When and how can advocacy groups influence the diffusion of new technologies, such as wind power? We examine the relationship between two different strategies that advocacy groups can adopt: political lobbying and campaigns aimed at potential end users of the new technology. Our game-theoretic analysis shows that without the opportunity to engage in political lobbying, end user campaigns by an advocacy group have the counterproductive effect of reducing the government's incentive to subsidise the new technology. Instead of supporting the advocacy group's campaigning, the government free rides on the social movement's campaigning efforts. While political lobbying cannot prevent free riding, it increases the government's incentive to subsidise the new technology, and thus increases the advocacy group's payoff. These findings suggest that advocacy groups can promote technology diffusion if they can effectively deploy a dual strategy of political lobbying and end user campaigning.

The importance of institutional trust for structuring welfare state support (WSS) has been advanced by several scholars. Yet, the thesis has not received convincing empirical support. We argue that the weak evidence observed by previous research is caused by the failure of not extending the analytical framework beyond the study of public institutions. Using Sweden as a test case, our analytical framework covers trust in public institutions (TPI) and market institutions (TMI). The main findings are: (1) TMI has a robust negative effect on WSS; (2) the expected relationship between TPI and WSS is strengthened controlling for TMI; (3) TMI mediates the relationships between socio-economic variables and WSS. These findings underline the importance of bringing in other institutional configurations that are seen as conceivable alternatives to the state for administrating social welfare, not the least in studies primarily interested in the link between TPI and support for state-organised welfare.

Scholars of political parties frequently note that a party's candidates are aided by the presence of a consistent and favourable party brand name. We argue that partisan success in maintaining a consistent position on important policy issues hinges on how their role in the government motivates their strategies about public policy formation. Specifically, when parties share control of government institutions, parties need to balance their electoral interest in promoting a consistent brand name with the need to generate public policy that leads to effective governance. When control is held by one party, the costs and benefits of effective governance are born entirely by the majority, absolving both parties of the need to compromise on the substance of policy. By employing item response theory methods to assess patterns of party voting on deficit issues, we find strong support for these hypotheses.

This article examines the changes of the Lisbon Treaty to the rules on agreeing the European Union's (EU) annual budget and multiannual financial framework. The comparative budgets literature as well as theories of agenda-setting, veto players and empowerment of the European Parliament inform the analysis of how the EU's budgetary powers changed and the likely outcomes on spending. Overall, the powers of the European Parliament are reduced, the budget becomes more inflexible and, most significantly, the rules of the Lisbon Treaty have the effect of reducing the amounts available to spend. Although the Lisbon Treaty grants the European Parliament greater influence over ordinary EU legislation, national governments seem to have used the same treaty to send the Parliament's budgetary powers in the opposite direction and to curtail EU expenditure.

Increasingly, governments and police agencies require evidence of effectiveness and efficiency with respect to law enforcement policies. The existing “what works” literature, specifically on drug law enforcement, focuses mainly on the effectiveness question when making complex choices between drug policy alternatives, but fails when it comes to incorporating empirical evidence and the experience of key experts in the decision-making process. In addition, little attempt has been made to employ sophisticated techniques to assist in complex policy decision making with respect to funding competing policing policy alternatives. We use the methamphetamine problem in Australia to illustrate a way of evaluating, using multi-criteria analysis, alternative policy options for developing better drug policy.