While it has become accepted that norms can act in institution-like ways, a highly valued norm that has not been examined is free speech. Can free speech be conceptualised as acting in institution-like ways? If it can, what does this illuminate about processes of policy change? I analyse policy change between 2001 and 2011 in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, a period during which significant new limits were introduced on free speech in relation to national security. In addition to showing how free speech acted in institution-like ways, the analysis suggests three implications: norms can both act in institution-like ways and be subject to change in interaction with other institutions; a broad, cultural level institution can mask policy change at the narrow, rule-based level even where the latter contradicts the former; and complexity and variation in speech regulation can be understood as consequences of the to-be-expected variability in the institutionalisation of a norm.

To better understand the impact of deliberations during participatory policymaking events, we introduce and explore the concept of group proximity. An example of such events is citizens’ summits, during which many parallel groups deliberate on solutions for a policy issue. At the summit that was studied, each group followed a value deliberation process with the aim to increase mutual understanding among participants. They were asked to rank the solutions in their order of preference before and after the deliberation. From these rankings, group proximity can be calculated with a rank correlation, enabling a precise comparison of participants’ preferences in each deliberative group. High group proximity indicates very similar rankings in a deliberative group, while low group proximity demonstrates the opposite. Comparing group proximity of the before and after rankings shows if a group ranked convergent, unchanged or divergent. This measure allows for a quantitative analysis of early-stage public policymaking processes.

Childcare policies have become an important element of social investment reforms, but in most countries access to childcare has remained socially unequal. Some studies have suggested that a trend towards more gender egalitarian work–family attitudes has facilitated the expansion of childcare provision. Yet, we know little about the repercussions of an unequal expansion of childcare provision on public attitudes towards the work–family nexus. Building on multilevel models of 18 European countries and two waves of the International Social Survey Programme, this analysis examines the effects of an unequal childcare expansion on attitudes towards maternal employment. The results reveal that individuals with lower income remain more skeptical of maternal employment when childcare provision is highly unequal. The unequally distributed benefits of an expansion of childcare provision contribute to a divergence of attitudes across socio-economic groups, which might create a more difficult political terrain for the implementation of expansive social investment reforms.

Despite widespread acknowledgement of the dangers of selective subsidisation, government support to business remains common practice. Looking at State aid allocations in the European Union, the article explores why some countries grant more aid than others. Scholarship has failed to address this issue in a comprehensive manner, focusing either on the responsiveness of governments to voters’ preferences or on the use of subsidies as a way to ensure the political survival of the incumbent. Using the lens of distributive politics, this article proposes a more comprehensive account of State aid politics that joins these two perspectives. By means of time-series cross-section regression analysis, it tests how aid allocation depends on the attainment of policy goals (namely correction of market failures), electoral pragmatism and responsibility towards international commitments. The results show that politicians are indeed electorally pragmatic, but not necessarily responsive, due to institutional constraints and international commitments.

How much do politics and politically sensitive policy choices matter for sovereign credit ratings? We contend that while policy is consistently important for rating decisions, attention to politics varies with perceived uncertainty. Quantitatively analysing the text of 635 sovereign rating reports issued by Standard and Poor’s (S&P) between 1999 and 2012 for 40 European countries, we find that S&P scrutinises policy with similar intensity across countries, but political scrutiny was less intense in developed countries and prospective European Union members (categories formerly associated with lower uncertainty) than in emerging countries until the crisis dispelled illusions of lower uncertainty in these categories. Our findings nuance the common notion that financial market actors allow countries perceived to belong to low-risk categories more “room-to-move” in their political and policy choices, by showing that in rating decisions such permissiveness only applied to politics – but not to policy – and it ended with the global financial crisis.

We examine unequal outcomes in the implementation of India’s national rural electrification program in Uttar Pradesh. We ask two questions: (1) to what extent did Dalits, the lowest group in India’s caste hierarchy, receive less attention when the state electrified rural communities? (2) Was BSP, the state’s Dalit party, able to reduce this inequality? Using data from a hundred thousand villages, we provide robust evidence for unequal outcomes. Villages inhabited solely by Dalits were 20 percentage points less likely to be covered by the program than villages without any Dalits. Moreover, a regression discontinuity analysis shows that the electoral success of BSP failed to reduce such differences. These results highlight the magnitude and persistence of caste inequality in the implementation of democratic public policy, despite political representation.

Policy is ostensibly crafted upon an overarching notion of rationality, in the form of rules, roles and designs. However, sometimes policy deviates from formal templates and seems to be guided by a different governing ethic. Rather than categorising these as policy anomalies, we can understand them as the workings of what we will refer to as a relational model of policy. The relational model describes how policy outcomes emerge from the working and reworking of relationships among policy actors. We define relationality and develop its use in policy research. While the relational can be depicted as an alternative model for policy (e.g., Confucian versus Weberian), it is more accurate to understand it as a system that complements conventional policy regimes. To illustrate the concept, we examine examples from policymaking in China. We end with a discussion of how relationality should be a general condition that should be applicable to many, if not all, policy situations.

Competition in the US Congress has been characterised along a single, left-right ideological dimension. We challenge this characterisation by showing that the content of legislation has far more predictive power than alternative measures, most notably legislators’ ideological positions derived from scaling roll call votes. Using a machine learning approach, we identify a topic model for final passage votes in the 111th through the 113th House of Representatives and conduct out-of-sample tests to evaluate the predictive power of bill topics relative to other measures. We find that bill topics and congressional committees are important for predicting roll call votes but that other variables, including member ideology, lack predictive power. These findings raise serious doubts about the claim that congressional politics can be boiled down to competition along a single left-right continuum and shed new light on the debate about levels of polarisation in Congress.