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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 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]

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]

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]

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]

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]