This paper seeks to explain patterns of central government control and local government discretion across nations as well as across policy areas. The argument is that central-local policy is the result of the interaction of three types of actors: ‘Expenditure advocates’, ‘expenditure guardians’, and ‘topocrats’. The argument is based on two assumptions. First, the actors are assumed to pursue self-interests – respectively, sectoral policy goals, macroeconomic control, and local autonomy. Second, the actors' abilities to pursue their self-interests are assumed to be constrained and facilitated by the structure of intergovernmental policy networks. The theoretical propositions are put to a first test in a comparative analysis of three policy areas (economic policy, health policy, and child care policy) in the three Scandinavian countries of Sweden, Norway and Denmark.

The purpose of this article is to examine the implications for welfare state retrenchment of central-local financial relations. In the post-war period, welfare state expansion has been a dominant theme in the development of central-local government relations in advanced industrial democracies. By the 1980s, however, nearly all OECD member countries had resorted to deficit financing as stagnant tax revenues combined with political pressure for increased public services. Faced with the urgent necessity of fiscal reconstruction, conservatives in advanced industrial democracies have favoured cutting public services throughout the 1990s. As always in times of retrenchment, elected officials have needed to win the goodwill of voters and interest groups for these unpopular cutbacks. There is no doubt that the politics of retrenchment is distinctively different from that of growth. Despite this new stage in the development of the welfare state, few systematic attempts have been made to analyse the impact of retrenchment politics on central-local financial arrangements. This article contributes to the new debate on comparative theories of retrenchment by analysing the impact of welfare state retrenchment in the context of Japan's recent fiscal reconstruction.

For all the day-to-day changes, the parties have actually been surprisingly faithful to their overarching ideologies. However, in no way has this stability precluded change. The main claim made in this article is that, on the contrary, in several instances it appears that the only way of keeping up ideological stability is through policy change. The kind of stability based on an ongoing adaptation and change might be the very triggering cause behind the successful opening up of a policy window. By offering a firm point of reference, ideology analysis could function as a bridge between ‘formative’ approaches – which indicate some degree of actor freedom — and ‘path dependency’ approaches – which stress deterministic structuring by institutions – and provide one of the missing links between institutional and rational choice analyses.