A NEW DEFENSE POLICY FOR COSTA RICA: CONSTRUCTING REALITY AND THE POLICY AGENDA

This paper examine5 the policymaking progress in Costa Rica, specifically the creation of a new item for the governmental agenda. This new agenda challenges the traditional Itno army" policy of Costa Kica. Following a brief historical overview of the traditional policy, the paper considers the role of specific factors that promote structural conduciveness for the new "defense" policy and the attendant transformation of political symbols and definitions. The impact of the definitional and organizational changes on the implementation stage of policy is explored. This article suggests the importance of studying the role of hegemony in the construction and transformation of political and cultural definitions, an explication of deci- sionmaking as well as nondecisionmaking processes, and the influence of external and internal threats on nation-state dependency.     

Mobilising evidence in public policy: The contribution of the evidence provider

This article contributes to the conceptualisation of evidence‐based policy through providing a framework of the key factors that influence research utilisation, including those that shape the quality of evidence provided. We apply this framework to an analysis of public policy to regulate the remuneration of freight truck drivers to improve workplace safety in their industry. Recent policymaking concerning the regulation of truck drivers’ remuneration in Australia provides an opportunity to examine the quality and utilisation of research evidence by external evidence providers in opposing political contexts. This article suggests the need for informed and vigilant scrutiny of the contributions of evidence providers to government policymaking, particularly in the case of wicked policy problems about which there are sustained ideological differences that underpin problematisation, research interpretation, and conceivable policy solutions.     

Austerity or welfare state transformation? Examining the impact of economic crises on social regulation in Europe

This article provides an encompassing analysis of how economic crises affect social regulation. The analysis is based on an innovative dataset that covers policy output changes in 13 European countries over a period of 34 years (1980–2013) in the areas of pensions, unemployment, and child benefits. By performing a negative binomial regression analysis, we show that economic crises do matter for social policymaking. Our main empirical finding is that crises impinge on social regulation by opening a window of opportunity that facilitates the dismantling of social policy standards. Yet crisis‐induced policy dismantling is restricted to adjustments based on existing policy instruments. We do not find significant variation in policymaking patterns across different macroeconomic conditions for the more structural elements of social policy portfolios, such as the envisaged social policy targets or the policy instruments applied. This suggests that economic crises do not lead to a profound transformation of the welfare state but to austerity.     

Setting Agendas and Designing Alternatives: Policymaking and the Strategic Role of Meetings1

This paper investigates the role of strategic forums—such as special commissions, task forces, roundtables, working groups, summits—in the policy process. Reviewing prominent theories about policymaking, the author suggests ways in which strategic forums might fit within these frameworks as an analytically distinct policy lever. The paper examines existing literature on such forums, and identifies characteristics of “meetings that matter”—those gatherings that appear to have achieved some policy traction in a given domain. Finally, the paper investigates a particular field, cultural policy, to evaluate the extent to which meetings are serving policy purposes. The author concludes that meetings can serve an important role in the policy process by framing public problems and highlighting policy alternatives; creating and sustaining policy communities; fostering policy transfer and knowledge uptake; and developing networks among policy entrepreneurs. Nonetheless, with regard to cultural policy, the author argues that, compared to other policy domains, strategic policy-focused convenings are not a regular part of the arts and culture landscape and remain underused policy tools.     

Different paradigms of evidence and knowledge: Recognising,honouring, and celebrating Indigenous ways of knowing and being

Debates over evidence-informed policymaking are predominantly structured from a western paradigm of ontology and epistemology. Other ways of being and knowing are neither privileged by the policy space nor the discipline, certainly not in the same way or to the same degree. This is changing, however, in the face of cultural recognition and with diversity and inclusion agendas and within the contexts of post-truth politics and the questioning of expertise. This article explores the contribution of Indigenous ways of knowing and being as providing valid, alternative forms of evidence that ought to inform the policymaking process. Australian experience suggests that Indigenous evidence and knowledge offers unique, substantive insights that are offered as ‘gifts’ to inform policy and public administration communities. This contribution is unrecognised and unincorporated into public administration at Australia and the world's peril given that Indigenous approaches offer new exciting ways forward for engagement, sustainability, and policy innovation. It should not be co-opted or presumed. Indigenous peoples need to be given self-determination avenues to decide what they wish to share or not, why, and how.     

Political Competition and Policy Adoption: Market Reforms in Latin American Public Utilities

This article shows that political competition generates incentives that affect the pace of adoption of market reforms in the context of policy convergence. Previous work shows the effect of financial and technological pressures in promoting policy convergence and the impact of institutional constraints on shaping the pace of policymaking. Controlling for these effects, this article demonstrates the policy effects of political competition and ideological polarization even at a time when ideological policy differences seem to be fading due to policy convergence. This article studies policy adoption using duration analysis for the 18 countries of Latin America during the 1985–2000 period when most of the market reforms in public utilities were adopted.     

The power of policy networks in authoritarian regimes: Changing environmental policy in China

In this article, I examine how civil society organizations (CSOs) in China created policy networks among government officials to change environmental policies. I contend that these networks work in similar ways to those in democracies, despite the focus in the literature on how policymaking in authoritarian regimes lacks societal participation. China adopted strict regulations to control CSOs by requiring registration with a supervisory agency. However, CSOs exploit the regulations to use the supervisory agency as an access point to policymakers whom they otherwise could not reach. I use case studies to demonstrate how the strategies used to construct policy networks determined their success in changing policy. This finding represents an initial step in theorizing bottom‐up sources of policymaking in authoritarian regimes given that these regimes all create mechanisms for government control over CSOs, have difficulty accessing good information for policymaking from society, and a policy process formally closed to citizen participation.     

Competitive Government in the United States: Policy Promotion and Divided Party Control

Divided party control of the executive and legislative branches of American government has traditionally been thought to contribute to the system's tendencies toward policy stalemate and paralysis. Based on a series of brief case studies over the past twenty-five years, this article argues that, under certain circumstances, divided party government may promote rather than hinder the enactment of legislation. It sketches an analytical framework that suggests a range of policymaking outcomes may result from party competition under conditions of divided government, including stalemate, neglect, accommodation, and promotion.     

Nationalism or Nationalist Foreign Policy? Contemporary Chinese Nationalism and its Role in Shaping Chinese Foreign Policy in Response to the Belgrade Embassy Bombing

Focusing on the Chinese response towards the Belgrade Embassy Bombing in 1999 as a case study, this article will address the role of contemporary Chinese nationalism in the Chinese foreign policymaking process. By dividing the meaning of Chinese nationalism into several layers, the author will explore the potential of nationalism in replacing communism as the new frame for Chinese foreign policy after the death of Mao. Then the article will examine four possible explanations in an attempt to account for a primarily nationalist Chinese foreign policy in response to the Belgrade Embassy bombing. Underlying the analysis of these arguments is the suggestion that contemporary Chinese nationalism exists more vividly in official rhetoric than actuality, and that it is unlikely to become the new Chinese foreign policy framer in the future.     

Lessons from the past? Cultural memory in Dutch integration policy

This article explores the contribution that cultural memory studies can make to the debate about the role of ideas and the dynamics of ideational change in policy making. Cultural memory studies engage with the cultural dimensions of remembering, and analyse how shared images of the past are mediated and transferred across distance and time. Such research shows how the past may continue to influence the present by informing the frameworks through which groups and individuals interpret and give meaning to events and phenomena. Since policy makers operate within a cultural context, shared memories are likely also to affect the way they think about the nature and roots of policy issues and the appropriateness and feasibility of policy options. In this article, policy memory (the memory shared by policy makers about earlier policies) is identified as a subcategory of cultural memory. The role of cultural memory among policy makers is studied with reference to Dutch integration policies in two periods: the mid‐1990s and the early 2000s. On the basis of an in‐depth analysis of policy reports and parliamentary debates, references to the past and the role they play in the policy debate are identified. Different modes of dealing with the past are found in the two periods studied, reflecting the different political contexts in which the debates took place. In the 1990s, the memory of earlier policy was invoked in the mode of continuity – that is, policy change was legitimised (conceived) as part of a positive tradition. In the 2000s, memory was invoked in the mode of discontinuity. The same policies were reinterpreted in more negative terms and policy change legitimised by the perceived need to break with the past. Arguably, this reinterpretation of the past was a precondition for the shift in policy beliefs that took place around that time.     

Public policy analysis in Washington and Ottawa

Policy analysis in the U.S. and Canada tends to follow the methods of systems analysis and takes into account variables relating to substantive matters as well as political and administrative constraints that governments face in pursuing different alternatives.Comparative analysis of the political effectiveness of the two governments in implementing the results of analysis indicates that Canada has built-in constitutional advantages. Comparative assessment of bureaucratic skills in policy analysis and policy implementation suggests that the American system is relatively weaker in terms of implementation, but relatively stronger in terms of policy analytical skills. This is followed by an assessment of the attempts made by the U.S. government to improve its policymaking structures through the setting up of the Domestic Council and the reorganized OMB, and the Canadian attempts to improve its policymaking capabilities through a reorganized Cabinet committee system and the strengthening of the Privy Council Office.The final section suggests that analysis of values and norms should be an integral part of policy analysis. The scope of policy analysis should be extended to include long-term economic and political analyses.     

Norwegian Politics of Abortion: Perspectives, Arguments, and Values

Grid-group cultural theory is applied to an empirical analysis of five debates on abortion in the Norwegian Parliament between 1992 and 1996. Policy arguments concerning selective abortion and abortion in general are compared. In the cultural–theoretical literature, restrictive policy arguments towards abortion have been connected to the hierarchical cultural bias, whereas permissive policy arguments have been associated with egalitarian and individualistic worldviews. The empirical analysis, however, shows that there are various different connections between abortion policy arguments and cultural biases. The possibly contradictory situation that arises when parties switch between cultural biases is discussed, and the article concludes that grid-group cultural theory proves useful in relating the various abortion policy arguments to broader worldviews that transcend this particular policy issue.     

Authoritarian responsiveness: Online consultation with “issue publics” in China

In recent years, public consultation has become a standard feature of policymaking in authoritarian regimes. While previous studies found evidence of government responsiveness to citizens' demands, they did not measure responsiveness in terms of real policy change. This article presents the first systematic analysis of Chinese central government policy responsiveness to consultative input. In 2008, the Chinese government unveiled a blueprint for health‐care reform, inviting the public to post their opinions online. Having collected 27,899 online comments, the government subsequently published a revised draft. This article analyzes a random sample of 2% of this corpus of comments, assessing the effect of comments on revisions while controlling for both media content and bureaucratic preferences. The findings demonstrate that public comments have an impact upon policy revisions and suggest that the Chinese government is more responsive to street‐level implementers than to other social groups.     

The Differential Empowering Effects of Europeanization on the Autonomy of National Agencies

This article examines the influence of Europeanization on the relationship between ministries and agencies at the national level. The core argument is that the differentiated nature of the international environment (with policy development often transferred to the international level and policy implementation left at the national level) transforms national agencies into policy‐developing actors that shape policies without being directly influenced by their national political principals. The increasingly common involvement of national agencies in European policymaking processes thereby increases these agencies' policy‐development autonomy but does not change their role in policy implementation. We examine this argument by testing an innovative hypothesis—the differentiation hypothesis—on a combined data set of German and Dutch national agencies. Our empirical findings support the hypothesis in both countries, suggesting that similar effects can be expected in other contexts in which semiautonomous agencies are involved in transnational policymaking.     

Culture without the State? Reinvigorating Ukrainian Culture with Diasporic Efforts

This article explores the efforts of diaspora groups to reinvigorate culture. Cultural policy studies tend to focus on efforts of the state to fund and support the maintenance, enhancement, and preservation of national culture(s). This article contributes to this area of research by noting the effects of diaspora groups in achieving many of the same ends as official cultural policy through unofficial means. Using Ukraine as an interpretive case study, the article explores diasporic efforts to respond to a lack of cultural policy at home by invigorating Ukrainian culture abroad. Through the use of social networking tools, Ukrainian diaspora groups in the United States and Canada have been successful in maintaining their culture without the state. This study suggests that cultural policy research should involve not only official state‐centric efforts, but nonofficial diaspora‐centric efforts of cultural invigoration.     

Making policy for complex systems: A medical model for economics

In recent years, policy analysts have shown a growing interest in less rationalistic policymaking models. Medical knowledge may be useful to consider in this regard, since it combines practical knowledge with the findings of numerous analytic disciplines, and includes procedures for dealing with high uncertainty. In contrast, economic policymaking often applies analysis from a single discipline directly to a multifaceted problem. A broader “socioeconomic” approach emulating the medical model would incorporate variables such as political, social, cultural, psychic, and environmental factors.     

From evaluation to auditing and from programs to institutions: Causes and consequences of the decline of the program approach

In the wake of the “audit revolution” during the 1980s and 1990s, administrative systems across the western world have tended to gradually downplay evaluation as a component of the policy process. At the same time, auditing has dramatically increased in scope and depth, and has also, to some extent, come to fill the role in policymaking previously played by evaluation studies. This article reviews this development from the perspective of policymaking and institutional change or “drift.” Specifically, we look at the types of information and knowledge that are lost and gained as a result of these developments. We apply a cross‐national approach, drawing on the examples from the European and North American contexts.     

Centralization, Access, and Influence: The Reagan Administration and the Semiconductor Industry's Trade Complaints

This article explores how the relative centralization of decisionmaking authority can affect a societal group's ability to achieve its interests. It examines the US semiconductor industry's efforts to persuade the Reagan administration to press Japan on its import barriers and its firms' trade practices. I find that the industry's eventual success was facilitated by an institutional change that centralized the structure of decisionmaking authority. Centralization proved more favorable to the industry's influence in this case because it reduced the number of competing state interests involved in policymaking and concentrated authority in state units that shared the industry's preferences. To account for the change in this structure I focus on the interplay between government officials and policy windows. The analysis suggests that centralization may under some conditions be more conducive than decentralized structures to societal influence, and that modest institutional changes can have significant policy implications.     

Policy Legacies,Visa Reform and the Resilience of Immigration Politics

Comparative scholarship tacitly assumes immigration politics to be relatively rigid. A state's immigration policy legacy is said to institutionalise policy preferences, thereby making it difficult to implement lasting reforms that are inconsistent with that legacy. This presents difficulties for states with restrictionist legacies wanting to implement liberal reforms in response to the emergence of labour shortages or demographic problems. The supposed rigidity of immigration politics is scrutinised in this article through a systematic process analysis of developments in the United Kingdom over the past decade, where the Blair government confounded the UK's characterisation as a ‘reluctant immigration state’ to implement various liberal work visa reforms. The uncoordinated nature of policymaking and implementation, and the limited involvement of state and societal institutions in the reform process, reflect the UK's historical experience with restrictionist policies, and help to explain the subsequent reintroduction of strict visa controls. The case demonstrates that policy legacies indeed play a significant role in defining the character of the policymaking institutions that shape a state's immigration politics.