Does public policy in the United Kingdom respond to changes in public preferences? If so, is this the result of the government changing its policy to reflect preferences (“policy accommodation”) or the result of governments that pursue unpopular policies being replaced at elections by governments more in line with the public (“electoral turnover”)? We explore these questions by estimating annual aggregate public preferences (“the policy mood”) using responses to 287 questions administered 2,087 times and annual policy using budgetary data (“nonmilitary government expenditure”) for the whole of the postwar period. We find that mood moves in the opposite direction to policy and variations in mood are associated with variations in annual vote intentions. Policy is responsive to party control but not directly responsive to mood. Shifts in mood eventually lead to a change in government and thus policy, but this process may be very slow if the public has doubts about the competence of the opposition.

This article reviews comparative research on institutions and economic performance, identifying analytical gaps in the political economy of growth literature. It also examines core assumptions underpinning the good-governance approach to development. Contrasting experiences of conceptual and policy issues in East Asia and Latin America are discussed. The author suggests future scholarship in this field should distinguish between the rules and the play of the game; move beyond the property rights approach to development; stress the distributional, endogenous nature of institutions; investigate the role of informal constraints and human learning; and consider sources of credible commitment and self-enforcing growth. Focusing on some uncertainties in the accepted wisdom on good governance and development, this article furthers the consolidation of research on the political foundations of prosperity.

This article combines theory and narrative to shed new light on the politics surrounding the making of central bank independence in contemporary Britain. Its central argument is that Gordon Brown's rewriting of the British monetary constitution in May 1997 constituted political manipulation in a Rikerian sense. The government removed a contentious issue from party politics in order to signal competence and enforce internal discipline. Building on Elster's constraint theory, the paper argues that Brown adopted a pre-commitment strategy aimed at binding others. The heresthetic move had dual consequences, both constraining and enabling. The institutionalization of discipline enabled New Labour to achieve economic and political goals. By revisiting the political rationality of precommitment, this article questions the dominant credibility story underlying the choice of economic institutions.

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