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Within the field of innovation studies, researchers have identified several market failures that hamper investment in R&D, innovation and growth in a market economy. Several policies such as government subsidies, tax deductions, soft loans, and public venture capital provided to firms that pursue R&D have therefore been recommended by researchers, in addition to regulations to increase the quality and standards of goods and services. Less attention has been paid to government failures in cases where a policy fails to achieve its stated goal, often due to conflicts between the interests of special interest groups and the public. This paper discusses the concept of government failure within an innovation policy context and why this perspective is important for policy design since it is likely that policies that aim to reduce market failures could suffer from political failures. A text analysis of all papers published in 5 leading innovation journals between 2010 and 2019, a total of 5,526 papers, indicates a lack of research about government failures, which could lead to recommendations from researches to policymakers not being successful due to political failures.

In recent years, public policies aimed at regulating and combating prostitution have differed significantly in Nordic countries. Among those countries, Sweden is unique in its ban on the purchase -- though not the sale -- of sexual services. With the goal of understanding the reason behind this policy difference, the authors examine the role of ideas in the formulation of public policy and policy changes. In outlining how this works, the authors place ideas in three distinct categories: Policy positions, expert knowledge, and ideational frameworks. In regard to the third category, utilizing the persuasive force of established norms can play a critical role in gaining needed support for the successful adoption of a particular policy. Adapted from the source document.

"Many transnational democrats support their claims for global democratic reform by appealing to the so-called all-affected principle, stating that everyone who is affected by a decision has a right to participate in making it. Although often identified as a core principle of democratic theory, the allaffected principle is difficult both to interpret and to apply. In the first part of this paper, I examine the critique against the all-affected principle, arguing that specifying what it means to be affected is itself a highly political issue, since it must rest on some disputable theory of interests, and that the principle does not solve the problem of how to legitimately constitute the democratic community, since such acts, too, are decisions which affect people. Furthermore, I argue that applying the principle comes at too high a cost: either political boundaries must be redrawn for each issue at stake or we must ensure that democratic politics only has consequences within an enclosed community, and that it affects its members equally. In the second part of the paper, I consider how two versions of transnational democratic theory - cosmopolitan democracy and deliberative democracy, both of which rely on the all-affected principle - may respond to this critique. In the final part of the paper, I discuss a possible replacement for the all-affected principle, an alternative principle according to which everyone who is subject to the laws should be granted the right to participate in making them. This subject-to-law principle solves some, but not all, of the problems that followed from the all-affected principle." (author's abstract)

The productivity of any scientist is affected by cumbersome, tedious and time-consuming tasks that try to make the heterogeneous web services compatible so that they can be useful in their research. MOWServ, the bioinformatic platform offered by the Spanish National Institute of Bioinformatics, was released to provide integrated access to databases and analytical tools. Since its release, the number of available services has grown dramatically, and it has become one of the main contributors of registered services in the EMBRACE Biocatalogue. The ontology that enables most of the web-service compatibility has been curated, improved and extended. The service discovery has been greatly enhanced by Magallanes software and biodataSF. User data are securely stored on the main server by an authentication protocol that enables the monitoring of current or already-finished user's tasks, as well as the pipelining of successive data processing services. The BioMoby standard has been greatly extended with the new features included in the MOWServ, such as management of additional information (metadata such as extended descriptions, keywords and datafile examples), a qualified registry, error handling, asynchronous services and service replication. All of them have increased the MOWServ service quality, usability and robustness. MOWServ is available at http://www.inab.org/MOWServ/ and has a mirror at http://www.bitlab-es.com/MOWServ/. ; The National Institute for Bioinformatics, a platform of the Genoma-España Foundation; the European Union co-funded project 'Advancing Clinico-Genomic Trials on Cancer' (contract-026996); Red de Investigación de Reacciones Adversas a Alergenos y Fármacos – Redes Tematicas de Investigación Cooperativa Sanitaria (RIFAAF – RETICS RD07/0064/0017); Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, proyecto I+D AGL2009-12139-C02-02; Universidad Pablo de Olavide (CABD-CSIC/JA/UPO). ; Peer Reviewed