Previous scholarship has shown that experience with public policies can affect citizens’ willingness to participate in politics. However, few studies have examined whether the effect of experience with policy is moderated by existing policy environments. We focus on the impact of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and examine how it affects foreign-born Latinos’ political orientation and behavior. We find a relationship between enrollment in DACA and political orientation and that the effect on participation is moderated by the intensity of enforcement in an immigrant’s county of residence.

Does the threat of automation of workers’ employment provoke distinct policy preferences from that of globalization? We present hypotheses about how these different threats affect support for policies to prevent such shocks as well as policies to compensate via redistribution. Using vignettes and conjoint experiments embedded in survey evidence from Spain, we find that the threat of automation does not provoke any greater demand for redistribution than does openness. Nor does job loss due to automation provoke beliefs of greater deservingness of compensatory transfers, compared to job loss from openness. While the threat of offshoring and hiring foreign workers increases support for policies to prevent this process from occurring, scenarios of robot substitution do not provoke a similar reaction. These results suggest policies to prioritize automation over openness may gain less political traction.

The outbreak of COVID-19 unleashed a severe crisis in society. The suddenness and speed with which the disease spread into a global pandemic makes it an outstanding case for showing how bureaucracy acts in response to a crisis marked by uncertainty and urgency. This article focuses on the role played by the central government bureaucracy in preparing and enacting the Danish government’s response to the COVID-19 crisis. It is based on full access to internal government files related to crisis management during the winter and spring of 2020. These files include memos, e-mails, decision notes, and draft decisions from key civil servants. The article demonstrates the strength of the theory of bounded rationality when it comes to analyzing the interaction between top civil servants and political executives. Moreover, it shows how administrative and political executives can mold a governmental organization to overcome the inertia inherent in bureaucratic organization and procedures.

Researchers and practitioners are increasingly embracing systems approaches to deal with the complexity of public service delivery and policy evaluation. However, there is little agreement on what exactly constitutes a systems approach, conceptually or methodologically. We review and critically synthesize systems literature from the fields of health, education, and infrastructure. We argue that the common theoretical core of systems approaches is the idea that multi-dimensional complementarities between a policy and other aspects of the policy context are the first-order problem of policy design and evaluation. We distinguish between macro-systems approaches, which focus on the collective coherence of a set of policies or institutions, and micro-systems approaches, which focus on how a single policy interacts with the context in which it operates. We develop a typology of micro-systems approaches and discuss their relationship to standard impact evaluation methods as well as to work in external validity, implementation science, and complexity theory.

How do cultural biases, trust in government, and perceptions of risk and protective actions influence compliance with regulation of COVID-19? Analyzing Chinese (n = 646) and American public opinion samples (n = 1,325) from spring 2020, we use Grid–Group Cultural Theory and the Protective Action Decision Model to specify, respectively, cultural influences on public risk perceptions and decision-making regarding protective actions. We find that cultural biases mostly affect protective actions indirectly through public perceptions. Regardless of country, hierarchical cultural biases increase protective behaviors via positive perceptions of protective actions. However, other indirect effects of cultural bias via public perceptions vary across both protective actions and countries. Moreover, trust in government only mediates the effect of cultural bias in China and risk perception only mediates the effect of cultural bias in the United States. Our findings suggest that regulators in both countries should craft regulations that are congenial to culturally diverse populations.

Schedule C and noncareer Senior Executive Service positions hold significant influence over policy outcomes, yet they have received limited scrutiny compared to advise and consent (PAS) appointments. Such appointments offer understudied avenues for presidential control over the bureaucracy. Through a comprehensive analysis of more detailed data than has been employed to date, we reveal that these appointments are responsive to broader political dynamics, particularly those relevant to PAS appointments, including inter- and intrabranch conflicts, agency ideology, Senate workload, and the political calendar. However, statutory constraints and agency characteristics – such as the managerial expertise of appointed agency leadership – also shape their utilization. While unilateral appointments provide an advantage to Presidents, executives are constrained when using them to overcome legislative opposition or reshape resistant agencies. These lower-level appointments reflect the wider political landscape, granting the President significant – but not unrestrained – opportunities to exert influence on both the bureaucracy and policy outcomes.

Why do citizens support or reject climate change mitigation policies? This is not an easy choice: citizens need to support the government in making these decisions, accept potentially radical behavior change, and have altruism across borders and for future generations. A substantial literature argues that political trust facilitates citizen support for these complex policy decisions by mitigating the cost and uncertainty that policies impose on individuals and buttressing support for government intervention. We test whether this is the case with a pre-registered conjoint experiment fielded in Germany in which we vary fundamental aspects of policy design that are related to the cost, uncertainty, and implementation of climate change policies. Contrary to strong theoretical expectations and previous work, we find no difference between those with low and high trust on their support for different policy attributes, assuaging the concern that low and declining trust inhibits climate policymaking.

Policy diffusion is an important element of the policy formation process. However, understanding of the micro-level interactions governing policy spread remains limited. Much of the literature focuses on macro-level proxies for intergovernmental connectivity. These proxies outline broad diffusion patterns without specifying the micro-level mechanisms that govern how individuals facilitate that diffusion. The role of stakeholders in diffusion in the policy subsystem is also poorly understood. We construct a panel dataset covering the spread of the US ecotourism programs from 1993 to 2016 to investigate how micro-level movement within stakeholder networks explains state-level policy diffusion over time. Using fixed-effects regression, we find that stakeholder movement significantly drives diffusion, acting as a mechanism of knowledge transfer. Our findings provide a more precise theoretical understanding of how policy knowledge diffuses at the micro level, empirically explain the role of policy stakeholders in diffusion, and highlight the value of citizen-science data for policy research.

Unilateral presidential action is thought to be limited by the ability of successors to easily reverse past decisions. Yet, most executive actions are never formally revoked. We argue that because of presidents’ unique position as chief executive, some actions create outcomes that make policy reversal more difficult or even infeasible. We develop a novel measure of policies with more immutable consequences and analyze the revocation of executive orders issued between 1937 and 2021. We find the degree of outcome immutability reduces the influence of political conditions on policy revocation. We further examine these dynamics in three cases in which presidents have substantial discretion – diplomacy, non-combatant detention, and police militarization. Scholarship has long highlighted the president’s first-mover status relative to other institutional actors as a key source of their power. Collectively, our argument and evidence demonstrate this applies to their relationship with successors.

Why do executive agencies form coalitions? Legislative coalitions are widely theorized and studied, but less attention has been paid to executive coalitions. Executive agencies’ dependence on the political branches calls for a distinctive theory of coalition building. This article presents such a theory, arguing that agencies form coalitions to optimize their autonomy given their subordinate position in a separation of powers system by signaling to overseers that their policies are efficient and should be maintained. Bureaucrats form coalitions actively to advance their policy goals in the face of political opposition. Using data on dozens of agencies over seventeen years, I find that agencies are most likely to form coalitions when their preferences are misaligned with the president but aligned with each other. I also find evidence that coalitions send credible signals that bureaucratic policies are efficient since Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs is less likely to request regulatory revisions of policies produced by coalitions.

This study analyzes the link between egalitarian ideals and the rise in party polarization in Congress. To demonstrate how philosophical differences over conceptions of fairness, equality, and justice help explain the recent growth in partisanship over the past few decades, I argue one overlooked explanatory factor which assists in capturing this ideological rift is noncontributory welfare spending. Recovering annual ideal point estimates between 1947 and 2018 that are comparable with annual federal spending, I use multivariate time series models and find convincing evidence which suggests welfare outlays have a strong short- and long-run effect on polarization. Moreover, analysis of the roll call record also shows when ideal point estimates are recovered by specific policy area, lawmakers exhibit higher levels of ideological separation on welfare compared to, among others, policies such as defense and transportation. Robustness checks confirm these findings also hold even when controlling for income inequality.

The three-child policy constitutes a hotly debated socio-political issue in China. Upon its announcement, many Chinese citizens have ridiculed the move on social media. Adopting the cognitive mediation model and the influence of presumed influence theory, this study examines how social media exposure to three-child policy-related news and discussions could affect the Chinese public’s attitudes toward the policy. The online survey results show that social media exposure negatively predicts supportive opinion via cognitive elaboration and three types of perceived negative effects of the policy (i.e., perceived negative effects on self, on the public, and on females) in serial. It also finds that institutional trust moderates the relationship between cognitive elaboration and policy support. Only among people with high institutional trust, there is a positive effect of social media exposure on supportive opinion through cognitive elaboration.

Policy piloting has become a popular form of organization in implementing public policies. However, the current literature surprisingly discusses little about its management. This study investigates how two policy-pilot attributes – ambiguity and compatibility – shape policy-pilot management. To accomplish this, we developed an analytic framework consisting of four management strategies: experimentation, refinement, upscaling, and institutionalization. We chose a representative policy pilot in Chinese health governance, the New Rural Cooperative Medical Scheme, to examine the adoption of these four strategies. Our finding that, at various junctures, the Chinese state adopted these four strategies to manage policy piloting demonstrates the applicability of the analytic framework constructed in this study. This study contributes to the existing public policy literature by providing new insights into policy implementation in temporary organizing settings.

Through the pooling and exchange of resources such as expertise and knowledge between network participants, European Administrative Networks (EANs) are expected to play a significant role in enhancing policy learning. Yet, scarce empirical evidence has been presented concerning the learning process taking place within EANs. This paper addresses this gap through the analysis of the Network of the Heads of European Environmental Protection Agencies (EPA Network). Based on a unique survey dataset, social network analysis and exponential random graph models are used to trace the interaction patterns within the network and test which factors shape them. The analysis highlights the relevance of national political factors – i.e. the preferences of national governments and ministries – in shaping the learning processes taking place in the EPA Network. While the network is an important venue for disseminating knowledge between directly and indirectly connected actors, learning processes are mainly limited to like-minded peers.

Various processes in recent years have brought about trends of polarization within democratic societies, challenging political stability. Against this backdrop, policy patterns that are being adopted regarding controversial issues are significantly affected by these countries’ aspiration to create and maintain a consensus, which may have implications not favoring the public. One such issue is human experiments in medicine (clinical trials), which has been regulated by most countries through primary legislation. As a deeply divided society, Israel has been addressing this issue through regulation and secondary legislation, despite several attempts to have it regulated through primary legislation. This article employs the consociational model alongside Public Choice Theory to explain the adoption of this policy pattern on the issue of human experiments. Based on thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews and existing sources, it sheds light on the normative choice that weighs the merits of primary legislation against the virtues of accommodation and consensus.

In contrast to other studies on policy entrepreneurship that address frontline officials’ roles in formal legislative procedures, this case study focuses on how frontline officials promote policy innovation within inconspicuous administrative routines. Because frontline officials have no legislative power, they must overcome officialism by using bureaucratic skills and seeking consensus among multiple stakeholders. “Citizen agents” and “state agents” are both necessary roles. This case provides administrative details on how a deadlocked policy was gradually enlivened within undramatic administrative routines. The findings bridge the legislative–administrative gap and improve the understanding of the long-term effects of frontline administrative activities on policy innovations.

This article argues that differences in sociopolitical reputation can explain why interest groups fail or succeed in influencing policymakers and that therefore sociopolitical reputation is a useful addition to the conceptual toolbox of interest groups scholars. Focusing on pharmacies and their associations in Greece and Portugal between 2005 and 2021, this article uses the concept of sociopolitical reputation to explain why reform attempts to reduce pharmaceutical spending and increase competition in the pharmacy sector were successful in Portugal but not in Greece, even though pharmacists are a much stronger interest group in Portugal than in Greece and even though both countries were under significant exogenous pressure to introduce structural reforms in the wake of the Eurozone crisis.

The conventional policy analyses with a path-dependent framework are featured by sequential causation composed of analytically two distinct phases: path production that occurs through a significant policy change at critical junctures and the subsequent path reproduction. This paper explores one policy area where the two-phase framework falls short in explaining path-making and maintenance – college education expansion in Korea. We argue that the shortcomings of the two-phase model can potentially be overcome by incorporating the underlying rule of the countries into the model. We identify the underlying rule relying on Esping-Andersen’s welfare regimes to highlight the political underpinnings of the countries. We show that the underlying liberal rule is a fundamental causal force behind the production and reproduction of college education expansion in Korea, using qualitative comparative analysis. Our framework based on the underlying rule provides a richer understanding of path dependency.

Why are international regulatory standards not set? While most of the literature focuses on explaining positive cases of standard-setting where international rules are agreed upon, weak or negative cases remain prevalent and yet surprisingly under-explored. To explain these cases in the area of financial services, we integrate an inter-state explanation, which focuses on competition between major jurisdictions, with a transgovernmental explanation, which relates to conflict between different regulatory bodies at the international level. We also consider how these dimensions interact with financial industry lobbying. This allows us to construct a typology differentiating between distinct types of cases concerning international standard-setting: (1) absent standards, (2) non-agreed standards, (3) symbolic standards, and (4) agreed standards. The explanatory leverage of our approach is illustrated through a systematic structured focused comparison of four post-crisis cases related to “shadow banking.” The article generates novel insights into regulatory conflicts and the scope conditions for international agreement.