This is the first general comparative study of health policy and politics to focus on major countries of Western Europe: France, Germany, Italy, Sweden and the UK. The book begins by identifying differences in arrangements for the finance, delivery and regulation of health care in different countries, explaining how health systems are to be understood as political entities. The book describes and accounts for the evolution of state intervention in the health sector before comparing and contrasting different kinds of systems. It examines recent changes in the organization of health care as...

National broadcasting and press regulation is undergoing a process of convergence in Europe. This book, newly available in paperback, explains how this process has been shaped by the actions of the European Union (EU) institutions.
Alison Harcourt observes that whilst communications is one of the EU's most successful policy areas, European decision-making is eroding the national capacity to regulate for the public interest. European-level efforts to protect public interest goals have been constrained by the European Treaties. The author argues that increased European coordination in...

The European Union and its member states are investing in ambitious programmes for 'better regulation' and targets of regulatory quality. This book, available in paperback for the first time, lifts the veil of excessively optimistic propositions covering the whole better regulation agenda. It provides an innovative conceptual framework to handle the political complexity of regulatory governance. It approaches better regulation as an emerging public policy, with its own political context, actors, problems, rules of interaction, instruments, activities and impacts. Focusing on the key tools of...

This book examines a hitherto under-researched aspect of the European Union's policy process - the extent and the nature of the involvement of central governments in the implementation of EU public policy. It discusses how the co-ordination of these institutions affects their capacity to shape the way in which the commitments that they make in Brussels are turned into concrete reality at the national level. It shows that the nature of their involvement in implementation reflects the pattern of their involvement in the formulation of EU policy. However, since implementation unfolds over long...

This book introduces international bureaucracy as a key field of study for public administration and also rediscovers it as an essential ingredient in the study of international organisations. To what extent, how and why do international bureaucracies challenge and supplement the inherent Westphalian intergovernmental order based on territorial sovereignty? To what extent, how and why do international bureaucracies supplement the existing international intergovernmental order with a multi-dimensional international order subjugated by a compound set of decision-making dynamics? International...

This volume offers a comprehensive analysis of the agency phenomenon in the European Union. It takes stock of the emergence and development of EU agencies, providing insight into the characteristics as well as the consequences of the ongoing EU agencification process. With this in mind, the volume first of all traces the varied roots of and routes to agency emergence and institutionalisation. Going beyond general trends and developments, it also studies the specifics of everyday decision-making processes within EU-level agencies, notably the management of such agencies, their role in the...