bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The Impact of Regime Change on Public Policy: The Case of Spain
Authors: Gunther Richard 
Published: November 2008

ABSTRACTDoes political regime matter? Parallel analyses of Spanish public expenditure and taxation policies under the authoritarian Franco regime and in the current democracy, as well as of decision-making processes under both regimes, based upon extensive in-depth interviews with relevant government officials from 1974 to 1996, indicate that political regime characteristics can have a profound impact on both policy processes and outputs. Ruling out a ‘socioeconomic’ explanation, the author concludes that striking aberrations in state spending and taxation policies in the early 1970s were systematic products of unusual features of Franquist policy-making processes, which were directly linked to the authoritarian nature of the regime itself. Subsequently, democratization has been accompanied by dramatic changes in both policy processes and outputs.
Labour and Citizenship: The Development of Welfare State Regimes
Authors: Boreham Paul , Hall Richard , Leet Martin 
Published: November 2008

ABSTRACTThis paper is concerned with the political determinants of the significantly different rates of welfare expenditure which characterise advanced capitalist countries. The research concentrates on the connections between the organization and mobilization of a key political actor pursing social wage benefits – the labour movement – and different levels across nations of welfare provision, including expenditure on health, social security consumption expenditure and social security transfers. The paper uses disaggregated, pooled time series data on welfare provision in 15 OECD countries, 1974–1988, to test the association between more comprehensive welfare state regimes and state structures that facilitate the intervention of organized labour movements in the policy process.
Evaluating the Advocacy Coalition Framework
Authors: Jenkins-Smith Hank C. , Sabatier Paul A. 
Published: November 2008

ABSTRACTThe Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) was developed to provide a causal theory of the policy process which would serve as one of several alternatives to the familiar stages heuristic, with its recognized limitations. This paper first summarizes the central features of the ACF, including a set of underlying assumptions and specific hypotheses. We next review the implications for the framework of six case studies by various authors dealing with Canadian education and with American transportation, telecommunications, water, environmental, and energy policy. While generally supportive of the ACF, the case studies also suggest several revisions.
Center–Local Linkages: The Impact of Policy Planning Systems
Authors: Skelcher Chris , Hinnings Bob , Leach Steve , Ranson Stewart 
Published: November 2008

AbstractThis paper examines policy planning systems in British central-local government relations, and in particular the formal, structured relationship in the local transport policy sector, as a means of exploring the impact in intergovernmental relations of the form of linkage between institutions. This impact is analysed in terms of central government's ability to use the planning system to promote policy processes and promote and regulate policy content in the locality. The use of specific and block grants by central government as a potential instrument of control in relation to policy planning systems is discussed. An examination of limiting cases reveals the importance of local resources in minimising central government influence through the policy planning system, and suggests that institutions will seek to restructure the form of linkage or underlying resources when they see themselves loosing advantage to others.
East-West Migration and the Czech Republic
Authors: Wallace Claire , Palyanitsya Andrii 
Published: November 2008

ABSTRACTThe fall of the Berlin Wall led to fears of an influx of migrants from Eastern Europe. So far this ‘flood’ has not arrived, but new patterns of migration from East to West are emerging. In this paper we explore patterns of migration in the Czech Republic which has emerged as part of a ‘buffer zone’ between East and West Europe. We develop a preliminary typology of types of migration and some of the factors which govern migration in the Czech Republic by drawing upon more than 200 in-depth interviews with migrants in their own languages. Our conclusion is that the Czech Republic has become a ‘transit’ zone of migration. However, it is also increasingly a destination country in its own right, something which has hitherto received little attention in studies of East-West migration.
Sterile Debates and Dubious Generalisations: European Integration Theory Tested by Telecommunications and Electricity
Authors: Schmidt Susanne K. 
Published: November 2008

ABSTRACTAnalyses of European integration processes are still dominated by the dichotomous debate between intergovernmentalism and suprana-tionalism. Sides are often taken in this debate based on very case-specific empirical findings. An analysis of two cases, European telecommunications and electricity policy, illustrates how misleading such generalisations can be. The former case is often used to support supranational claims, while the latter highlights the importance of intergovernmental vetos. However, further analysis reveals the very parallel supranational policy approach of the European Commission to both sectors and the resulting weakness of the dominant interpretation. An analysis using a multilevel governance approach to European integration can avoid these difficulties.
Sustainability: Demands on Policy
Authors: Dovers Stephen R. 
Published: November 2008

ABSTRACTIn recent years, issues of environment and human development have been gathered together under the integrative framework of sustainability (sustainable development), creating unprecedented demands on policy. Major policy processes have been constructed and are producing new and supposedly far reaching agreements, policies and strategies. However palatable politically, the likelihood of these leading to significant positive changes in the environment or human use of it, however, is questionable. This situation is sketched, using the Australian setting as an example. The article then establishes in detail the problem attributes particular to sustainability, and argues the crucial proposition that this policy field is different from others in both kind and degree. Some implications of this for policy analysis and prescription are noted.
Social Insurance as an Efficiency Device
Authors: Barr Nicholas 
Published: November 2008

ABSTRACTIrrespective of views about equity, social insurance has a major efficiency role. Because of technical problems in private markets, neither unemployment nor inflation are risks against which private markets can supply actuarial insurance, and medical insurance cannot cover all risks for all types of individual. The existence of social insurance is therefore supported on the grounds that it does things which private, actuarial insurance would either not do at all or would do inefficiently.
Popular versus Elite Views of Privatization: The Case of Britain
Authors: McAllister Ian , Studlar Donley T. 
Published: November 2008

ABSTRACTPrivatization is an idea that is popular among political elites throughout the advanced industrial world. In Britain, it has been the centrepiece of Margaret Thatcher's three Conservative governments, reflected in the sale of publicly-owned industries to the private sector and in the sale of council houses to their tenants. Using survey data, this article tests two models to account for privatization policy. The median voter model argues that it was a policy demanded and initiated by voters, while the elite interests model argues that it stemmed from the government and that little popular demand existed for it. The evidence confirms the elite interests model and shows that public opinion has generally accepted the status quo on the public ownership of industry. In addition, the Conservatives have made modest electoral gains from privatization. However, voters are not consistent in their views about privatizating particular industries, implying the Conservatives may lose votes with future privatization.
Fighting Political Terrorism by Refusing Recognition: A Critique of Frey's Proposal
Authors: Friedland Nehemia 
Published: November 2008

ABSTRACTFrey (1987) proposed a new information policy designed to lower the utility of terrorist action. The policy is predicated on the assumption that terrorists aim to draw public attention to their cause. Therefore, the terrorists' rewards can be reduced by refraining from attributing a particular terrorist act to any one group. Faced with diminished rewards, terrorists are likely to give up violent action or to resort to tactics that put them in greater jeopardy. The present article offers a thorough analysis of Frey's proposal. It shows that the proposal derives from a too limited view of the terrorist strategy and from unrealistic assumptions about the extent to which democratic governments can control the sources and the dissemination of information. A judgment of Frey's proposal according to criteria drawn from a more comprehensive view of the terrorist strategy leads to the conclusion that the proposed policy is both impractical and counterproductive.
Interpreting the unexpected: the case of AIDS policy making in Britain
Authors: Day Patricia , Klein Rudolf 
Published: November 2008

ABSTRACTThis paper analyses the reactions of a government faced with an unpredictable and unexpected crisis with possible catastrophic long-term effects: the AIDS epidemic in the United Kingdom in the 1980s. First, the AIDS epidemic is defined as a case study of government forced to cope with uncertainty, moral ambiguity and the knowledge that there are no solutions, only ways of limiting the damage. Second, it examines the evolution of policy of British ministers, who initially preferred to ignore evidence of AIDS but were forced to act by signals threatening a popular backlash. They did so by creating a programme of action based on the advice and values of the medical profession and public health experts. The conclusion argues that this kind of policy response may be generalisable. When societies are faced with problems that do not appear to be soluble but which may imperil social cohesion they seek to create an elite consensus to treat them as technical matters, so insulating the policy process from possible disruptive populist pressures.
Management Accountability: The Signals sent by Auditing and Evaluation
Authors: Rist Ray C. 
Published: November 2008

ABSTRACTAuditing and Evaluation are two strategies which governments may use to ascertain if existing policies and programs are being administered as they ought. They provide critical information by which to determine the economy, efficiency, and effectiveness of government action and are the basis for holding accountable those responsible for the government policies and programs. The analysis compares the strengths and weaknesses of auditing and evaluation as means of monitoring accountability. Three types of accountability are discussed. Auditing makes its strongest contributing to managerial accountability through a focus on fiscal or regulatory issues.
Social Steering and Household Strategies: the macropolitics and the microsociology of welfare states
Authors: Therborn Göran 
Published: November 2008

ABSTRACTAn analytical perspective for grasping how welfare states relate to the ordinary life-pursuits of their population and how the latter relates to the welfare state is needed. What welfare states do is distinguished into social administration, social education, social reform, and social steering. Steering reaches furthest into people's lives. As such it is problematic both to integrative and aggregative theories of democracy; it can also include the possibility of calling forth more signals from the population than less ambitious democratic policies. A systematic overview of aggregate Swedish household data the major activities of households provides a basis for analysing how the population is affected by and affects the welfare state. The state appears as an important provider of work, housing, childcare, and leisure; the most effective signals from households to the state come forward when public provision and subsidy have created tight markets. From the household perspective, signals to government through individual action of various sorts, direct or mediated, appear crucial even in very organized Sweden.
The Transformation to the Market: At High Cost, Often with Long Lags, and Not Without Question Marks
Authors: Winiecki Jan 
Published: November 2008

ABSTRACTThe shift from a command economy to a market economy is not only a question of following appropriate macro-economic policies but also a matter of instilling a market ethic in the minds of people who had been socialized and rewarded in a non-market command economy. In that system, many concentrated on technical rules of survival. The lumpenproletariat in favoured industries were rewarded even when they shirked or pilfered from state enterprises. The ethics of the lumpenintelligentsia reflected Communist party values, as professional. associations were under party control. The maintenance of such attitudes creates substantial resistance to the transformation of the economy, because a Weberian protestant ethic is lacking. Transition does occur, but the legacy of the old ethic imposes high transaction costs, inefficiencies and inhibits forward direct investment.
Welfare Over Time: Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism in Panel Perspective
Authors: Headey Bruce , Goodin Robert E. , Muffels Ruud , Dirven Henk-Jan 
Published: November 2008

ABSTRACTIn this paper we analyse the effects, over time, of the liberal (US), corporatist (German) and social democratic (Dutch) welfare states on poverty, inequality and income redistribution 1985–89. Unlike previous international comparisons relying on static frameworks and cross-sectional data, we use panel data from the Dutch Socio-Economic Panel (SEP), the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), and the American Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) — all of which have large samples (15,000+ respondents) and all of which have been running for fully a decade — to compare welfare state performance over one and five years. We find that both the corporatist (German) and especially the social democratic (Dutch) welfare states redistribute income substantially to reduce poverty and inequality, and that in both cases these effects are substantially greater over five years than one. In the social democratic (Dutch) regime very few people have incomes which, taking a five year average, put them below the poverty line. The corporatist (German) regime also turns out to be much more redistributive over five years than would ordinarily be expected. The liberal (US) welfare state, in contrast, is not only much less redistributive on a one-year basis but also no more so over five years than one. There is, however, evidence of efficiency losses in the more ‘generous’ social democratic welfare state, in that fewer people appear to escape poverty through labour markets than in the liberal welfare regime.
From London to Bretton Woods; Sources of Change in Bargaining Strategies and Outcomes
Authors: Odell John S. 
Published: November 2008

ABSTRACTOur most prominent theories of international bargaining miss elements essential for understanding national bargaining strategies and international outcomes. In particular they lack sufficient mechanisms of change over time. A focused contrast between the London economic and monetary conference of 1933 and the Bretton Woods conference of 1944 suggests three new dynamic hypotheses. (1) Changes, especially extreme ones, in national market conditions are likely to shift the state's bargaining strategy sharply even if its relative international position has not changed. A slump will produce a more exploitative strategy, while a boom will encourage either a passive or an expansive strategy. (2) Painful national experience running contrary to prevailing policy ideas is likely to discredit those ideas among politicians and officials, turn them toward alternative doctrines, and lead to corresponding strategy changes. The ideas most likely to spread politically are ones which had predicted the currrent problem, and those whose advocates mount the most sophisticated publicity campaign. (3) International technical disagreement can pose a decisive impediment to intergovernmental agreement, while in some conditions at least technical convergence facilitates official agreement.
Devaluation and Domestic Politics in Developing Countries: Indonesia in 1978
Authors: Woo Wing Thye 
Published: November 2008

ABSTRACTDevaluations are traumatic events. The historical record shows that a devaluation doubles the probability that a ruling group would be replaced and triples the likelihood that the Minister of Finance would be relieved. Yet in November 1978, Indonesia devalued its currency by 50 percent when observers were not predicting a balance of payments crisis in the near future. The devaluation was undertaken to effect an income transfer to the countryside and the Outer Islands, the centers of traditional agricultural export industries. Since this action contradicts the logic of the dominant models of the Indonesian state, we propose that authoritarian corporatism is a more accurate characterization of the state-society relationship. The economic conditions in the countryside and Outer Islands are important to policy makers because the former has a long history of agrarian radicalism and the latter a history of secessions.
Obstacles to International Macroeconomic Policy Coordination
Authors: Frankel Jeffrey A. 
Published: November 2008

ABSTRACTThis paper considers the effects of uncertainty on the magnitude of prospective welfare gains from international macroeconomic policy coordination. Three different sources of uncertainty are studied: the initial state of the economy; the correct welfare weights to be assigned to policy targets; and the impact on the economy that economic models attribute to policy changes. Simulation results show that uncertainty about any of the three reduces the likely gains from coordination and creates the possibility of negative effects. The gains from improved economic knowledge can be quite substantial in relation to the gains from coordination. This suggests that the development and exchange of economic information can be an important function of international cooperation.
Convergence with divergence: A sound change in Vernacular Black English
Authors: Denning Keith 
Published: November 2008

ABSTRACTSome recent research proposes that changes observed in the morphology and syntax of Vernacular Black English (VBE), combined with the failure of VBE to participate in regional changes in the pronunciation of white speech, constitutes evidence for the divergence of VBE from white and standard varieties. The present article presents quantitative evidence for a change in VBE which appears to involve increasing similarity between VBE and other varieties: a marked tendency toward higher, fronter realizations of the final /i/ in words like happy in the speech of younger blacks. Evidence for the character of the change comes from English dialectology, historical phonology, and research conducted by the author on the speech of residents of East Palo Alto, California. It is proposed that whereas black and white varieties may remain distinct, undergoing some changes separately, this need not be regarded as absolute divergence. Distinct varieties in contact may, for complex sociological and linguistic reasons, be expected more realistically to appear to diverge and converge simultaneously.
The child as linguistic historian
Authors: Labov William 
Published: November 2008

ABSTRACTThough the diachronic dimension of linguistic variation is often identified with linguistic change, many stable linguistic variables with no synchronic motivation show historical continuity with little change over long periods of time. Children acquire at an early age historically transmitted constraints on variables that appear to have no communicative significance, such as the grammatical conditioning of (ing) in English. Studies of (td) and (ing) in King of Prussia families show that children have matched their parents' patterns of variation by age 7, before many categorical phonological and grammatical rules are established. Some dialect-specific and socially marked constraints are acquired before constraints with general articulatory motivation. Constraints on (td) appear in the speech of a 4-year-old, but there is no evidence in the productions of a 2-year-old child in the same family.
Sex, attitudes, and the assibilation of /r/ among young people in San Luis Potosí, Mexico
Authors: Rissel Dorothy A. 
Published: November 2008

ABSTRACTThis article analyzes the assibilation of /r/ among young people in San Luis Potosí, Mexico, in light of previous research on women's speech in language change. It is demonstrated that assibilation, an innovation known to have first appeared in the speech of women of the middle and upper social echelons, is closely associated with sex, sociocultural level, and attitude toward traditional male and female roles. These attitudes are suggested as a factor that plays an important role in the dynamics of the change, showing opposite effects among young men and women. That is, young men with traditional attitudes assibilate least, whereas young women with traditional attitudes assibilate most frequently. Parallels between this study and one of a similar innovation in Argentinian Spanish suggest a generalized pattern of change in which variables introduced by women of the middle and upper social echelons become markers of gender display in the lower classes, where they grow to be favored by women and avoided by men. The discovery of the role of attitude toward traditional sex roles in this pattern of change is unique to the present study.
Deletion as an indicator of SVO → SOV shift
Authors: Clements J. Clancy 
Published: November 2008

ABSTRACTThe Indo-Portuguese (IP) creoles display a well-known and uniform manner of marking the simple past and present continuous with the preposed particlesja(<Ptg.já‘already’) andtE(<Ptg.esta‘is’), respectively. Moreover,n3(<Ptg.no‘in the’) andd3(<Ptg.de‘of, from’ ordo‘of, from the’) are typically used as prepositions to express goal or location. Those creoles with Neoaryan adstrat languages, of which Korlai Creole Portuguese (KP) is one, theoretically possess the option of deleting these markers or prepositions if they are contextually or otherwise redundant. Using data from several sources spanning approximately 100 years, it is shown thatja, tE, n3, andd3in KP have undergone or are undergoing gradual deletion. It is argued that this development is part of a much larger SVO → SOV shift. The status of the typological shift indicators of verb-object/complement, adposition, and adjective-noun order are shown to corroborate the findings regarding deletion.