose that major components of spending are identified by similar factors. The theoretical reflection and the existing analysis indicate that there is likely to be a stronger connection between items of public consumption expenditure and party ideology.

The article focuses on the Left-Right ideological scale, a common way of classifying the stance of two distinct political parties in various countries. According to the author, this classification is apparent in attempting to evaluate the relationship of political parties with public policy outcomes. The Left-Right scales can be measured in terms of adherence to the party's political ideas or ideology and operate in line with the party's programs. Moreover, the article also presents the list of several parties whose primary goal is to cut-off their Left-Right ideological dimension.

The controversy about whether 'politics matters' in the determination of public policy outcomes is frequently overlaid by assumptions concerning the role of structure and agency in human affairs. However, although it is usually assumed that the debate is about the rival explanatory claims of economic structure and political choice. the studies undertaken in the public policy field are almost invariably structural in character. Explicit recognition that the debate is about political and economic structures and the linkages between them will strengthen our ability to understand the nature of policy determination in the contemporary state. This view is illustrated by discussion and re-analysis of Cameron's thesis that the structure of international trade is the major determinant of the expansion of the public economy. What we do is to look at the relationship between the international economy and a wide variety of public expenditure patterns in eighteen capitalist democracies both in the early 1960s and mid-1970s. The analysis suggests that Cameron mis-specifies the relationship between political and economic structure, and-that an important factor conditioning contemporary expenditure patterns is the way in which the emergence of modern party systems structured the opportunity for lower and middle-class participation in political life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the determinants of public and social expenditure change in the crisis of the 1970s. The author points out that differences in determinants are purely a matter of semantics, since they agree on all the relevant points of empirical interpretation. They tend to differ in the ramification of approaches to the analysis of policy outcomes. The determinants of change are a considered a legitimate object of scholarly attention. It notes that misspecification can only be avoided if the relationship between change and constant structure is always kept to the forefront of the analysis.