Under what conditions do dominant policy ideas change in Japanese bureaucratic organizations? The answer is developed in reference to a rare empirical case in which critical information has been released about intra-bureaucracy politics, the Japanese Ministry of Finance during the 1969–1971 international monetary crisis. The paper contends, first, that the crisis did not automatically lead to a change of a dominant policy idea prevalent in the Ministry. A policy change occurred only after tactful leadership was exercised by the highest Ministry official. Second, dynamics of paralysis and change were strongly shaped by structures and norms characteristic of Japanese organizations. At a more general level, the case study shows that the exercise of policy-changing leadership vis-á-vis bureaucracies depends on two intra- governmental structure variables: institutional arrangements within and surrounding bureaucracies; and the level of information control exercised by bureaucracies.

The role of semi-public intermediary institutions is underestimated in political research. This paper elaborates the dynamics of the interaction pattern of mission-agencies, promoting and conducting research in the United States, Great Britain, France and Germany. The principal-agent-model serves as the organizing theoretical concept. By stressing the role of the third party, usually neglected in the model, it is shown that intermediary agencies in policy-making are drawn into cooperative and almost symbiotic relationships with the recipients of programs. The use of intermediary agencies becomes a double-edged sword for policy-makers. While close relationships with the scientific community improve the acceptance of political research programs, the formulation of research policies becomes subject to compromise and coalition building within funding agencies.

Policymakers hold and seek to act on beliefs concerning trade strategies as well as those concerning trade tactics and instruments. In contrast to prominent hypotheses in the literature, this article argues that constraints placed on specific dimensions of trade policy by societal groups and state institutions appear to play a greater role in shaping the impact of beliefs on policy choices than overall shifts in discretion accorded to policymakers. Insights into the resurgence of the retaliatory tariff in U.S. trade policy during 1985–88 are at the interaction of policy beliefs and variation in executive discretion. Although lending support to scholarship focusing on the interaction of ideas and institutions, these findings raise questions concerning prominent claims about the significance of policy beliefs.

Germany's economic resilience, even in the face of the extreme pressures of unification, cannot be explained by the neoclassical economic approach. Its social market institutions induce the major actors in the political economy to negotiate over the terms of economic and political adjustment in such a fashion as to diffuse innovative new organizational and institutional practices broadly and thoroughly throughout the economy and polity. The reorganization of the financial sector and the spread of new forms of workplace organization and corporate governance are used to illustrate this dynamic. The paper concludes with implications for how we think about regulation.