The Implementation of Public Policy: Still the Missing Link

Although theories of public policy and theories of governance both seek to establish relationships between policymaking and its consequences, they do not complement each other very well. Public policy models tend to de-emphasize that which governance theories tend to emphasize: the influence on government performance of implementation, broadly described as the actions taken by those engaged in administration (including managers at all levels, those engaged in service delivery, and third-party agents) after a policy has been lawfully promulgated by elected officials and interpreted by the courts. A comparison of a recently developed theory of public sector performance with several prominent theories of policymaking suggests that multilevel governance theories can supply what continues to be the missing link in public policy theories. At the same time, governance theories might be enriched by the process modeling of public policy theories.     

The Preemptive Power of State Supreme Courts: Adoption of Abortion and Death Penalty Legislation

We offer a theory about public policy adoption that depicts a game between state supreme courts and state policymakers. We hypothesize that court ideological hostility or friendliness operates to discourage or encourage policy enactment, with the likelihood of subsequent court intervention magnifying the relationship. To test the argument we examine the influence of court ideology on the enactment of state abortion and death penalty laws since the 1970s. Empirical analyses provide strong support for our theory, indicating that court ideological hostility or friendliness significantly influenced state abortion and death penalty policy enactments. In addition, the likelihood of court intervention conditioned this relationship, with the most pronounced effect occurring where subsequent court review was mandatory. The findings reveal courts exert important preemptive influence on law without hearing a case. This facet of judicial influence expands the traditional view of actors involved in the policymaking process.     

Punctuated Equilibrium and the Supreme Court

In the legislative and executive branches, policy scholars have used punctuated equilibrium (PE) theory to describe and explain patterns of change. However, there has been little examination of how PE might apply to courts and legal policy change. This article addresses that gap by providing evidence that legal policy change—here conceptualized as changes in what precedents the Supreme Court most often cites—is governed by PE theory. After making a prima facie case for the applicability of PE theory to the Court, I leverage network rankings of Supreme Court decisions to create a proxy for legal policy change that improves on existing measures. Using both a stochastic process model and an analysis of the punctuations the measure uncovers, I find strong evidence of PE processes.     

Determinants of Organizational Failure in the Milwaukee School Voucher Program

In this article, we utilize 25 years of data on the Milwaukee voucher program to test the relationships among organizational liabilities of newness, institutional affiliation, market‐share, and regulatory environment on the cumulative risk of school failure. Overall, we find that 41 percent of all private voucher schools operating in Milwaukee between 1991 and 2015 failed. Start‐up voucher schools, and those unaffiliated with a larger institution, have comparatively higher failure risk over time. The results of our analysis shed light onto one of the long‐term impacts of a public policy reform premised on social entrepreneurship. We conclude that policymakers should consider the consequences of organizational failure when utilizing nongovernment entities in the provision of public goods, and that scholars focus increased attention to understanding the negative externalities created by public entrepreneurship.     

Controlling Forum Choice and Controlling Policy: Congress,Courts and the IRS

Considerable scholarly attention has been paid to litigation and its influence on social and bureaucratic policy. One area of research has focused on interest group litigation. Another area of scholarship has shown that Congress encourages individual use of the courts to monitor and control bureaucratic behavior. In several areas of law, litigants have a choice of forum by deliberate legislative design, which is sometimes derided as “forum shopping.” Little attention has been paid to the dominant national political coalition's ability to encourage forum shopping through legislation and the appointment process. One area of law that the coalition can encourage forum shopping is in challenging tax audits. It can do so through implict legislative signals and the appointment process to influence litigants to sue the Internal Revenue Service in the forum that offers the litigant the greatest chance of success. Given the prominent role of courts in setting and determining policy and given the particular prominence of taxes and tax policy over the past three decades, whether and where tax litigants choose to sue is critically important to understanding the dynamics of both tax policy and tax enforcement, as well as public policy creation and change. To demonstrate the influence of political forces on tax forum choice, I compare tax and district court filings from 1994 through to 2000. I find that as the Tax Court and national political coalition become more conservative, more taxpayers sue in the Tax Court and this “forum shopping” choice is supported by the national political coalition.     

Advocacy Coalitions in Low Salience Policy Subsystems: Struggles Under a Smooth Surface

The Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF), a well-known framework used to understand policy changes at the subsystem level, is predicated on the idea that coalitions with distinct beliefs compete to influence policy subsystem decisions. The ACF is noted as being most appropriate for, and is typically applied to, high salience policy areas. However, scholars have noted the need to also apply the ACF to less typical application settings in the interest of theoretical refinement. This paper thus explores the applicability of the ACF to Day Habilitation and Employment services systems for working-age adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities in two U.S. states, Washington and Pennsylvania, both of which have experienced distinct state-level policy changes during the last two decades despite low levels of public attention and conflict. Using a mixed-methods approach, the paper identifies the presence of two advocacy coalitions (Employment First and Choice) in both states. The study concludes that there is sufficient evidence to apply the ACF to these low salience subsystems, noting theoretical and practical implications for scholars and policymakers interested in applying the ACF to similar settings.     

Public Outreach,Executive Orders,and the Unilateral Presidency

Scholars have traditionally and loosely defined executive orders as presidential directives that instruct bureaucrats about how to implement policy. In contrast, proclamations are thought to be used by presidents to address policy matters regarding the general public. This has been an assumption that scholars have accepted without empirical evidence. We have long known that presidents strategically pursue policy to build support among numerous groups, such as African Americans, religious organizations, women, educators, and labor unions. Presidency scholars also know that executive orders are an expedient tool that an administration utilizes to pursue its policy agenda. As a result, why should we assume that the exclusive target population of executive orders is members of the federal bureaucracy? This is the first study to explore whether and how presidents from 1936 through 2008 use executive orders to target specific populations with policy.     

Applying Policy Process Theories to Environmental Governance Research: Themes and New Directions

Policy scholars have effectively leveraged policy process models, theories, and frameworks to respond to a variety of important environmental questions. For example, how do environmental issues arrive on the agendas of policymakers? What factors contribute to environmental policy change? What are the designs and effects of institutions (e.g., policies or cultural norms) on environmental governance? In this review, we survey the field of policy process scholarship, focusing on environmental governance, with three objectives. The first objective is to catalog the policy process models, theories, and frameworks most often featured in studies of environmental governance. The second is to capture the methodological choices commonly employed in the application of these models, theories, and frameworks in environmental domains. The third is to identify how these approaches deal with issues central to environmental governance research, including time, space, and policy scale. We aim to identify trends and strategies for integrating key considerations of scale into empirical policy process scholarship.     

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.     

More than just experts for hire: A conceptualization of the roles of consultants in public policy formulation

Consultants are increasingly a part of public policy formulation, and their policy involvement draws extensive interest in research and public debate. However, there is a gap in how we think about their formulation role: they are often conceptualized as a type of expert, while their actual interaction with and contribution to policy formulation is much more varied. This paper develops a conceptualization of consultants' formulation roles. It demonstrates that rather than just informing policy formulation, consultants take multiple roles and interact with policymaking and makers in multiple ways. Using a policy network/subsystem distinction and a substance/process distinction as the main axes for analysis, the paper develops four role categories: (1) experts and knowledge brokers, in which consultants provide policy advice and analysis; (2) seeing for the government, in which they construct a picture of the policy field; (3) legitimizers and validators, in which they provide symbolic capital to policy; and (4) channels for stakeholders' policy preferences, in which they manage deliberation and synthesize actors' policy preferences. The paper provides much-needed clarity on how consultants engage with policy formulation and policymakers and forwards our understanding of how consultants exert their policy influence.     

Political Science and U.S. Health Policy in the Era of the Affordable Care Act

Few laws have a profound and lasting impact on an entire political system. The Affordable Care Act (ACA), despite its incremental nature and bipartisan heritage, has been one of those remarkable landmarks. Even a decade after its passage, the political struggle is far from over, as the ACA is still facing near constant threats from the incumbent president, Congress, the courts, statehouses, attorneys general, and governors across the nation. How have political scientists responded to the continued struggle? This article provides an overview of the effects of health reform and the ACA on political science research since 2008. While political scientists have written much about the subject, coverage has been distinctly uneven within the discipline. Indeed, it has almost been entirely confined to scholars of public and health policy. Nonetheless, there have been important contributions across disciplinary fields. This article provides an overview of contributions embedded within the study of federalism, policy feedback effects, and political framing. It concludes by emphasizing the need for more engaged scholarship on health policy issues from across the entire discipline, and by highlighting other areas of study that could benefit from broader attention by political scientists.     

What do we know about the punctuated equilibrium theory in China? A systematic review and research priorities

The punctuated equilibrium theory (PET) shows that government policy is mostly stable with occasional drastic change, which scholars attribute to institutional friction and limited information processing capacity. Although the existing PET literature predominantly focuses on democracies, scholars have started to apply the theory to authoritarian countries. Autocracies are a fertile testing ground for the theory's underlying mechanisms because they appear to experience less institutional friction but more informational restrictions than democracies. However, PET studies on autocracies are still rare. To deepen our understanding of the PET and the policy process beyond democracies, we conduct a systematic review of 88 Chinese language PET journal articles. We show that Chinese language PET research is increasing. Contrary to the English language PET literature, most Chinese studies are qualitative, while a key similarity is the weak operationalization of PET core concepts. The reviewed studies confirm a punctuated equilibrium pattern of policymaking in China but provide only limited evidence for more intense punctuations compared with democracies. Future PET research on China ought to use long-term data sets and examine institutional friction and information processing by policymakers. We also argue for more international exchange and comparative research to advance our understanding of the policy process in China and other autocracies.     

How street-level dilemmas and politics shape divergence: The accountability regimes framework

Hierarchical accountability often proves insufficient to control street-level implementation, where complex, informal accountability relations prevail and tasks must be prioritized. However, scholars lack a theoretical model of how accountability relations affect implementation behaviors that are inconsistent with policy. By extending the Accountability Regimes Framework (ARF), this paper explains how multiple competing subjective street-level accountabilities translate into policy divergence. The anti-terrorism “Prevent Duty” policy in the United Kingdom requires university lecturers to report any student they suspect may be undergoing a process of radicalization. We ask: what perceived street-level accountabilities and dilemmas does this politically contested policy imply for lecturers, and how do they affect divergence? An online survey of British lecturers (N = 809), combined with 35 qualitative follow-up interviews, reveals that accountability dilemmas trigger policy divergence. The ARF models how street-level bureaucrats become informal policymakers in the political system when rules clash with their roles as professionals, citizen-agents, or “political animals.”     

Widespread Policy Disruption: Terrorism, Public Risks, and Homeland Security

We address theoretical and empirical aspects of policy disruptions that affect multiple areas of policymaking. Our theorizing leads us to consider the effects of widespread disruptions in gaining the attention of elected officials, in affecting policymaking, and in reshaping the involvement of federal agencies. Our empirical analyses concern the threat of terrorism in the United States and its implications for public risk subsystems over the past 25 years. Our analyses of the attention of policymakers and resultant policymaking volatility show selective patterns of subsystem disruption related to the threat of terrorism. We show that capturing the attention of policymakers in multiple subsystems is insufficient to motivate heightened levels of policymaking across the board. In addition, we find more muted impacts for federal agency involvement than might have been expected from the massive reorganization that created the Department of Homeland Security. More generally, the disjunctions we observe show the powerful influence of policy subsystems in buffering against widespread policy disruptions.     

Framing Reparations

Since the enactment of reparations for Japanese American World War II internees in the early 1990s, the public debate on slavery reparations has gained momentum. Recently, a number of states and the U.S. House of Representatives have issued formal apologies for slavery. In light of this debate, it may be important for policymakers, as well as policy researchers, to better understand public opinion on this issue. At present, not much is known other than that most Americans oppose reparations. However, public opinion surveys yield widely varying population estimates. These differences may represent random error by an uninformed public or they may reflect complex considerations about "who" should be compensated "by whom" in "what form" and "for what" injustice. Using the results of a nationally representative question wording experiment ( n =  2,001) this article investigates whether opposition to slavery reparations is unqualified, or whether it depends on the specific policy design. Since data collection was completed before Virginia became the first state to apologize for slavery in February 2007, the study offers a window into the formation of public opinion prior to elite policy enactment. Results suggest that the public carefully distinguishes between different reparations proposals and that policymakers, as well as policy researchers, may have to be very specific when addressing an issue of this complexity.     

Global Public Policy,Transnational Policy Communities,and Their Networks

Public policy has been a prisoner of the word “state.” Yet, the state is reconfigured by globalization. Through “global public–private partnerships” and “transnational executive networks,” new forms of authority are emerging through global and regional policy processes that coexist alongside nation‐state policy processes. Accordingly, this article asks what is “global public policy”? The first part of the article identifies new public spaces where global policies occur. These spaces are multiple in character and variety and will be collectively referred to as the “global agora.” The second section adapts the conventional policy cycle heuristic by conceptually stretching it to the global and regional levels to reveal the higher degree of pluralization of actors and multiple‐authority structures than is the case at national levels. The third section asks: who is involved in the delivery of global public policy? The focus is on transnational policy communities. The global agora is a public space of policymaking and administration, although it is one where authority is more diffuse, decision making is dispersed and sovereignty muddled. Trapped by methodological nationalism and an intellectual agoraphobia of globalization, public policy scholars have yet to examine fully global policy processes and new managerial modes of transnational public administration.     

Rethinking Bureaucrats in the Policy Process: Criminal Justice Agents and the National Crime Agenda

Policy scholars have noted that bureaucrats can play an important role in defining policy alternatives. Few studies, however, examine the extent of their involvement in this process. This study contributes to public policy scholarship by offering a framework for understanding the strength of bureaucratic involvement in the process of defining problems and policy alternatives. Using witness data from congressional hearings on crime between 1947 and 1998, I find that federal, state, and local criminal justice bureaucrats have come to occupy a central role in the process of defining policy alternatives. In addition, I find that the centrality of criminal justice actors comes at the expense of interest groups, community organizations, and citizens/victims. Implications for criminal justice policy and understanding bureaucratic involvement in the policy process are discussed.     

The birth of Sweden’s multicultural policy. The impact of Olof Palme and his ideas

The breadth of Sweden’s multicultural policy has left it as one of the few truly multiculturalist countries in the West. This exceptionalism is puzzling and has generated a lot of attention from scholars and the public alike. Using a policy process perspective, this article traces its process of adoption in the 1970s. It shows that the adoption of an official multicultural policy relied crucially on Olof Palme and his ideas in his role as an ‘activist gatekeeper.’ The article takes as illustration the country’s first State Cultural Policy passed in 1974.     

Public Opinion and Policy Representation: On Conceptualization,Measurement, and Interpretation

The congruence between public preferences and public policy is of special importance in representative democracies. We want to know whether the public is getting the policies it wants and, if not, whose preferences are being represented. To directly evaluate congruence, scholars need to measure what the public wants in a particular policy area and then correctly match it to policy in that area. This is difficult to do. Not surprisingly, while much scholarship examines the congruence of positions, little research examines actual policy congruence. Even the work that there is on the subject offers limited information. In this paper, I assess what we can infer about congruence from the different scholarly traditions in the study of representation. I also consider prospects for research on the match between public preference inputs and public policy outputs, particularly when we cannot assess it directly.     

The effect of economic sanctions on the severity of genocides or politicides

This study examines the effect of economic sanctions on the severity of ongoing instances of genocide or politicide. Research suggests that sanctions exacerbate human rights conditions, yet influential policymakers, human rights advocates and some scholars continue to call for economic sanctions to mitigate ongoing atrocities. Ordered logit analyses of genocides and politicides from 1976 to 2008 reveal that sanctions neither aggravate atrocities, as some of the academic literature expects, nor alleviate them, as assumed by many policymakers and advocates (and some researchers). These findings hold regardless of whether they are measured as the number or presence of sanctions, cost, level of comprehensiveness, duration or whether imposed or administered by an international organization. Threats of sanctions also have no effect on atrocity severity, either on their own or combined with other policy options.