Narrative dynamics in European Commission AI policy—Sensemaking,agency construction,and anchoring

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is arguably one of the most powerful and disruptive technologies of our times which may pose challenges as well as opportunities to contemporary political organizations. Studying AI from a lens of perceived uncertainty, this article studies the policy response of the European Commission toward this fast-paced emerging technology. By empirically focusing on the Commission's policy process from start to end, from initial communication to concrete proposal, the article shows how different types of narratives are used to construct the new policy area of AI policy. A novel theoretical framework is constructed building on a combination of narrative organizational studies and narrative policy studies, displaying how narratives play a key role in organizational sensemaking, agency construction and anchoring. The paper finds that the Commission broadly makes sense of AI technologies with a future-oriented discourse, establishes agency to existing and new forms of political organizing and anchors the policy response within the overarching frame of the EU single market policy. The main contribution of the paper is that it shows how political organizations settles uncertainty through narratives and sketches a way forward through establishing policy goals and anchoring them within pre-existing lines of political mobilization.     

Administrative burden in digital public service delivery: The social infrastructure of library programs for e-inclusion

In their efforts to digitize public service delivery, countries increasingly use algorithms based on mathematical models, data and/or a combination of different administrative datasets to issue decisions, but recent studies point towards challenges around citizens' understanding, accessing, and filing objections to such automated decisions. This paper focuses on the social infrastructure supporting citizens that struggle with accessing such services. To address this, we ask: How does the social infrastructure affect administrative burdens associated with digital government services? This is studied in the Dutch context through expert interviews and observations of support programs in libraries. We find that although libraries as primary sites for these services may pose the disadvantage of being more difficult to reach for low-literate citizens, advantages are their organizational structure at the local level as well as their currently changing role to include a growing range of services, including (digital) skills courses.     

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.     

Policy beliefs,policy learning,and risk perception: Exploring the formation of local creative Placemaking-catalyzed policy network

This article studies the formation of a local Creative Placemaking (CPM) policy network based on the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) and social capital perspective of policy networks. This article hypothesizes that policy beliefs, policy learning, social capital, and the perceived risks induced by defections, as well as macro-level changes in the broader political and socio-economic system, influence partner selection in the local CPM policy networks. The study collected survey data from policy actors participating in the Franklinton CPM-catalyzed revitalization project in Columbus, Ohio. An exponential random graph model (ERGM) was applied to test the hypotheses. The findings partially support the hypotheses: policy learning, certain secondary policy beliefs, and risk perceptions of changes in economic and political factors are correlated with tie formation. The reciprocity-driven bonding structure underlies the Franklinton CPM policy network, suggesting that policy actors perceive the Franklinton CPM policy network as a high-defection-risk network. This study has implications for policy makers in designing engagement strategies to better involve stakeholders holding different beliefs and occupying different network positions.     

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.     

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.     

The Politics of Technology Decline: Discursive Struggles over Coal Phase‐Out in the UK

The decline of carbon intensive technologies is a key element in the ongoing energy transition and our attempts to tackle climate change. At the same time, our understanding of technology decline and of the associated policies and politics is still limited. This paper builds on the sustainability transitions perspective, a novel approach to analyze socio‐technical transformation, including the complex interplay of policy and technology change. We study the decline of coal‐fired power generation in the United Kingdom from 2000 to 2017 by analyzing the discourse in The Guardian. We find scientists and environmental NGOs criticizing coal for climate and health reasons. Government and incumbent businesses tried to re‐legitimate coal but eventually, their resistance collapsed and coal was almost completely abandoned in just a few years. Particularly devastating for coal were failed promises around carbon capture and storage, rapid diffusion of wind energy, and pressure from various policies. This study contributes to better understanding the contested nature of decline, and the interplay of discursive struggles, technology change, and public policy in sustainability transitions.     

Exploring Aggregate vs. Relative Public Trust in Administrative Agencies that Manage Spent Nuclear Fuel in the United States

Trust is a key component of democratic decision‐making and becomes even more salient in highly technical policy areas, where the public relies heavily on experts for decision making and on the information provided by federal agencies. Research to date has not examined whether the members of the public place different levels of trust in the various agencies that operate within the same policy subsystem, especially in a highly technical subsystem such as that of nuclear energy and waste management. This paper explores public trust in multiple agencies operating within the same subsystem, trust in each agency relative to aggregate trust across agencies that operate within the nuclear waste subsystem, and trust in alternative agencies that have been suggested as possible players in the decision‐making process. We find that trust accorded to different federal agencies within the nuclear waste subsystem varies. The variation in trust is systematically associated with multiple factors, including basic trust in government, perceptions about the risks and benefits of nuclear energy/waste management, party identification, and education. These findings have significant implications for research on public trust in specific government agencies, alternative policy entities, and for policy makers who want to design robust and successful policies and programs in highly technical policy domains.     

Electric Shock: The 2012 India Blackout and Public Confidence in Politicians

How do disruptions in basic public service delivery shape people’s perceptions of politicians? We offer evidence from the July 2012 blackout in India, the largest in human history. Using data from the India Human Development Survey, we compare confidence in politicians between households that were surveyed during the outage and affected by it (treatment) and only days before it (control). Balance statistics show that the treatment and control groups are statistically indistinguishable, and further tests indicate that there was no disturbance to the pattern of surveying. Far from undermining public confidence in politicians, the outage increased it, as citizens reacted to the anxiety created by the crisis. The implications are normatively troubling, as politicians seem to have reaped benefits from disruptions in public service delivery.