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The failure of a policy to achieve its goals is often an important reason for the decision to replace it. Failure alone, however, is rarely a sufficient explanation of the timing and direction of policy change. Change follows failure when alternative policies exist that are politically viable--that is, able to garner support from powerful actors--and that can explain past failure persuasively, and offer new policy prescriptions. This article evaluates this argument through a case study of British international security policy after the end of the cold war. British decision makers' initial policy was to rely on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as the vehicle through which to organize multilateral responses to 'crisis management tasks.' The failure of this policy to deal successfully with the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia led British decision makers to search for and evaluate alternative policies. They concluded that the rival idea of basing more multilateral crisis management on a European rather than North Atlantic institution best explained the failures in the former Yugoslavia. This policy was not politically viable, however, leading the government to continue to rely on NATO for such missions. Only a change in government--the election of the Labor government in 1997 with a large parliamentary majority--allowed decision makers to adopt and implement this new policy. Keywords: policy failure; policy change, policy ideas; European Security and Defense Policy

This article evaluates the role of increased capital mobility, sectoral interests, and domestic institutions in bringing about policy change in French capital markets. Capital mobility played an indirect role by making it more costly for French governments to pursue inflationary economic policies. But it was domestic politics, not capital mobility, that led governments to achieve lower inflation by stabilizing the exchange rate. The key domestic political factor was institutional change to regulatory practices, while financial markets reduced bank lending to industry and internationalized French finance, breaking the strong ties and common monetary diplomacy interests of bankers, industrialists, and policymakers, and thereby weaken the political priority of promoting domestic growth and industrial competitiveness., French monetary diplomacy--government preferences regarding the exchange rate and international monetary institutions--has changed in important ways since the collapse of the global regime of fixed exchange rates in the early [...]

The field of comparative politics has begun to take seriously the role of ideas in politics, but to date this interest has not clearly specified the conditions under which ideas influence public policy. The author develops an integrated framework that shows ideas about policy goals and instruments are most influential when they do not attract substantial opposition from voters and interest groups and when political institutions concentrate decision-making authority. The author tests this framework by examining the fates of three ideas, facing different degrees of societal opposition and concentrated authority, adopted by the first Thatcher government in Britain.

As tensions in the European Monetary System demonstrate, international capital flows can have a decisive influence on countries' economic policies. The external constraint of high international capital mobility led the countries of Western Europe in the 1980s to attempt to stabilize their exchange rates and converge toward low levels of inflation. Yet this process was not uniform: French governments pursued a rigorous anti-inflationary policy of high interest rates and a strengthening currency, while Italian governments had difficulty controlling inflation and maintaining the lira in the European Monetary System. This difference is best explained by comparing political institutions and policymaking processes in the two countries. Particular attention is given to political leaders' access to economic policy tools and their capacity to design and implement long-term goals.

Does respect for human rights check or promote terrorism? This question is hotly debated within policy circles. Some hold that restricting human rights is a necessary if unfortunate cost of preventing terrorism. Others conclude that such abuses aggravate political grievances that contribute to terror. The authors demonstrate that theory and data support the latter position. They hypothesize that abuse of the subset of rights known as physical integrity rights fuels terrorism by making it more difficult for government authorities to collect intelligence on terrorists and by undermining domestic and international support for their counterterrorism efforts. They test this hypothesis using a data set that includes measures of both domestic and transnational terrorist attacks and find that respect for physical integrity rights is consistently associated with fewer terrorist attacks. This suggests that those interested in curtailing terrorism should press governments to more carefully respect physical integrity rights.