Institutional shifts and punctuated patterns in digital policy

While digital policies provide significant value within contemporary governance, not many governments' digital policies are adapted to rapidly changing technologies and associated expectations. The limited adaptability can be explained by governments' focus on institutional shifts as an instrument to generate policy changes. Therefore, this article examines the impact of institutional shifts on digital policy by leveraging the Punctuated Equilibrium Theory (PET) as a lens to explore the Belgian federal government between 2000 and 2020. This is done through performing a distributional application of the PET and an explaining-outcome congruence case study. The results highlight the role of institutional shifts in directing digital policy, but also underscore the importance of other factors (i.e., policy image, attention allocation and/or structure of the political system) and the presence of policy entrepreneurs to explain the (in)stability of digital policy.     

Policy capacity and rise of data-based policy innovation labs

In scarcely a decade, a “labification” phenomenon has taken hold globally. The search for innovative policy solutions for social problems is embedded within scientific experimental-like structures often referred to as policy innovation labs (PILs). With the rapid technological changes (e.g., big data, artificial intelligence), data-based PILs have emerged. Despite the growing importance of these PILs in the policy process, very little is known about them and how they contribute to policy outcomes. This study analyzes 133 data-based PILs and examines their contribution to policy capacity. We adopt policy capacity framework to investigate how data-based PILs contribute to enhancing analytical, organization, and political policy capacity. Many data-based PILs are located in Western Europe and North America, initiated by governments, and employ multi-domain administrative data with advanced technologies. Our analysis finds that data-based PILs enhance analytical and operational policy capacity at the individual, organizational and systemic levels but do little to enhance political capacity. It is this deficit that we suggest possible strategies for data-based PILs.     

Bureaucratic politics,innovation compatibility,and the dynamic diffusion of subnational decentralization reforms in China

Despite the widely recognized significance of policy attributes in explaining innovation diffusion, limited research has emphasized the underlying endogenous mechanisms dictating the construction of innovation attributes. This study points out that bureaucratic politics could dynamically shape an innovation's compatibility with the potential adopters and its diffusion likelihood. Based on the subnational decentralization reforms in China, we note that compared to administrative and fiscal decentralization, political decentralization is less likely to generate personal gains and more likely to negatively affect the career prospects of local officials in a layer-by-layer personnel management system. Therefore, the study speculates that political decentralization reforms have a lower level of compatibility, consequently reducing its diffusion likelihood among local governments. We confirmed our theoretical expectations by conducting an in-depth case study of the top-down diffusion of three types of “Province-Managing-County Reforms” among 102 counties in China's Henan Province (2004–2021).     

Programmatic action in Chinese health policy—The making and design of “Healthy China 2030”

The Programmatic Action Framework (PAF) is a powerful analytical perspective to advance our understanding of policy change by stressing the role of programmatic groups and how they promote their preferred policy programs. While the PAF has been applied successfully to European countries and the US, a considerable research gap remains regarding its explanatory power in other regions and political settings. To step into this research gap, we apply the PAF to authoritarian China through a qualitative case study of the making of “Healthy China 2030”, a national health policy program. We explore two research questions: firstly, to what extent can the PAF be operationalized in a nondemocracy to identify programmatic groups and evaluate policy design, and second, what are the limitations and challenges facing the application of the PAF to nondemocracies? Our empirical analysis shows that the design of this policy program involves actors from different policy areas, despite the top-down political structure. With regards to the transfer of PAF hypotheses, we show that the framework is a helpful lens to identify programmatic groups and to evaluate policy programs' potential for success based on coherence, responsiveness, and program fit. Meanwhile, the research process of our study revealed the challenges of applying policy process theories to China, including hard-to-reach political actors for data collection, lack of transparency regarding collaboration processes between actors, and a lack of publicly available program-related information.     

Contagious COVID-19 policies: Policy diffusion during times of crisis

The COVID-19 crisis demanded rapid, widespread policy action. In response, nations turned to different forms of social distancing policies to reduce the spread of the virus. These policies were implemented globally, proving as contagious as the virus they are meant to prevent. Yet, variation in their implementation invites questions as to how and why countries adopt social distancing policies, and whether the causal mechanisms driving these policy adoptions are based on internal resources and problem conditions or other external factors such as conditions in other countries. We leverage daily changes in international social distancing policies to understand the impacts of problem characteristics, institutional and economic context, and peer effects on social distancing policy adoption. Using fixed-effects models on an international panel of daily data from 2020, we find that peer effects, particularly mimicry of geographic neighbors, political peers, and language agnates drive policy diffusion and shape countries' policy choices.     

Comparison of Policy Experiments: Practices in Asia

Abstract

Policy experimentation has become a global trend in recent decades. The dynamics of policy experiments in Western countries have been extensively investigated, whereas those in non-Western contexts have not. The latter is theoretically relevant in testing the generalizability of existing theoretical arguments and provides opportunities for developing new theories, and practically relevant given that academic research could provide scientific evidence that facilitates the decision-making of practitioners. This introduction summarizes six articles that examine the practices of policy experiments in Asia and identify multiple patterns of policy experimentation, such as policy laboratories, policy syntheses, and proportionate policy responses. Particularly, evidence drawn from China, India, and Singapore suggests that policy experiments tend to fit the characteristics and scale of the policy problem and the risks or uncertainty of the policy environment.     

Policy learning and change during crisis: COVID-19 policy responses across six states

Whereas policy change is often characterized as a gradual and incremental process, effective crisis response necessitates that organizations adapt to evolving problems in near real time. Nowhere is this dynamic more evident than in the case of COVID-19, which forced subnational governments to constantly adjust and recalibrate public health and disease mitigation measures in the face of changing patterns of viral transmission and the emergence of new information. This study assesses (a) the extent to which subnational policies changed over the course of the pandemic; (b) whether these changes are emblematic of policy learning; and (c) the drivers of these changes, namely changing political and public health conditions. Using a novel dataset analyzing each policy's content, including its timing of enactment, substantive focus, stringency, and similar variables, results indicate the pandemic response varied significantly across states. The states examined were responsive to both changing public health and political conditions. This study identifies patterns of preemptive policy learning, which denotes learning in anticipation of an emerging hazard. In doing so, the study provides important insights into the dynamics of policy learning and change during disaster.     

Uneven local implementation of federal policy after disaster: Policy conflict and goal ambiguity

As climate change continues to increase both the frequency and intensity of environmental hazards and disasters, the need for a cohesive national mitigation policy grows. As the environmental federalism scholarship indicates, the inherent tension in federal, state, and local policy implementation highlights that despite a national need, environmental quality is a local public good. To complicate matters, there is disagreement about the optimal level of decision-making regarding the adoption and implementation of environmental policy. This study addresses this gap by considering the role of policy ambiguity and conflict in policy implementation. The analysis relies on primary qualitative data collected from open-ended interviews with 22 local government officials in 12 municipalities following Hurricane Harvey. Through the lens of policy ambiguity and conflict, we find confirmatory support for the idea that policies with less ambiguous goals are more likely to be implemented. Furthermore, we find that policy conflict arises when local governments perceive there is little for the community to gain by implementing the federal program. Thus, the level of protection afforded to citizens varies greatly between communities and is influenced heavily by politics. This research supports the Ambiguity-Conflict Model of policy implementation, an oft-cited but rarely tested theoretical framework for assessing the intergovernmental politics of policy implementation. It also demonstrates the barriers to local implementation of federal environmental policy in a nested system of government.     

Unpacking the intensity of policy conflict: a study of Colorado’s oil and gas subsystem

This article applies the Policy Conflict Framework (PCF) to describe and explain the characteristics of policy conflict within the oil and gas subsystem in Colorado. We use data from a survey of policy actors to assess three cognitive characteristics of policy conflict: divergence in policy positions, perceived threats from opponents’ positions, and an unwillingness to compromise. Aggregating these indicators across policy actors in the subsystem, we find a moderately high level of policy conflict intensity, but we also find substantial variation in the characteristics of policy conflict across policy actors. To help explain this variation, we examine how interpersonal and intrapersonal attributes of policy actors relate to the characteristics of policy conflict. In particular, we find that insular policy actor networks, interest group affiliations, and rigidity of risk and benefit perceptions associate more consistently with conflict characteristics than political views, education, or experience. We conclude with a discussion of the strengths and limitations of this first application of the PCF and reiterate the need for theoretically and empirically rigorous measures of policy conflict.     

Policy Conflict Framework

This essay introduces a Policy Conflict Framework to guide and organize theoretical, practical, and empirical research to fill the vacuum that surrounds policy conflicts. The framework centers on a conceptual definition of an episode of policy conflict that distinguishes between cognitive and behavioral characteristics. The cognitive characteristics of a policy conflict episode include divergence in policy positions among two or more actors, perceived threats from opponents’ policy positions, and unwillingness to compromise. These cognitive characteristics manifest in a range of behavioral characteristics (e.g., framing contests, lobbying, building networks). Episodes of policy conflicts are shaped by a policy setting, which consists of different levels of action where conflicts may emerge (political, policy subsystem and policy action situations), interpersonal and intrapersonal policy actor attributes, events, and the policy issue. In turn, the outputs and outcomes of policy conflicts produce feedback effects that shape the policy setting. This essay ends with an agenda for advancing studies of policy conflicts, both methodologically and theoretically.     

The times make a hero: Street-level policy entrepreneurship in major crisis responses in China

Street-level bureaucrats are often grassroots officials, and they are regarded as passive practitioners of policy with no authority to change policy or innovate, while policy entrepreneurs are usually high-level officials. Based on observations of China's responses to two national crises, this study found that the times do make a hero. When acting as innovative frontline technocrats, major transboundary crisis practitioners, and management savvy operators within the top-down bureaucracy, street-level bureaucrats can become policy entrepreneurs. To innovate and drive policy change, street-level policy entrepreneurs will adopt innovative strategies. They will make efficient use of their expertise and discretion, integrate various resources, strive for attention from superiors, consolidate their achievements, and expand their influence.     

Framing Contests and Policy Conflicts over Gas Pipelines

This paper compares and contrasts high‐conflict policy debates over the siting of three natural gas pipeline projects at different decision stages of the siting process. This paper draws on over 600 newspaper articles spanning 3 years, analyzed through Discourse Network Analysis. Drawing from the Advocacy Coalition Framework and Policy Conflict framework, this paper finds that actor framing of opposing policy beliefs involves more indirect than direct confrontations, with statements in the media waxing and waning over time. Opponents of the pipelines more often explicitly argue against pipelines, while also using a broad range of conceptual arguments, whereas proponents more often couch their arguments around the economic benefits of pipelines and use fewer conceptual frames overall. We also find evidence that opposing coalitions use similar framing across different decision contexts. This paper concludes with a commentary on the status and contributions of this paper to the study of policy conflicts and next steps in advancing similar research agendas.     

Gender equality in Swedish AI policies. What's the problem represented to be?

Over the past few decades, Sweden has established itself as a “world leader” in gender equality. Alongside this development, Swedish politicians have also initiated ambitious plans that aim to establish the country as “world class” in terms of digitalization. International research shows that women and racialized groups are in a minority in the design processes, that AI facial recognition systems are built with white male faces as the norm, and that digital tools replicate racial injustices. In this paper, we are interested in if, and if so how, gender equality is articulated and thus filled with meaning in national policies on AI and digitalization. The overall aim is to discuss the potential of gender (equality) mainstreaming to challenge systems of privilege in the implementation of AI systems in the public sector. The paper analyses how gender equality is filled with meaning in national policy documents on AI and gender equality. The main findings show that gender equality is turned into a question of lack of knowledge and information, which in turn blocks out an understanding of gender equality as something that is related to gendered power relations.     

Managing Value Conflict in Public Policy

Policy issues are often characterized by conflicting values. Conventionally, students of public policy have conceptualized government's response to value conflicts as a matter of "balancing" competing goals, or striking trade-offs among values. In this paper we argue that this way of managing value conflicts represents only one possibility from a larger and more varied repertoire of strategies that draw from more complex models of practical reasoning. Policy actors do sometimes try to strike a "balance" among conflicting values, but they often avail themselves of other strategies as well: they cycle between values by emphasizing one value and then the other; they assign responsibilities for each value to different institutional structures; or they gather and consult a taxonomy of specific cases where similar conflicts arose. We argue that each of these strategies can be rational in some institutional contexts, and that conclusion challenges the view that policy values must always be treated as commensurable for rational policy choices to be made. Government responds to value conflict in ways that are more varied and changing than existing views of public policy imply.     

STI policy conventions in Uruguay. An analysis of political party platforms 2004–2019

Science, Technology, and Innovation (STI) have been considered as critical tools in development processes, gaining growing importance in the public policy agenda. We assert that an intersubjective agreement about STI policy has emerged in Latin America from the beginning of the twenty-first century. This operates as a developmental convention which is based on a hybrid theoretical rationale from neoclassical economics and the innovation systems approach. This process has been analyzed from different perspectives of innovation and political economy studies. However, as far as we know, the role of political parties in the construction and reproduction of STI conventions has not been studied. After illustrating the general assertion with stylized facts from the whole Latin American region, we study the platforms that Uruguayan political parties presented in the national elections between 2004 and 2019. Text analysis techniques show that platforms of both left- and right-wing political parties were embedded in the current STI policy convention. However, critical discrepancies emerge in relation to policy implementation—the positive and negative agendas—which show that there has been political competition regarding the role of the state and of markets. This leads us to conclude that even though one can observe a shared set of building blocks on STI policy and development, there is competition within the current convention, suggesting that any agreement is illusory.     

How governance boundaries affect regional collaboration on atmospheric governance—Evidence from China's Yangtze River Delta

Regional public affairs will become more complex when contradictions emerge between administrative boundaries and policy issues that require cross-boundary collaboration. Breaking administrative boundaries has become a prerequisite for facilitating inter-local government collaboration. This study categorizes governance boundaries into the administrative boundary and the ecology-based policy boundary and then examines how these two governance boundaries and their interactive relationship contribute to the intergovernmental collaboration network in China's regional atmospheric governance (RAG). Using data on the atmospheric governance collaboration from 30 cities in the Yangtze River Delta region from 2013 to 2018, we employ the MR-QAP model to find that cities within the same administrative boundary are more likely to collaborate and cities within the ecology-based policy boundary, compared with those beyond, are more likely to collaborate but with a lagging effect. Ecology-based policy boundary has a positive but lagging moderating effect on the contribution of the administrative boundary to the formation of intergovernmental collaboration networks.     

Policy entrepreneurship in developing countries: A systematic review of the literature

What can be learned from two decades of studies on policy entrepreneurship in developing countries? Policy entrepreneurship is a rapidly evolving analytical concept. A growing number of studies exploring public policy in developing countries use policy entrepreneurship as an explanatory theoretical concept. However, a substantial part of this research relies on qualitative case study analysis, lacking a comprehensive overview of the concept of policy entrepreneurship. This paper conducts a systematic review of the literature on policy entrepreneurship in developing countries. A total of 47 papers addressing policy entrepreneurship in the developing world, published between 1993 and 2017, have been analysed. The purpose and contribution of this paper are to offer a clearer picture of policy entrepreneurship in the developing world by concentrating on two aspects. First, we describe the characteristics of the studies on policy entrepreneurship in the developing world. Second, we analyse such studies, identifying the lessons that can be drawn on the phenomenon of policy entrepreneurship in the developing world. We conclude with an agenda for future studies, examining new theoretical, methodological, and empirical opportunities to advance the understanding of policy entrepreneurship in developing countries.     

Shaping the Scope of Conflict in Scotland’s Fracking Debate: Conflict Management and the Narrative Policy Framework

This study applies a narrative lens to policy actors’ discursive strategies in the Scottish debate over fracking. Based on a sample of 226 newspaper articles (2011–2017) and drawing on key elements of the narrative policy framework (NPF), the research examines how policy coalitions have characterized their supporters, their opponents, and the main regulator (Scottish government). It also explores how actors have sought to expand or contain the scope of conflict to favor their policy objectives. Empirically, only the government strives for conflict containment, whereas both pro‐ and anti‐fracking groups prioritize conflict expansion through characterization contests and the diffusion and concentration of the costs/risks and benefits of fracking. In theoretical terms, the study proposes that Sarah Pralle’s conflict management model, which emphasizes symmetrical strategies of conflict expansion by both coalitions, is a potential tool to revise extant NPF expectations about the different narrative strategies of winning and losing coalitions. Moreover, the fact that policy actors mostly employ negatively rather than positively framed characters in their narratives may be a valid expectation for similar policy conflicts, particularly under conditions of regulatory uncertainty.