During the past decade, Democrats and Republicans each have received about fifty percent of the votes and controlled about half of the government, but this has not resulted in policy deadlock. Despite highly partisan political posturing, the policy regime has been largely moderate. Incremental, yet substantial, policy innovations such as welfare reform; deficit reduction; the North American Free Trade Agreement; and the deregulation of telecommunications, banking, and agriculture have been accompanied by such continuities as Social Security and Medicare, the maintenance of earlier immigration reforms, and the persistence of many rights-based policies, including federal affirmative action.

In Seeking the Center, twenty-one contributors analyze policy outcomes in light of the frequent alternation in power among evenly divided parties. They show how the triumph of policy moderation and the defeat of more ambitious efforts, such as health care reform, can be explained by mutually supporting economic, intellectual, and political forces. Demonstrating that the determinants of public policy become clear by probing specific issues, rather than in abstract theorizing, they restore the politics of policymaking to the forefront of the political science agenda.

A successor to Martin A. Levin and Marc K. Landy’s influential The New Politics of Public Policy (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), this book will be vital reading for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in political science and public policy, as well as a resource for scholars in both fields.

Health, safety, and environmental regulations have been traditionally perceived as distinct entities from trade policy, yet today they have become intertwined on a global scale. In this pioneering work, David Vogel integrates environmental, consumer, and trade policy, and explicitly challenges the conventional wisdom that trade liberalization and agreements to promote free trade invariably undermine national health, safety, and environmental standards. Vogel demonstrates that liberal trade policies often produce precisely the opposite effect: that of strengthening regulatory standards.

The most comprehensive account of trade and regulation on a global scale, this book analyzes the regulatory dimensions of all major international and regional trade agreements and treaties, including GATT, NAFTA, the Free Trade Agreement between Canada and the United States, and the treaties that created the European Community and Union. He explores in depth some of the most important trade and regulatory conflicts, including the GATT tuna-dolphin dispute, the EC's beef hormone ban, the Danish bottle case, and the debate in the United States over the regulatory implications of both NAFTA and GATT.

This timely book unravels the increasingly important and contentious relationship between trade and environmental, health, and safety standards, paying particular attention to the politics that underlie trade and regulatory linkages. Trading Up is essential reading for the business community, policymakers, environmentalists, consumer interest groups, political scientists, lawyers, and economists.

Transatlantic Policymaking in an Age of Austerity integrates the study of politics and public policy across a broad spectrum of regulatory and social welfare policies in the United States and several nations of Western Europe. The editors and a sterling list of contributors look at policymaking in the 1990s through the present—providing a comparative politics framework—stressing both parallel development and the differences between and among the nations. Similar prevailing ideas and political factors can be identified and transatlantic comparisons made—providing for a clearer understanding of the policymaking process.

Faith in regulated markets and the burden of rising welfare costs are concerns found on both sides of the Atlantic. Western democracies also share political climates colored by economic austerity; low trust in government, pressures from interest groups, and a sharply divided electorate. Because of differing political processes and differing policy starting points, a variety of disparate policy decisions have resulted.

Real world policymaking in the areas of welfare, health, labor, immigration reform, disability rights, consumer and environmental regulation, administrative reforms, and corporate governance are compared. Ultimately, the last decade is best characterized as one of "drift," sluggish changes with little real innovation and much default to the private sector. In general, policymakers on both sides of the ocean, constrained by economic necessity, have been unable to produce policy outcomes that satisfy the key segments of the electorate.

The contributors examine the United States, Great Britain, France, and Germany, as well as a number of other European countries, and study the European Union itself as a policymaking institution. Transatlantic Policymaking in an Age of Austerity distills the prominent issues, politics, and roles played by governmental institutions into a new understanding of the dynamics of policymaking in and among transatlantic nations.