One of key goals of deliberative mini-publics is to counteract expert domination in policymaking. Mini-publics can be expected to democratize expertise by providing citizens with good opportunities for weighing expert information. Yet, there are concerns about undue influence of experts even within mini-publics. We test these expectations by analysing data from an online mini-public organized in Finland

There has been revived scholarly interest in policy capacity recently. While it is widely assumed that capacity is important for policy performance, it is difficult to separate its impact from the effect of policy instruments to establish whether capacity can produce an independent and positive effect on target group behavior in relation to achieving policy objectives. Undertaking a critical case study

Much has been said theoretically about whether populism corrects the limitations of democracies, or instead damages their foundations. Yet we still know very little about how populist governments affect democratic policymaking in practice. Taking the classic policy cycle approach as a heuristic device, this article analyzes how populists influence agenda-setting, policy formulation and design, implementation

Over the last two decades, the design practice has been expanding to the public sphere to generate solutions for public challenges. In particular, the reflections on the design practice of public sector innovation (PSI) units, working in or with governments, are increasingly contributing to a growing body of literature attempting to characterise the practice in policy making. Although scholars conclude

This paper explores political drivers and policy process of the reform of the framework for Artificial Intelligence regulation and governance in the European Union (EU). Since 2017, the EU has been developing an integrated policy to tighten control and to ensure consumer protection and fundamental rights. This policy reform is theoretically interesting, raising the question of which conceptual approaches

As academic and political interest in citizen participation and democratic innovations is growing, the question of their impact on public policy remains essential to assess their genuine contribution to the normative project of democratization. Impact assessments of consultative participatory mechanisms are commonly conducted with a congruency approach—a desk-based research method which assesses impact

As part of Harold D. Lasswell’s policy sciences, the decisions functions emerged to explore and understand comparative policy processes. The decision functions specified different categories of purposes, roles, and responsibilities performed, to various extents and ways, by all governments. These included intelligence, recommendation, prescription, invocation, application, appraisal, and termination

This article questions the use of morality frames and gender stereotypes in discoursing about abortion. The morality policy literature puts abortion forward as the paradigmatic example of its object of investigation. Yet, as heated as abortion debates can get, the issue is not always manifest in the spotlight. We argue salience of the issue depends on active politicization through morality frames.

The European Union’s 2030 climate and energy package introduced fundamental changes compared to its 2020 predecessor. These changes included a stronger focus on the internal market and an increased emphasis on technology-neutral decarbonization while simultaneously de-emphasizing the renewables target. This article investigates whether changes in domestic policy strategies of leading member states

This article uses the concept of policy inaction to analyse data about the implementation of policy evaluations and public inquiries. Consequently, it produces outputs for two audiences. For those interested in policy learning and policy implementation the analysis identifies four ‘moments’ in which forms of inaction can influence the implementation of learned lessons in positive and negative ways

We know relatively little about the conditions that encourage people to jump into the political fray as policy entrepreneurs, advocates who devote substantial time, energy, and resources to campaigning for a policy goal. This paper aims to fill that gap by investigating the catalysts of policy entrepreneurship in municipalities across the State of New York, where between 2008 and 2012, hundreds of

There is a rapidly developing literature on risks that threaten the whole of humanity, or a large part of it. Discussion is increasingly turning to how such risks can be governed. This paper arises from a study of those involved the governance of risks from emerging technologies, examining the perceptions of global catastrophic risk within the relevant global policymaking community. Those who took

COVID-19 has caused 100s of millions of infections and millions of deaths worldwide, overwhelming health and economic capacities in many countries and at multiple scales. The immediacy and magnitude of this crisis has resulted in government officials, practitioners and applied scholars turning to reflexive learning exercises to generate insights for managing the reverberating effects of this disease

Complexity is inherent to the policy processes and to more and more domains such as environment or social policy. Complexity produces unexpected and counterintuitive effects, in particular, the phenomenon of policy regimes falling short of expectations while made by refined policies. This paper addresses this phenomenon by investigating the process of policy integration and its nonlinearities in the

The increasing international use of consulting firms in public administration has attracted warnings against diminishing policy capability, accountability and transparency. Whilst significant debates and multiple tensions exist, this article introduces an innovative Australian model which provides scope to harness and balance the strengths of the contributions of consultants and consultancy firms to

Digital technologies can be important to policy-makers and public servants, as these technologies can increase infrastructure performance and reduce environmental impacts. For example, utilizing data from sensors in sewer systems can improve their management, which in turn may result in better surface water quality. Whether such big data from sensors is utilized is, however, not only a technical issue

This article explores the relationship between policy narratives and the design of the Italian border management and external migration control regime in the last two decades. First, drawing from the theory of social construction and policy design and through a qualitative application of the Narrative Policy Framework, the article traces the evolution of narratives developed by key actors in government

The overuse of fertilizers in agriculture and their entry into freshwater has many negative impacts on biodiversity and poses problems for drinking water resources in Germany. In response to exceeding levels of nitrate concentrations in groundwater in parts of the country, an intense public dispute evolved and a significant policy change in fertilizer regulation occurred in 2020. Based on the German

Environmental threats increasingly entail important risks from government responses. In considering the risks of a new vector-borne disease, for example, decision-makers must also grapple with potential risks from responses such as the aerial spraying of pesticides. In communicating about these complex risks, public officials often choose different “frames” that promote different conceptualizations

Government agencies responsible for policy implementation have expertise on policy practicability, efficiency and effectiveness, and knowledge which is provided to policymakers as feedback. However, we know very little about the feedback dynamics in which implementing agencies provide different types of feedback with the intention that it is used by policymakers, and the strategic decisions underlying

This article examines policy experimentation in the context of policy learning in Canadian cultural policy. Despite the attraction of experimentation to encourage learning and thus improved policy outcomes, much of the literature on experimentation does not give sufficient attention to how it is operationalized in practice. Drawing from a novel dataset based on interviews with key actors, this article

Think tanks are expected to cut through the prevailing short-term government agenda of the day, and to inject long-term perspectives and research-based expertise into policy debates. In order to do so, they need to attract media attention to themselves in connection with those issue areas in which they have expertise, even if government is focusing elsewhere. Yet, existing studies of media attention

This paper investigates time variations in the implementation of legislative requests by the Swiss government. Combining the literature on executive–legislative relations with findings from implementation research, we focus on the procedural level and argue that implementation delays can occur because the government does not want to, cannot or should not implement faster. We test these mechanisms using

This contribution investigates how combinations of instruments, often called policy mixes, enhance policy learning processes at different levels. It analyzes the European Union’s (EU) Covenant of Mayors (CoM) that is underpinned by a set of learning instruments, to promote local action for sustainable energy and climate. The piece offers an original framework to explore whether and how the Covenant

Environmental problems are usually not tackled with path-departing policies but rather with incrementally adjusted or unchanged policies. One way to address incremental change is the policy feedback approach, which initially focussed on self-reinforcing feedback and path-dependency. Today, self-undermining feedback is also increasingly being studied, centring on agency and change. However, it is unclear

Policy design has returned as a central topic in public policy research. An important area of policy design study deals with effectively attaining desired policy outcomes by aligning goals and means to achieve policy design fit. So far, only a few empirical studies have explored the relationship between policy design fit and effectiveness. In this paper, we adopt the multilevel framework for policy

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced governments to impose major restrictions on individual freedom in order to stop the spread of the virus. With the successful development of a vaccine, these restrictions are likely to become obsolete—on the condition that people get vaccinated. However, parts of the population have reservations against vaccination. While this is not a recent phenomenon, it might prove

This article explores why governments do not respond to public compliance problems in a timely manner with appropriate instruments, and the consequences of their failure to do so. Utilising a case study of Italian vaccination policy, the article considers counterfactuals and the challenges of governing health policy in an age of disinformation. It counterposes two methods of governing vaccination compliance:

Although the Multiple Streams Framework (MSF) is frequently used to explain agenda setting and decision making across a variety of policy domains, it has been criticized for failing to contribute to theoretically rigorous and empirically falsifiable policy scholarship. This study argues that by explicitly attending to the institutional context in which a policy process occurs—a previously under-articulated

This article seeks to critique and extend recent work in the policy sciences, by Maor in particular, on disproportionate policy making—including policy overreaction and underreaction. While the disproportionate policy making thesis does help address assumptions that something is amiss in the policy process by capturing an imbalance between policy problems and the interventions to address them, we argue

The governance of several cross-cutting challenges, such as food security, climate change, and sustainable development, calls for integrative policy approaches. However, efforts to better theorize the drivers of integration beyond listing explanatory factors remain weak. Viewing integration as a process of policy change for dealing with complex problems, this study argues that policy integration analysis

Using ex ante analysis to predict policy outcomes is common practice in the world of infrastructure planning. However, accounts of its uses and merits vary widely. Advisory agencies and government think tanks advocate this practice to prevent cost overruns, short-term decision-making and suboptimal choices. Academic studies on knowledge use, on the other hand, are critical of how knowledge can be used

Social policy scholarship assumes that left-wing governments favour a stronger public provision of services, while right-wing politics promote privatization, largely as a matter of ideology. Yet the findings on Canadian provinces’ market-based housing instruments suggest that alternative views are possible. Left-leaning governments introduced private delivery mechanisms for economic as well as non-economic

Policy learning can alter the perceptions of both the seriousness and the causes of a policy problem, thus also altering the perceived need to do something about the problem. This then allows for the informed weighing of different policy options. Taking a social network perspective, we argue that the role of social influence as a driver of policy learning has been overlooked in the literature. Network

Policy design studies have addressed the role of political and institutional limitations in formulating effective climate policies including renewable energy targets (RETs). However, it is still not entirely clear how and why these limitations result in policy designs that are incapable of staying on track to meet the overall goals of the Paris Agreement on climate change. In order to deepen our understanding

Effectiveness has been understood at three levels of analysis in the scholarly study of policy design. The first is at the systemic level indicating what entails effective formulation environments or spaces making them conducive to successful design. The second reflects more program level concerns, surrounding how policy tool portfolios or mixes can be effectively constructed to address complex policy

Public administration, public policy, and political economy literatures are increasingly preoccupied with the role of agency in policy and institutional change, and the effects of institutions on the agency of individual actors. However, linkages between policy and institutional entrepreneurship in processes of institutionalization remain a black box. This article aims to fill this void. It contributes

Several of the most respected policy scholars, including H. Simon, J. W. Kingdon, G. Peters and M. Howlett, have observed a long time ago that decision makers often form their views on policy solutions irrespectively of concrete policy issues, and that their views on policy means often “chase problems.” This proposition labeled in this article as “autonomy of policy instrument attitudes” (APIA) claims

Algorithms are increasingly used in different domains of public policy. They help humans to profile unemployed, support administrations to detect tax fraud and give recidivism risk scores that judges or criminal justice managers take into account when they make bail decisions. In recent years, critics have increasingly pointed to ethical challenges of these tools and emphasized problems of discrimination

Public policy education in the Global South has mushroomed in the past 2 decades, concomitant with governance models that provide an alternative to liberal Western democracies. However, not much empirical evidence exists on the drivers and implications of this trend, with few exceptions that point toward a form of internationalization in the policy sciences. This study aims to fill this scholarly gap

Poverty-alleviation initiatives in lower-income countries are challenged by intelligence deficits that cause suboptimal designs that threaten their effectiveness, targeting, and sustainability. The uncertainty of theory and information, the adverse consequences of conventional family-level “means testing,” and unpredictable future events and conditions call for auto-targeting and auto-correcting policy

Metropolitan cities can serve as laboratories of sustainable development by experimenting with innovative sustainability programs while leveraging the advantages of metropolitan areas. With the importance of cities’ sustainability efforts, scholars have increasingly explored what factors motivate local governments to implement voluntary sustainability programs by focusing on internal government and

The precautionary nature of risk regulation in the European Union (EU) and the United States (US) is an ongoing debate. Theoretical contentions over ‘who is more precautionary’ confirm that the degree of relative precaution may lead to different levels of protection, but also suggest that precaution needs to be evaluated against different parts of the regulatory process. This paper addresses a new

In this paper, we explore the assumption that blame-attribution can be an effective rhetorical strategy for non-elite interest groups who want power holders to be attentive to their demands. Through a qualitative analysis of two pro-migrant campaigns led by grassroot activists in Sweden, one taking place in 2005 and the other in 2017, we offer a nuanced empirical examination of non-elite initiated

Previous scholarship has focused primarily on how citizens’ form policy preferences and how those preferences are taken into account in democratic decision-making. However, the temporal aspect of policy preferences has received little attention, although many significant societal problems have consequences that extend far into the future. To fill the gap, we examine to what extent citizens are willing

This article develops a heuristic framework to help analysts navigate an important but under-researched issue: ‘policy success for whom?’ It identifies different forms of policy success across the policy making, program, political and temporal realms, to assess how a specific policy can differentially benefit a variety of stakeholders, including governments, lobbyists, not-for-profits, community groups

When the actions of private military contractors result in civilian casualties during war, who do citizens blame? This study argues blame attributions can be shaped by people’s inferences about the motivation of actors operating on behalf of the government. Using national survey data, this study randomizes whether casualties are the result of state military forces or private military forces contracted

The COVID-19 crisis has revealed structural failures in governance and coordination on a global scale. With related policy interventions dependent on verifiable evidence, pandemics require governments to not only consider the input of experts but also ensure that science is translated for public understanding. However, misinformation and fake news, including content shared through social media, compromise

The design of public subsidies for long-term care (LTC) programmes to support frail, elderly individuals in Europe is subject to both tight budget constraints and increasing demand preassures for care. However, what helps overcoming the constraints that modify LTC entitlements? We provide a unifying explanation of the conditions that facilitate the modification of public financial entitlements to LTC