This article explains the failure of two long-term care (LTC) reforms attempted between 2005 and 2019 in Poland, and driven by policy entrepreneurs—individuals with a personal understanding of the challenges faced by LTC and determined to initiate policy change in the domain. The article inductively identifies the ‘outsider policy entrepreneur’ mechanism of policy reform. LTC in Poland is a negative case (or breakdown) of this mechanism, which occurs when a policy entrepreneur has enough political influence to initiate a formal reform proposal, but not enough to convince decision-makers to adopt it. The article combines an examination of the role of policy entrepreneurs in social policy change with an analysis of their interactions with domestic and foreign epistemic communities. Through showing how ‘foreign’ policy models are used by policy entrepreneurs to pursue domestic reform, the study contributes to the literature on transnational policy diffusion/transfer. The analysis is based on document analysis and 16 semi-directed expert interviews, which were used to process trace the explained outcome (failed reforms). The article concludes that the mechanism failures were due to the fact that involved policy entrepreneurs did not convince decision-makers of the need to reform LTC. Specifically, the contribution identifies two features of the political context in illiberal post-transition polities that interrupt the persuasion efforts of outsider policy entrepreneurs—the impossibility of inter-partisan cooperation and continuity, and the declining role of Western policy models as catalysts for change.

中文翻译：

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当政策企业家失败时：解释波兰长期护理改革的失败

本文解释了 2005 年至 2019 年期间在波兰尝试的两次长期护理 (LTC) 改革失败的原因，这些改革由政策企业家推动 - 个人对 LTC 面临的挑战有个人理解并决心在该领域发起政策变革。文章归纳确定了政策改革的“局外人政策企业家”机制。波兰的 LTC 是这种机制的一个负面案例（或崩溃），当政策企业家有足够的政治影响力发起正式的改革提案，但不足以说服决策者采用它时，就会发生这种情况。本文结合了对政策企业家在社会政策变革中的作用的考察，以及对他们与国内外认知共同体的互动的分析。通过展示政策企业家如何使用“外国”政策模型来进行国内改革，该研究为有关跨国政策扩散/转移的文献做出了贡献。该分析基于文件分析和 16 次半定向专家访谈，这些访谈用于处理跟踪解释结果（失败的改革）。文章的结论是，机制失败是由于政策企业家没有说服决策者需要改革 LTC。具体而言，该贡献确定了不自由的转型后政体中政治背景的两个特征，这些特征中断了外部政策企业家的说服努力——跨党派合作和连续性的不可能，以及西方政策模型作为变革催化剂的作用正在下降。