European Union External Trade Policy: Multilevel Principal–Agent Relationships

This article examines the potential political influences on European Union (EU) external trade policymaking. Given the EU's volume of international trade and its extensive involvement in bilateral and multilateral trade arrangements, a better understanding of how the EU makes external trade policy is increasingly important. It is an extremely complex process—involving the EU public, the 25 member states' parliaments and governments, and the institutions of the EU, including the Council of Ministers, the European Parliament, and the European Commission. It is a system of multilevel governance with overlapping jurisdictions with numerous potential access points for societal interests to influence European external trade policy. In this article, we evaluate the probable political channels that societal interests could use to influence EU external trade policy. We employ the principal–agent (P–A) framework to examine five of the more important P–A relationships that are likely to influence EU external trade policymaking. We conclude that EU policymaking as it pertains to external trade is quite insulated from general public pressures. The primary institutions involved in external trade policymaking are the EU Council of Ministers and the Commission—both of which are largely insulated from the public. Future empirical work should focus on this relationship between the Council of Ministers and the Commission.     

Boundary spanning regimes and public policy change: the convergence of welfare and immigration policies

The concept of boundary spanning regimes has emerged to describe activity across policy subsystems that seek to manage ‘wicked’ public policy problems. This paper examines two existing public policy theories, namely those of exogenous shocks and the Advocacy Coalition Framework theories and assesses their capacity to explain why boundary spanning regimes emerge. It argues that broad structural conditions play an important role in shaping boundary spanning activity in the case studies discussed in this paper, indicating limitations in these theories which tend to overlook such conditions. The paper tests the explanations for policy change through original qualitative analysis of incremental convergence across the welfare and immigration policy fields in Australia from 1947 to 1996.     

How Electoral Systems Can Influence Policy Innovation

This paper argues that in certain areas of policy, electoral systems can influence policy innovation (how early countries will adopt certain policies). Electoral systems influence the number of parties that win representation and thereby influence the diversity of perspectives included in the policymaking process. It is argued here that this diversity facilitates elite and public consideration of new issues and ideas, and consequently, it leads to earlier debate and action on these issues and ideas. This dynamic is particularly relevant to controversial issues and ideas that major parties may be hesitant to address and that minor parties may be more incentivized to promote. In this paper, two issues/ideas are considered: extending rights to same‐sex couples and making material sacrifices to protect the environment. I show that countries with more proportional electoral systems tend to act earlier to protect the environment and that they tend to be early adopters of civil union legislation. These results are also supported by World Values Survey data showing public preference patterns that support these policy outcomes.     

Doing democracy and governance in the fast lane? Towards a ‘politics of time’ in an accelerated polity

This article examines the relationship between time, governance and political participation through a critical engagement with the ‘acceleration thesis’. Whilst the acceleration thesis argues that the ‘shrinking of the present’ is a condition of contemporary governance, others have viewed it as dysfunctional to the democratic process and effective policymaking. By drawing on a wide range of literature and through the use of illustrative examples, this article argues that slow and fast politics have strengths and weaknesses when it comes to the practice of governance and democratic participation. In turn, questions are raised about how public organisations and others might manage temporality and change in an ‘accelerated polity’. The article concludes by calling for further research into the ‘politics of time’ and its effects on public policymaking and political participation.     

Participation in Policy Streams: Testing the Separation of Problems and Solutions in Subnational Policy Systems

The multiple streams theory of national policymaking has been influential in the study of public administration and public policy—if not without a fair bit of controversy. While some laud the model for its openness to the important role of policy entrepreneurs and the irrationalities of the decision‐making processes, others criticize the model for its lack of readily testable propositions. This article identifies a series of testable propositions in the multiple streams model (particularly that discussed by Kingdon). We assess whether participation in local policymaking (focusing on school district policymaking related to violence prevention) is characterized by “separate streams” of participants or is dominated by organized participants like interest groups or policy specialists. We found evidence of unity (rather than separation) in the policymaking process and scant evidence of elite, organized interests dominating the policymaking process. The results call into question a key assumption of the multiple streams model.     

The Conditioning Effects of Policy Salience and Complexity on American Political Institutions

Years ago, Bill Gormley introduced public policy scholars to a new and innovative salience- complexity typology for regulatory policies. This typology not only helps scholars catalog numerous policies into distinct categories, but also helps explain variation in political processes. Specifically, different policies provide different incentives for political actors to be involved in policymaking. Salience encourages activity on the part of elected officials; complexity often requires policymaking outside of the public sphere. In this article, I extend Gormley's salience-complexity typology to more than just regulatory policies and confirm that levels of institutional activity vary across this range of public policies. I also expand on Gormley's contribution by differentiating the distinct impacts that policy type has on the policy activities of Congress and the presidency, and propose that institutional activity differs according to the dynamics of a policy's salience.     

Topping Off and Bottoming Out: Setting Budget Priorities Through Executive Power

This article examines the role of the institutional power of executives in public budgeting; specifically, how executives change spending on particular budget items. Leveraging extant theories of the policy process concerning preference expression, attention, and institutions, we argue that executives deepen large cuts and boost large increases in budgetary change. The strictures of the budgetary process force trade-offs for executives in preference expression such that increases to preferred categories typically require decreases in other categories. Literatures in public policy and political representation suggest that all executives would like to express fiscal preferences, thereby contributing to categorical budget oscillations; however, not all executives are created equal. We employ quantile regression to examine whether the institutional strength of governors determine cuts, stasis, and expansion in spending across all budget functions in the American states between 1985 and 2009. Our model includes a host of political and economic variables found in the literature of fiscal policymaking, such as partisanship and divided government. The desire to change policy may be widely shared across executives, but we find that the ability to “top off” categorical increases and bottom out categorical decreases is a function of an executive's capacity to call attention to preferred categories via agenda-setting power and to secure those changes via veto power. The findings show strong governors are well positioned to influence public policy through the budgetary process.     

The Dynamics and Interactions Between the President's and the Public's Civil Rights Agendas: A Study in Presidential Leadership and Representation

Past research views presidents as reactive and minor actors in the civilrights policy process. However, that research has focused solely on the latter stages of the policy process. This report views the president's role from an agendasetting perspective. A content analysis reveals that presidents lead public opinion on civil rights, but that the public has little impact on the president's civil rights agenda. The distinction between discretionary and required agenda items explains this asymmetry between the president and the public in civil rights policymaking. A fuller notion of policymaking that includes all stages of the process, from agendasetting to implementation and evaluation, is required to understand the role of the president in civil rights policymaking and leads us to revise the perception that presidents play reactive and minor roles in civil rights policy.     

Theories of Governance: Comparative Perspectives on Seattle's Light Rail Project

Governance entails the formulation and implementation of public policies across organizational and sectoral boundaries through coalitions, contracts, and networks. Studies of governance tend to cluster loosely into two theoretic traditions: rational choice and sociological institutionalism. Where the former analyzes actors’ individual interests and information, the latter examines their joint relationships and norms. These different analytic foci can be difficult to reconcile, leaving scholars at a loss as to how to cumulate insights and knowledge across the theoretic traditions. To understand better how the two traditions conflict and support one another in the analysis of governance, this article distinguishes domains of governance and identifies the different theories that the traditions use to study each domain. A case study of a rail transit project compares the insights from these theories, and assesses the quality and the complementarities of the explanations they offer. An analysis of the case generates propositions about the comparative utility of different concepts and theoretic traditions for understanding key governance phenomena.     

Cross-Coalition Coordination in Collaborative Environmental Governance Processes

Collaborative governance processes seek to engage diverse policy actors in the development and implementation of consensus-oriented policy and management actions. Whether this is achieved, however, largely depends on the degree to which actors with different beliefs coordinate their actions to achieve common policy goals—a behavior known as cross-coalition coordination. Drawing on the Advocacy Coalition Framework and collaborative governance literatures, this study analyzes cross-coalition coordination in three collaborative environmental governance processes that seek to manage water in the Colorado River Basin. Through comparative analysis, it highlights the complex relationship among the institutional design of a collaborative governance process, how and why actors choose to engage in cross-coalition coordination, and the consequent policy outputs they produce. The findings advance policy scholars’ nascent understanding of cross-coalition coordination and its potential to affect policymaking dynamics.     

Bureaucratic Leverage over Policy Choice: Explaining the Dynamics of State-Level Reforms in Telecommunications Regulation

While state governments have enjoyed greater control over regulating local telephone service providers since 1984, movement toward efficiency-based policy reform (e.g., adoption of competitive markets) has proceeded slowly. We investigate this pattern by addressing how the degree of policy discretion held by state public utility commissions (PUCs) affects reform of local telephone exchange regulation. Using precise measures of both PUC discretion and state policy changes over time, we find that states with "stronger" PUCs (more policymaking authority) are significantly more likely to move toward efficiency-based policy regimes and away from traditional rate-of-return regimes. Greater PUC discretion systematically related to state adoption of efficiency-based reforms over time suggests that regulators are using updated information about policy impacts to inform their policymaking activities. Our findings contradict a common presumption that regulatory bureaucracies are simply motivated by a desire to increase their control over policymaking. Instead, state PUCs are a key source of telecommunications policy reform in the states.     

Policy Diffusion and Strategies for Promoting Policy Change: Evidence From California Local Gun Control Ordinances

Recent research efforts on policy innovation and diffusion largely have focused upon policymaking at the state government level. In this article we seek to develop an understanding of the ways momentum for policy change can be generated among receptive local governments. We use gun control policymaking within California to illustrate how local government characteristics, the presence of regional associations, and the establishment of interest groups may lead to policy development and diffusion. We also identify linkages between interest groups, focusing events, and the successful use of a new image of gun violence as a public health problem, yielding insights into strategies that may be used successfully to promote policy change.     

Beyond Subsystems: Policy Regimes and Governance

We suggest attention to policy regimes provides a fruitful means for joining the contributions of scholars who study policy processes with those who are concerned with governance challenges. Our research synthesis underscores the limits of existing theorizing about policy processes for problems that span multiple areas of policy and highlights the prospects for and limitations of governing beyond the boundaries of subsystems. We suggest new avenues for theorizing and research in policy processes based on the concept of a boundary‐spanning policy regime. We develop notions about this type of policy regime within the context of the broader literature about regimes in political science, discuss the forces that shape the strength and durability of such regimes, and provide a variety of examples. This synthesis challenges the focus of policy process scholars on subsystems and broadens the traditional focus on policymaking to consideration of the dynamics of governing.     

Policy Analysis for What? The Effectiveness of Nonpartisan Policy Research Organizations

For the past several decades, scholars have studied the role of policy research in decision making. Depending how "use" is measured, the results have indicated only modest or indirect impacts. This study takes another direction to studying knowledge utilization, comparing the influence of nonpartisan policy research organizations in 19 states on their principal clients: state legislators. Nonpartisan research agencies represent a particularly rigorous test since the literature on knowledge utilization questions whether nonpartisan policy analysis organizations (NPROs) can remain neutral and contribute meaningfully to policymaking. Further, this analysis is comparative across states, studies institutions rather than specific reports or policy domains, and examines multiple types of "use." Using the results of surveys of both agencies and legislators, the results indicate a strong association between the size and type of policy research organizations and legislators' assessments of use, even controlling for political and ideological factors. This suggests that policy analysis organizations—even those in a highly politicized environment—have a significant impact on policymaking, mainly by providing information and analysis to decision makers but also in influencing public policy outcomes.     

Agents of Change: The Role of Public Managers in Public Policy

Our article outlines a number of ways that theories of public management can contribute to the work of public policy scholars. We first outline some of the ways in which public managers have been incorporated into previous work on public policy, and the limitations faced by previous treatments. We then discuss the role that public management plays in the policy process, with a specific focus on managerial quality, networking, and performance evaluation.     

Policy Subsystem Configurations and Policy Change: Operationalizing the Postpositivist Analysis of the Politics of the Policy process

Over the past two decades thinking about the role of politics in the policy process has taken several different shapes. Analysts in the "positivist" school of policy analysis have tended to use restricted notions of politics in their search for policy determinants or causes of policy change. This approach can be contrasted usefully with "postpositivist" analyses, which emphasize the role played by policy discourses in the policy process. This article discusses the manner in which policy networks and policy communities integrate ideas and interests in public policymaking and provide an opportunity to overcome the positivist/post-positivist conceptual dichotomy. It proposes a model setting out how different subsystem configurations relate to paradigmatic and intraparadigmatic processes of policy change. The paper suggests that the identification of the nature of the policy subsystem in a given policy sector reveals a great deal about its propensity to respond to changes in ideas and interests and is therefore a good indicator of the likely effect "politics," in either the restrictive or broad sense of the term, will have on policymaking.     

Modeling Issue Definitions Using Quantitative Text Analysis

Issue definitions, the way policy issues are understood, are an important component for understanding the policymaking process. Research on issue definitions has been divided between a macro level that examines collective issue definitions and a micro level focusing on the ways in which policy actors frame policy issues. This article develops a model of issue definitions that assumes issues are multidimensional, competition exists among policy actors in defining issues, and that collective issue definitions can be understood as the aggregation of individual issue definitions. This model is then estimated using quantitative text analysis. While various approaches to text analysis and categorization have been used by scholars, latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), a specific type of topic modeling, is used to estimate issue definitions. Using LDA, witness testimony taken from Congressional hearings that occurred from 1975 to 2012 about the issue of used nuclear fuel (UNF) is examined and seven distinct dimensions of the UNF debate are estimated. The construct validity of these dimensions is checked by testing them against two major policy changes that occurred in the UNF domain. I conclude with a discussion of the strengths and weakness of topic modeling, and how this approach could be used to test hypotheses drawn from several of the major policymaking theories.     

Theories of and in the Policy Process

Like public administration before it, public policy has an uneasy place in the discipline of political science. The stress is most obvious in the distinction between theories that attempt to explain the policy process and theories that are useful to those who seek to operate within the policy process. Accommodating this stress within the disciplinary boundaries of political science poses a difficult challenge.     

新自由主义的危机与都市治理——从全球到地方

自2008年的经济危机之后,新自由主义作为西方国家和城市治理的主要手段也受到根本性的挑战,这些政治经济的失败,最终表现在都市空间的治理当中。本文将以新自由主义的扩张案例入手,通过国内外都市空间治理的实践经验,剖析新自由主义所带来的短期和长期的政治经济危机后果,并讨论全球不同空间尺度当中撤退空间的治理与挑战。新自由主义的问题不仅存在于西方国家,在网络时代和全球化的趋势下,资本的累积是在全球范围内产生危机,亚洲国家以及中国也必须思考如何应对危机,以及探索后新自由主义的发展道路。最后,文章从全球到地方的撤退空间讨论当中,反思新自由主义作为一种全球性的都市治理政策在全球的流动,认为就后政治的城市来说,要超越新自由主义的局限还有待观察,中国城市走向后新自由主义的治理转型就必须勇于摆脱英美社会脉络所产生的都市治理论述,建构符合地方社会脉络的理论和实践。     

Integrating Delegation into the Policy Theory Literature

Public policy scholars have developed a number of theories of the policymaking process. Their work has come to define what some now refer to as the "policy theory" literature. Our task is to identify theoretical and empirical courses of study that will advance this research program. We limit ourselves to identifying an existing theory that already provides such an advance and discuss some of its theoretical benefits and empirical support. Specifically, we make the case that there exists a well-developed theory of delegation that rivals what we deem to be the best of the existing policy theories. We also suggest that existing theoretical frameworks might benefit from incorporating delegation theory explicitly and conclude that policy research has much to contribute to the development and useful application of delegation models.