ABSTRACT

The Multiple Streams Framework (MSF) has developed into one of the major theoretical lenses to explain policy change. However, it has been mostly used to explain policy formation whereas studies on policy termination remain scarce. This article addresses this gap. It combines the MSF and the literature on policy termination to study both the formation and the termination of one and the same policy. We explain why an algorithm-based university admission system in France, Admission Post Bac (APB), was introduced in 2008 before being abolished ten years later. While we find that the problem stream and the political stream were ripe and facilitated policy change in both cases, a policy entrepreneur coupling a policy solution with the open window could only be found for the introduction of APB. Instead, the termination was mainly characterized by enormous problem pressure. Our results contribute to theoretical refinement of the MSF and to empirical studies on political dynamics in the understudied field of algorithmic governance.

摘要

多流框架 (MSF) 已发展成为解释政策变化的主要理论视角之一。然而，它主要用于解释政策形成，而关于政策终止的研究仍然很少。本文解决了这一差距。它结合了无国界医生和有关政策终止的文献来研究同一政策的形成和终止。我们解释了为什么在 2008 年引入了基于算法的法国大学录取系统，Admission Post Bac (APB)，然后在十年后被废除。虽然我们发现问题流和政治流在这两种情况下都已经成熟并促进了政策变革，但只有在引入 APB 时才能找到将政策解决方案与开放窗口相结合的政策企业家。反而，终止的主要特点是问题压力大。我们的研究结果有助于 MSF 的理论改进和算法治理领域中政治动态的实证研究。