Is Morality Policy Different? Testing Sectoral and Institutional Explanations of Policy Change

We analyze morality policy change from the perspective of punctuated equilibrium theory (PET) to test whether reform dynamics in this policy sector follow a distinct pattern. First, we propose a new measurement scheme capturing changes in the intensity of morality policy output. Second, we demonstrate that morality policy change is strongly punctuated. Finally, and most importantly, we show that the degree of policy punctuations varies between different domains of morality policy, but not according to institutional features operating on the country level, supporting existing PET research, which has discovered similar domain‐specific dynamics in changes of public spending. Specifically, punctuations are particularly pronounced in areas of manifest morality policy, that is, policies characterized by strong value conflicts, whereas punctuations are less pronounced for latent morality policies, that is, policies in which other dimensions of conflict are present next to the value dimension. Significant differences in reform dynamics are neither discerned for countries belonging to the religious or the secular world, nor for countries with majoritarian or consensual democracies. The analysis relies on an original dataset capturing legislative changes in five manifest (abortion, euthanasia, prostitution, pornography, and homosexuality), and three latent morality policies (drugs, gambling, and handguns) in 19 European countries (1960–2010).     

Is Good Policy Unimplementable? Reflections on the Ethnography of Aid Policy and Practice

Despite the enormous energy devoted to generating the right policy models in development, strangely little attention is given to the relationship between these models and the practices and events that they are expected to generate or legitimize. Focusing on the unfolding activities of a development project over more than ten years as it falls under different policy regimes, this article challenges the assumption that development practice is driven by policy, suggesting that the things that make for ‘good policy’— policy which legitimizes and mobilizes political support — in reality make it rather unimplementable within its chosen institutions and regions. But although development practice is driven by a multi‐layered complex of relationships and the culture of organizations rather than policy, development actors work hardest of all to maintain coherent representations of their actions as instances of authorized policy, because it is always in their interest to do so. The article places these observations within the wider context of the anthropology of development and reflects on the place, method and contribution of development ethnography.     

Advocacy Coalitions,Policy Stability,and Policy Change in China: The Case of Birth Control Policy, 1980–2015

This study used the advocacy coalition framework (ACF) to explain stability and change in China's national birth control policy from 1980 to 2015. We found that policy remained stable, despite internal and external changes to the relevant subsystem, from 1980 to 2013. The stability was explained by the dominant advocacy coalition's mobilization of considerable resources to defend its policy core beliefs. Policy changes in 2013 and 2015 were caused by a combination of external and internal perturbations, in addition to policy-oriented learning and advocacy by two expert-led minority advocacy coalitions. The case showed that the openness and plurality of China's policy processes had increased over time but were still limited in comparison with those in Western democracies. The case analysis confirmed two policy change hypotheses and suggested a mechanism for policy change: a hierarchically superior jurisdiction is more likely to impose a major policy change when it learns that the change is an adaptation to internal and external perturbations and that adopting the change will serve the jurisdiction's political interests.     

Local Media and Experts: Sources of Environmental Policy Initiation?

Research on the process of policy change often involves a direct or indirect analysis of the roles of policy entrepreneurs and the mass media. In Colorado, beginning in 1998, twelve communities decided to obtain water rights for recreational in-channel purposes such as kayaking and whitewater rafting. These water rights stirred political controversy within some communities in Colorado related to spending public money, appropriate uses of water, and the role of recreation in local economies. Using a comparative case study research method, this research analyzes the role that policy entrepreneurs and local media coverage of recreational water rights played in initiating policy change in local communities. The most critical finding from this study is that in communities where citizens acted as policy entrepreneurs there was more controversy, less positive media coverage, and more media coverage early in the process. This case contradicts the assumption that local media coverage helps to highlight policy problems within communities. It supports the idea that experts wield higher levels of influence than citizens in promoting policy agendas.     

Political Power and Policy Design: Why Are Policy Alternatives Constrained?

Little research examines the stage of the policy process during which policy alternatives are formulated. Using quantitative and qualitative data from Swedish local politics, we address this deficiency by analyzing the process by which the number of specific policy alternatives is reduced. The findings suggest that, in approximately 20 percent of issues, more than one alternative will reach all politicians making the binding decisions. Most local politicians, in both the majority and opposition factions, think that they lack sufficient information on alternative policy designs. We also find a “political bias,” that is, alternatives are discarded at an early stage because they are deemed not politically feasible. Politicians outside the inner circles, especially those with higher education, would like to see more policy alternatives to discuss and from which they can make choices.     

The End of the Beginning?: Welsh Regional Policy and Objective One

'West Wales and the Valleys' now qualify for EU Objective One status, entitled to draw down up to 1.3 billion in EU funds, matched from public and private sources between 2000 and 2006. However, there are many issues raised by the process of organizing the subsequent programme. There are questions over policy focus in the economically diverse Objective One areas, how governance of these policies will work, and the wider implications of Objective One in financial and political terms. There is also debate over previous regional policy initiatives in a Wales that for many years had access to a relatively large share of the UK's regional policy budget and EU funds, yet still faced falling GDP per head as a proportion of the UK average, west Wales and the Valleys' very Objective One status relying on GDP per capita under 75% of the EU average.     

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.     

Does Policy Diffusion Need Space? Spatializing the Dynamics of Policy Diffusion

For decades, scholars in multiple disciplines have examined spatial diffusion, or the spatiotemporal properties associated with the diffusion of innovations. These properties include contagious, hierarchical, and relocation diffusion. Each of these refers to a spatial model that epitomizes how innovations spread among geographic locations. Policy diffusion, a separate but homologous research tradition, had its theoretical underpinnings in spatial diffusion. However, contemporary policy diffusion has focused largely on mechanism‐based diffusion. This article demonstrates how exploratory spatial data analysis can be used to uncover spatial policy diffusion properties. In this study, municipal smoking regulation adoptions, religious‐based initiatives, and bag ban and bag fees are examined. This study finds evidence that for each policy more than one property is occurring; therefore, this study proposes that a hybrid model best explains diffusion. This article demonstrates how examining spatial diffusion properties, in addition to diffusion mechanisms, can improve the conceptualization of diffusion theories, enhance mechanism or theory‐based specification of diffusion models, and unravel the specific regional or neighboring causal pathways linking policies between adopting jurisdictions.     

The Rise of the “City-region” Concept and its Development Policy Implications

As well as enjoying a rich scientific history, the concept of the “city-region” has also attracted particular attention in recent years. Combinations of an urban core or cores, linked to semi-urban and rural hinterland by functional ties, are increasingly regarded as the “adequate” scale for the implementation of development policies. The popularization and widespread use of the city-region concept for policy-making has important implications for the design and implementation of development strategies. It first signals a change from sectoral to territorial approaches to development and requires the adjustment of development strategies to widely varying contexts, leading to much greater policy diversity and innovation. It also involves a more complex governance structure, characterized by the horizontal and vertical coordination of numerous institutional public and private actors, and enables experimentation with bottom-up and participatory policy-making. This paper evaluates these changes and critically addresses their normative implications, especially in light of the facts that there is still little agreement on how the city-region is defined, that the term has become appropriated by urban elites, and that the problems faced by city-regions may not be that different from those operating at other geographical scales.     

Cooptation of ENGOs or Treadmill of Production? Advocacy Coalitions and Climate Change Policy in Finland

Corporatist Nordic welfare states are largely thought to have exemplary environmental policies. Finland, however, was labeled “a failing ecostate” by a recent study owing to its weak climate change policy. Why is Finland different? We use data from a survey of organizations belonging to the Finnish climate change policy network to investigate two alternative explanations related to policy networks. According to the Cooptation Thesis, inclusive corporatist polities, where environmental NGOs (ENGOs) have support from and access to the state, formulate less ambitious policies because environmentalists moderate their views to secure state funding and political access. Second, according to the Treadmill of Production Theory, the decisive feature of Nordic corporatism with regard to environmental policy is the tripartite system linking business interests, labor unions, and the state in a coalition that prioritizes economic over ecological values. The results indicate that the ENGO Coalition is the least influential, least resourceful, smallest, least linked to the others, and not particularly moderate. The Treadmill Coalition is the most influential, most resourceful, second largest, well linked to the state, and least ecological in its beliefs. Thus, of the two policy network explanations, the dominance of the Treadmill Coalition rather than cooptation of ENGOs gets support.     

Liberal,Liminal and Lost: India’s First Diplomats and the Narrative of Foreign Policy

Indian historiography has largely overlooked the contribution of Indian Liberals in the pre-independence era. It is worse in Indian diplomatic history where studies on pre-independence are few and far between. Responding to this double excision, this article traces the emergence of a new Indian narrative of foreign policy around the issues of equality and justice in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. Anchoring their argumentativeness in diplomatic finesse, Indian Liberals such as Satyendra Prasanno Sinha, V. S. Srinivasa Sastri and Tej Bahadur Sapru relentlessly campaigned for racial equality and predominance of the rights of people over the rights of states at the Imperial Conferences. In the articulation of these views, South Africa, a country where ideas about the status of Indians and Indian civilisation were most contested, emerged as the singular foreign policy ‘other’ around which India’s foreign policy narrative was constructed.     

The Reagan “Mandate,” Public Law and the Ethics of Policy Change

The development of post-election polling techniques makes it possible to examine the nature of electoral mandates more precisely, and therefore to compare them with the mandate claims of winners. On that basis, we can more accurately assess the limits of the “administrative presidency” in individual cases. This article first summarizes the evidence regarding the 1980 Reagan mandate, and then proceeds to describe prominent cases in which his administration tried (with uneven success) to reverse or greatly re-orient purported statutory intent. Finally, it sketches some propositions regarding the appropriate limits of policy change in the absence of changes in organic statutes, and evaluates the cases discussed in light of these propositions, suggesting that a legitimate part of executive discretion revolves around how to reach statutory goals but not whether to pursue them. It concludes that the limits of what has to be permissible for effective operation of the system are probably broader than critics of any particular president's policy positions may prefer to see.     

Misaligned Social Policy? Explaining the Origins and Limitations of Cash Transfers in Sudan

This article examines whether the transitional government in the wake of the December 2018 Sudanese revolution succeeded in realigning social policy with public demands. The article focuses on the evolution of cash transfer programmes from the 2012 cash programme under the Ingaz regime to the transitional government's programme 2021. While the recent programme was popularly viewed as a ‘World Bank programme’, its originators were in fact Sudanese professionals. Similarly, the Ingaz regime experimented with cash transfers before seeking out World Bank technical support. In this sense, cash transfers cannot be seen as an external imposition, as domestic actors have favoured them across different regimes. Yet, their appeal may still reflect the ‘choicelessness’ that Thandika Mkandawire associated with structural adjustment, as in both cases cash transfers were introduced as part of broader economic reform. Sudan's case is distinct in the sense that its domestic policy makers did not begrudgingly accept cash transfers but were enthusiastic instigators of them. The article traces the origins of this enthusiasm within Sudan's recent political history and explores the way in which alignment with international mainstream policy making locks Sudan into a bind. The country urgently needs to reverse the fragmentation of social policy along geographic and racial lines, yet these programmes do little to overcome such regional and racial inequalities. Thus, even after a popular revolution displaced the prevailing political settlement and called for radical change, policy makers remain misaligned to public demands.