We study the policy choice of an office-holding politician who is concerned with the public’s perception of his capabilities. The politician decides whether to maintain the status quo or to conduct a risky reform. The success of the reform depends critically upon the abilities of the politician, which is privately known to the politician. The public observes both his policy choice and the outco...

The article discusses some difficulties of drawing implications from welfare state reform in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development for "middle-income countries", and whose welfare states have been less well institutionalized. It is argued that globalization's role in contemporary social policy dynamics were not unimportant, but social processes occurring within national con...

A dynamic process of social security reform took place during the economic transition in the Soviet Union from 1985 through 1991, and in the Russian Federation in 1992. Despite administrative and financial difficulties, the Gorbachev reform objectives have been incorporated (with modest revisions) into the Russian Federation pension legislation and family allowance programs. Following the adopt...

This article explores how private organizations influence the content and meaning of consumer protection legislation. I examine why California forced consumers to use a private dispute resolution system that affords consumers fewer rights, while Vermont adopted a state-run disputing structure that affords consumers greater rights. Drawing from historical and new institutional theories, I analyz...

There is increasing support for the proposition that academic health centers have a duty to accept broad responsibility for the health of their communities. The Health of the Public program has proposed that centers become directly involved in the social-political process as advocates for reform of the health care system. Such engagement raises important issues about the roles and responsibilit...

Existing accounts of the Clinton health reform efforts of the early 1990s neglect to examine how the change in big business reform interests during the short period between the late 1980s and 1994 might have altered the trajectory of compulsory health insurance legislation in Congress. This article explores evidence that big employers lost their early interest in reform because they believed th...

Chile revolutionized pension systems in 1981 by transforming its defined-benefit pay-asyou-go contributive system into a defined contribution privately managed fully-funded scheme. After 27 years, the fragmentation, low coverage and high costs of administering the private system led to a comprehensive reform to address these problems in 2008. The latter reform was a step forward in several ways...