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Studies of federal reorganization provide an incomplete perspective on its implications for intergovernmental relations and by extension the role of the states in U.S. national policy. The literature reflects persistent theoretical and practical debates over how best to characterize the U.S. federalist system. From these debates emerge normative and empirical arguments that serve to bring into focus the fundamental role of "states’ sovereignty" in influencing U.S. national public health policy and practice. This paper presents a preliminary case study of the Homeland Security Act of 2002, with particular focus on Section 505, which governs the health and human services’ components of national counter bioterrorism policy. The goal is to illustrate through the prism of theory and public administration praxis ? how the U.S. public health system exemplifies the basic tenets of collaborative federalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How and why do Korea and Japan, two prototypal developmental states, differ in responding to the challenges of informatization? By using the case of two countries’ IT venture nurturing policies, this paper argues that (1) variations in venture-nurturing policy between Japan and Korea stem from those in the preexisting developmental institutions and strategies that each pursued in their industrialization processes, and that (2) variations are also affected by the way in which historically evolved structures limit the options of political actors (decision-makers) at critical choice points or the points of disjuncture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT: The confidence in the continuous expansion of the welfare state was reversed in the last quarter of the 20th century when, in response to the economic crisis of the 1970s and increasing integration of markets, many Western nations began to reorganize their economies along neoliberal ideas. Conventional wisdom now suggests that in the new international context that favors neoliberal solutions to economic problems, the principles of social democracy cannot be sustained. The empirical evidence challenges this view. In some countries neoliberalism in economic policymaking entailed retrenchment in social policy; in others, welfare state continued to grow. This paper attempts to provide insight into the causes of this variation. Through a comparative analysis of the rise of neoliberalism in Britain and France during the 1970s and 1980s, I develop an institutionalist approach that emphasizes the domestic processes under which neoliberal policies are constituted. I argue that in both countries the rise of neoliberalism was followed a crisis triggered by large scale changes in the international system. However, the differences in the way the two countries came to define their respective crises led to a different neoliberalism in each of them. In Britain, welfare state became subject to the neoliberal solution; in France, it has not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the Federal Republic of Germany, I offer an analysis of voter behavior in federal contexts. Using data from German federal and Länder elections between 1965-2002, I establish voting patterns in state elections and their relationship to voting in federal elections. The institutional design of the German system by which electoral cycles are unsynchronized both across states and between states and federal levels allows for a particularly interesting comparative analysis. I first demonstrate that unless elections are concurrent, the party holding the chancellery systematically loses seats in state elections, and that the extent to which voters withdraw their support from the party holding the chancellery depends on the timing of the elections with respect to the federal cycle. Following these finding, I then sample particular elections and employ a micro-foundational analysis based on survey data from these elections. I show that voters engage in vertical institutional balancing, using state institutions to counterbalance the federal government. Finally, I use these insights to reinterpret the ongoing debate between the directional and proximity models of voter choice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper empirically addresses the issue of how institutional interactions within and between government and business actors can influence corporate voluntary actions toward environmental protection. Major foci are on the institutional structures that are intricately related to interactions and relations within and between government and business in the policy making process. Three types of interactions are considered: inter-business interactions; government-business interactions; and inter-government interactions. The patterns of interactions provide individual firms with learning by which corporate managers determine the degree of uncertainty and make decisions to undertake (or reject) voluntary initiatives. The paper analyzes data from the ISO 14001 survey report (2000) provided by the International Standardization Organization and the measures of institutional characteristics of 34 Democratic countries. The closer interaction within and between business sectors and government are important determinants to influence the corporate decisions to certify ISO 14001. In addition, the previous institutional capability of governments to promote environmental sustainability is crucial in terms of the diffusion of ISO 14001 certificates among potential corporate adopters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the property rights literature there are two schools of thought about the source of property rights institutions. Legal scholars and many comparativists have concentrated on rights as determined by national-level policy, where formal constitutional guarantees and rule-of-law are the key variables. Economists, on the other hand, have typically viewed property rights as emerging from voluntary interactions among economic agents isolated from the broader political and institutional context. A number of political economists and researchers in institutional analysis have begun to re-examine the foundations of property rights and specify the exact institutional mechanisms that determine a rights system. This paper adds to this literature by focusing on the costs of producing a property rights institution. It examines a property rights system as emerging from a nested enforcement game, where the costs of producing an institution is a function of the decisions of formal government institutions, implementing agents, and a community's ability to overcome local collective action problems. While it adopts the legal understanding of a right as a social institution defining relationships among individual agents, it uses the economic understanding of transaction costs and collective action theory to explain property rights variation. The paper examines property rights to forest resources among a sample of rural communities in Southern Mexico bordering a newly established national park. It uses this empirical case in the evolution of a mixed property rights system to develop a general comparative institutional model of property rights, where rights are determined by interactions among local users as well as formal political actors. It concludes by examining the implications of the model and results for understanding the diversity of property rights arrangements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A large literature in the social sciences deals with the way in which advanced democracies respond to structural economic (and social) change. We focus on processes of institutional change, and we start from the assumption that any new, or reformed, institutional set-up must be coherent. The requirement of coherence is the reason for one important aspect of the process of reform: there is competition between epistemic communities that propose different solutions to policy problems in different policy areas. This competition turns experts into ideological advocates, as experts in one area attempt to influence policies in other areas. We demonstrate the relevance of our argument through an analysis of Swedish economic and social policymaking in the post-war period. Our argument has two important implications: studying periods of transition and change is potentially more important than studying periods of equilibrium and stability, and soft variables–ideas, knowledge and norms–have effects on hard variables, such as economic performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper comments on the similarities and differences in the contemporary regulatory behavior towards smoking in eight industrial democracies. It takes as its central source of information extended case studies of Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States written by specialists for a Robert Wood Johnson supported research project on the control of tobacco use. Assessing the relevance of competing theories of public policy formation, the paper concludes that the structure of political institutions provides the best guide to differences in regulatory regimes. In particular, the suggestion is that federal regimes --as compared with unitary political structures--are more likely to have moralistic campaigns against tobacco use, with health reformers choosing more attractive settings to advance their anti-tobacco agenda. The international flow of information and regulatory strategies provides convergence in the arguments employed and strategies tried, but there are clear differences in the strength of current regulations of tobacco use among these rich democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We offer a simple model of policymaking emphasizing socialization and limits on human cognition to explicate mechanisms of change in emergent (as opposed to established) institutions. Emergent institutions are more susceptible to change, and their opponents may use frames or existing reference points to illustrate inconsistency with prevailing notions of legitimacy. Broader institutional structures and specific organizational characteristics moderate pressure for change. This perspective has novel implications for strategy and policy design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After a decade of, by and large, successful thoroughgoing reforms in several Post-communist countries, it has to be recognized that the results of change contradict certain assumptions commonly held valid in political science. The paper outlines major theoretical premises of what might be summarized as the ?impossibility theorem of holistic reform? and examines the discrepancy between theory-based expectations, on the one hand, and rather successful en-deavors of policy reform and institutional policy over the course of transition. Thorough in-stitutional changes have been implemented through demanding policy programs concerning fiscal stabilization, structural reforms and privatization. Reform governments proved apt to strategic planning as well as policy-oriented learning when they identified windows of oppor-tunity and adapted to the international environment. They secured the feasibility of the re-form packages by choosing a proper way of sequencing as well as creating pre-emptive forms of conflict resolution. In this paper, some empirical findings are confronted with the theory-based propositions. Relative to the discrepancy between theory and practice, suggestions are made concerning the validity of the skeptical theoretical assumptions. Check author’s web site for an updated version of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The focus of the paper is military organizational change. Utilizing insights from game theory, sociology and international relations, I attempt to explain the complicated decision-making process behind the creation of the West German armed forces ? the Bundeswehr. My argument focuses on non-military goals and the desire to signal ?responsibility? as important motives in designing the original institutional structure of the Bundeswehr. In order to promote West European integration, the development and maintenance of a democratic political system and regain the much-needed trust of domestic and international actors, German decision-makers sacrificed military combat effectiveness and configured their armed forces in an extremely unique (revolutionary) manner. Furthermore, in order to more thoroughly understand the dynamics behind the process, the detailed case study incorporates factors from two-levels of analysis, the domestic and international. Ultimately, the Bundeswehr performed a useful function in consolidating Germany’s post-war transition to democracy and fostering the Western orientation necessary for the Federal Republic of Germany to become the vital anchor of the European Union. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wildland fires constitute a major crisis in American environmental policy, a crisis created by a longstanding policy failure. This study explores the political processes that generated and reinforced this policy failure over time. The concepts of bounded rationality, punctuated equilibria, and self-reinforcing mechanisms are applied to study the evolution of American wildfire policy between 1905 and the present. This study finds that a self-defeating wildfire suppression policy was established in the period 1905 through 1911, and subsequently reinforced for more than six decades. This policy did not include a complementary program to counteract the steady accumulation of flammable organic materials (fuels) that occurred in many ecosystems when fires were suppressed. The resulting fuel accumulations have greatly increased the risk of damaging high-intensity wildfires in a range of American wildlands. A combination of fire suppression and fuel reduction programs will be needed to manage this risk in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the last 15 years, several reforms have been introduced in French social policy, which progressively lead to transformation of some part of the French welfare system. The paper analyses the political process through which path-breaking reforms are introduced in supposedly "frozen" welfare states. The comparison of the political dynamic that allowed these reforms to be passed show that they all share some common features at the different stages of the policy-making process. 1. Diagnosis: "Negative policy feedback". Path shifting reforms are possible when there is a common agreement that the new problem to be dealt with is due to former policies failure. 2. Elaboration: "In Opposition to past policies". New programmes, measures are elaborated in opposition to former programmes. Policy elaborators are mainly focused on creating new ways of doing that are different from former ways, instead of directly dealing with the new problem. 3. Decision: "An Ambiguous agreement" New measures are accepted by a wide range of different groups (political parties, administrations, trade unions, employers...) who agree on the new measure but for different reason and interest. They neither share a common vision of the reforms, nor the same interest in the measures. Among alternatives during the decision-taking process, the measure which is selected is the one which is able to aggregate different vision and interest. 4. Implementation: "Incremental, but cumulatively transformative" The new measures are introduced at the margin, as if it was only to fix or complement the system, but they develop so as to become very important, meaning a shift in the whole welfare state trajectory. These four characteristics of the policy process can be seen as political conditions for both the selection and the sustainability of path-breaking reforms of welfare systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper revises and amends the theoretical framework of "the new politics of the welfare state". It examines a deviant case: the partial privatization of public pensions in Germany’s frozen welfare state. After analyzing the paradox of major institutional change in a frozen welfare state, it makes suggestions to improve the three theoretical modules of the new politics framework: the theory of blame avoidance, interest group theories, and path dependence theory. Next it suggests two additional modules called institutional interference and creative opportunism. The argument is an explanation of major institutional change in frozen welfare states requires us to incorporate two additional causal forces for welfare state reform into our framework: the institutional goals and constraints embodied in the new fiscal institutions at the European level and the ideas and interests of governments. It also argues that the reform process is very different from welfare state adaptation to socioeconomic pressures: the politics of privatizing public pensions is highly conflictual and very risky, not negotiated and consensual as the politics of welfare state adaptation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decade, students of the welfare state have produced a sizable body of research on welfare state reform, the dominant thrust of which is that remarkably few systems of social protection have experienced fundamental shifts. In this paper, I question this now-conventional wisdom by reexamining the post-1970s trajectory of the American welfare state, long considered the quintessential case of policy stability in the face of conservative attack. Examining the broad framework of risk protection in health and pension policy, I argue that while public social policies have not been radically scaled back, their ability to achieve the goals embodied in their programmatic architecture has noticeably weakened, creating a growing mismatch between the risks that citizens confront and the public and private social protections they enjoy. Much of this disjuncture, it turns out, is rooted in the very institutional and political stickiness that retrenchment studies argue has protected the welfare state against radical retrenchment-stickiness that, in an era of major changes in economic and family structure, has prevented social policies from smoothly tracking evolving social risks. Yet the retrenchment scholarship remains incomplete. The view of the welfare state, path dependence, and institutional change that it embodies, as well as the types of evidence it has offered, have all obscured important ways in which welfare states are evolving, in many cases despite relative stability in policy rules. Examining these forms of policy "drift" alongside the changing risks that families confront suggests that the role of the welfare state is in fact changing quite substantially. And it suggests that these changes are in important respects an outgrowth of political struggles over social policy, not simply the consequences of exogenous social shifts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International and domestic actors have been important in postcommunist policy reform. Yet prominent theories of institutional change still tend to emphasize domestic actors, and often fail to consider the direct role of international and transnational actors in policy deliberation. This paper amends the veto players literature to include consideration of international, as well as domestic, actors. This requires an analysis of deliberation in multiple deliberative fora. It further requires consideration of the role of proposal actors, who may shape the preferences of veto actors during a deliberative process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The end of World War II is one of the great historical breaking points in European history and gives rise to the expectation that the destruction and dislocations of war and occupation would induce far-reaching changes in the social structures and the institutions of the newly emerging political system. However, in West Germany core institutions of the political system were essentially restored. This was pronouncedly the case in the country’s welfare system. Between 1945 and 1957 the institutional core of that welfare state, the social insurance system lived through tremendous challenges surprisingly unchanged in its core organizational forms. My paper argues that this resilience of institutional form is only half of the process that needs to be explained about the system’s evolution in during the twelve years after the war. The other half is that the social insurance system was transformed in the principles on which it grants benefits as well as in the overall generosity of its benefits. Explanations of this transformation do not get far when they concentrate on ?constant causes?, such as the functions that the system would fulfill once installed, or the interests of particular actors in the decision system. What is needed, instead, is a genetic explanation that pays attention to the dynamics of the development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the need for European welfare states to engage in reform that could be more or less radical, but highlights that the reform that is taking place today is in fact ?institutionally bounded? change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International regime research has pioneered a measurement concept to answer the question whether international institutions matter. Yet this approach is merely concerned with international institutions and not with performance at large. It could well be the case that international institutions are effective, but miss the overall point of making much of a contribution as compared to domestic and European actors in a particular policy domain. This paper builds on the original measurement concept for (relative) regime effectiveness and extends it to the triad regulatory domains of domestic, European, and international. By using absolute lower and upper bounds, this concept of absolute effectiveness allows for the separation of performance across the triad of national, European, and international actors and the derivation of potential cross-actor interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]