Journal: Policy & Politics

Abbreviation

Publisher

Policy Press

Journal Volumes

ISSN

1470-8442
0305-5736

Description

Filters

2020 - 20243
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Publications 1 - 3 of 3
  • New pathways to paradigm change in public policy: combining insights from policy design, mix and feedback
    Item type: Journal Article
    Sewerin, Sebastian; Cashore, Benjamin; Howlett, Michael (2022)
    Policy & Politics
    To tackle the manifold crises of our times, most notably the environmental crises we face, ambitious policy change is urgently needed to achieve the necessary radical transformation of our industrialised societies. Yet, while there is increasing demand for public policy scholarship to provide guidance on how policy should be designed to achieve such change, existing scholarship struggles to provide ???forward-looking??? recommendations. Within this context, our article takes a step back to reconsider the underlying logics of policy change. We argue that focusing on policy, its effect and the subsequent politics it triggers is best achieved by combining insights from the policy design, policy mix and policy feedback literatures. This combination allows us to re-evaluate which potential pathways towards policy change exist. The main contribution of our article is its proposition of two distinct pathways towards policy change, building on a systematic understanding of policy design elements. These pathways place greater emphasis on policy change happening (1) ???bottom-up??? through initial low-level design changes rather than ???top-down??? through high-level ideational change, as argued in earlier scholarship, (2) through the interplay of several policies in a complex mix. In this way, these pathways provide a useful framework for systematically analysing how policy should be designed to achieve ambitious policy change and thus enable transformative societal change.
  • Are responses to official consultations and stakeholder surveys reliable guides to policy actors' positions?
    Item type: Journal Article
    Ingold, Karin; Varone, Frédéric; Kammerer, Marlene; et al. (2020)
    Policy & Politics
  • Identifying and explaining policy preferences in Swiss water management
    Item type: Journal Article
    Bolognesi, Thomas; Lieberherr, Eva; Fischer, Manuel (2024)
    Policy & Politics
    Policy preferences are a key element in understanding the policy process. In this article, we conceptualise policy preferences as latent constructs, which can be identified in an inductive way, based on actors’ choice of policy instruments and organisational structures. To inductively identify policy preferences, we take an approach based on principal component analysis, informed by theory on preference formation. Using water supply in Switzerland as a case study, we propose an approach based on policy preference spaces to identify preferences based on clusters of choices. Our results show the presence of three distinct policy preferences: 1) local management with regional support, 2) local autonomy, and 3) strong regional management with local financing autonomy. We investigate the factors affecting the formation of these policy preferences through a regression analysis. Our results indicate that preference formation is affected by actor types and, to a lesser degree, by goal priority. In this way, the article makes two distinct contributions to the field. The first is a methodological contribution, through its proposition for measuring and operationalising policy preferences; and the second is a theoretical contribution, in demonstrating how policy preferences are influenced by actor types and goal priority it highlights the context-dependent nature of policy preferences.
Publications 1 - 3 of 3