Neglected challenges to evidence-based policy-making: the problem of policy accumulation

Claims for evidence-based policy-making are motivated by the assumption that if practitioners and scholars want to learn about effective policy design, they also can. This paper argues that this is becoming more and more challenging with the conventional approaches due to the accumulation of national policy portfolios, characterized by (a) a growing number of different policy targets and instruments, that (b) are often interdependent and (c) reformed in an uncontrolled way. These factors undermine our ability to accurately relate outcome changes to individual components within the respective policy mix. Therefore, policy accumulation becomes an additional source of the well-known ‘attribution problem’ in evaluation research. We argue that policy accumulation poses fundamental challenges to existing approaches of evidence-based policy-making. Moreover, these challenges are very likely to create a trade-off between the need for increasing methodological sophistication on one side, and the decreasing political impact of more fine-grained and conditional findings of evaluation results on the other.     

Planning for Brexit: the Case of the 1975 Referendum

Both during and since the 2016 referendum on the UK's membership of the European Union, concerns were raised as to the absence of contingency planning within Whitehall. This situation was in direct contrast with 1975, when extensive planning took place for the possibility of a vote to leave the European Community. However, there has been little in the way of detailed analysis of the contingency planning undertaken in 1975. Using archival evidence of the Wilson government's preparations, this article highlights the complex challenge that withdrawal would have posed for the UK in 1975, the tensions that existed between the political imperative for a swift withdrawal, in the event of a leave vote, and the civil service's concerns as to whether such a withdrawal was deliverable. Finally, it shows how dependent the UK's position would have been on the approach taken by the other members of the EC.     

Plus ça Change,Plus C’est La Même Chose? A review of Paul Sabatier’s “An advocacy coalition framework of policy change and the role of policy-oriented learning therein”

Paul Sabatier’s 1988 Policy Sciences paper, “An advocacy coalition framework of policy change and the role of policy-oriented learning therein” (21:129–168), introduced the advocacy coalition framework (ACF) to the policy discipline. Over the past 30 years, the ACF has become a generalizable theory of policy change. Another feature is the ongoing critical self-assessment and revisions of the framework’s theoretical and empirical assumptions. As a result, there have been many reviews of the ACF. However, the popularity of Sabatier’s contribution and the most cited article in this journal is its wider significance beyond the ACF. A bibliometric analysis of 737 peer-reviewed publications citing this paper is undertaken. This is followed by a summary chronicling ACF reviews and scholarship comparing the ACF with other policy process theories and frameworks.     

Policy Advice from Outsiders: The Challenges of Policy Co-construction

The nature of policy work in nongovernment organizations (NGOs) is important consideration when understanding policy co-construction. Based on the results from a Canadian web-based survey of policy workers across five fields across three provinces, a multi-regression structural equation model suggests how NGO policy work can contribute to a greater collaboration on key policy issues and greater policy interaction between societal organizations and government agencies. The frequency of formal and informal invitations by governments played an important role in terms of the overall levels of interaction and stakeholder input. Networking activity was found to be important when addressing consultative-related issues, but only with NGO networks or their clients. Involvement in the early stages of policy development by the NGO policy workers did not lead to greater engagement with government officials, which may be a potential problem when their advice is sought after.     

Informational Cues,Partisan-Motivated Reasoning,and the Manipulation of Conspiracy Beliefs

In this article, we examine the relationship between partisan-motivated reasoning and uncertainty-inducing official information cues with respect to conspiracy beliefs. We find that while partisanship matters when it comes to conspiracy beliefs, the uncertainty-inducing and countervailing nature of official cues can further inflame conspiracy beliefs when it is not in the political interest of individuals to subscribe to a given conspiracy theory. Contrary to expectations, we find that cueing Democratic self-identifiers with different types of official responses to conspiracy theories that implicate Republicans has no effect. However, such informational cues do significantly increase conspiracy beliefs among Republicans, even when a Republican is implicated in the conspiracy theory. Although partisan-motivated reasoning has a baseline effect on conspiracy beliefs, the extent to which these beliefs can further be manipulated appears asymmetric across party lines. Simply put, Republicans appear to be more susceptible to conspiratorial cues than Democrats.     

Localizing Peacebuilding: The Arizona Market and the Evolution of U.S. Military Peacebuilding Priorities in Bosnia

ABSTRACT

This article examines peacebuilding localization, in particular how encounters with local contexts and actors shape external peacebuilders' priorities and practices. My vehicle for exploring this dynamic is the rapid emergence of a massive black market in northeast Bosnia, the ‘Arizona’ market, which developed on territory controlled by U.S. peacekeeping forces. I argue that the military's relationship with the market contributed to a shift from an initially minimalist, peacekeeping-centric, conception of the peacebuilding process toward the embrace of broader post-war political and economic initiatives, and identify three factors that influenced its unfolding in the case of Arizona: adaptation, embeddedness and place.     

Revenue Source and Electoral Accountability: Experimental Evidence from Local US Policymakers

Political Behavior - Existing research suggests that tax-reliant governments are more accountable to citizens. This pattern is consistent with micro-level evidence that citizens who are taxed are...