This paper examines approaches to public investment appraisal as theyare currently recommended in the British Treasury and implemented byevaluation units within the Department of Health, Department of Transport and the Home Office. The evidence suggests that spending departments have reacted to the pressure for increased selectivity in their expenditures by adopting a heterogeneous blend of appraisal techniques, including financial analysis, cost-effectiveness and option appraisal, withcost-benefit analysis eventually playing a minor role. The imposition of cash limits rations capital expenditures. When these constraints bite departments differently, either a unique social discount rate for projectappraisal is inappropriate or the rations themselves are giving wrong signals to the departments The departments do not have an incentive todevote time and effort to cost benefit analysis and other techniques of a more limited scope are implemented.

Drawing on data for 60 Australian Commonwealth government bureaucracies 1976–86, this paper explores what measurable consequences for bureaucratic structure can be associated with staffing and spending cutbacks. It looks at cutbacks both at government-wide and at individual-bureaucracylevel, on the basis of a casualty list intended to portray the different dimensions of relative bureaucratic ‘suffering’ more systematically than has hitherto been done in the cutback management literature. It then explores associations between measures of cutbacks and indicators of structural consequences, both at government-wide and departmental level, relating that to the debate as to whether ‘leaner means weaker’ in government cutbacks. The ‘leaner means weaker’ view of bureaucratic cutbacks is hard to sustain from these data.

This work examines the relationship between policy style and issue environment. Empirical research in the electricity supply sector in West Germany suggests that even at the sectoral level the expectation of a monolithic and static policy style cannot confidently be sustained. This sector displays a dual policy style, the source of which is located in the relationship between state and sector, the structure of interest representation, and ownership / market relations in the sector. Fluctuations in policy style are related to changes in the issue environment. Addressing the structural dimension of issues, the work abstracts the structure and form which issues assume from their substantive content to identify issue anatomy. This concept is deployed in an explanation of changing policy style in the face of a complex of sectoral issues.

Following Wildavsky's argument that a federal bias is often the best principle for organising public policy, this study compares two national public broadcasting systems: the diffuse pattern of multiple agencies used in the United States of America and the highly centralized design employed in Australia. The paper examines whether each structure can respond to an audience while resisting the partisan demands of politicians. Significant advantages are found in the American model, though the question arises of whether participation and editorial independence in public broadcasting are bought at the cost of efficiency and effectiveness.