This article examines the challenges of regulating artificial intelligence (AI) systems and proposes an adapted model of regulation suitable for AI’s novel features. Unlike past technologies, AI systems built using techniques like deep learning cannot be directly analyzed, specified, or audited against regulations. Their behavior emerges unpredictably from training rather than intentional design. However, the traditional model of delegating oversight to an expert agency, which has succeeded in high-risk sectors like aviation and nuclear power, should not be wholly discarded. Instead, policymakers must contain risks from today’s opaque models while supporting research into provably safe AI architectures. Drawing lessons from AI safety literature and past regulatory successes, effective AI governance will likely require consolidated authority, licensing regimes, mandated training data and modeling disclosures, formal verification of system behavior, and the capacity for rapid intervention.
{"title":"When code isn’t law: rethinking regulation for artificial intelligence","authors":"Brian Judge, Mark Nitzberg, Stuart Russell","doi":"10.1093/polsoc/puae020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/polsoc/puae020","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the challenges of regulating artificial intelligence (AI) systems and proposes an adapted model of regulation suitable for AI’s novel features. Unlike past technologies, AI systems built using techniques like deep learning cannot be directly analyzed, specified, or audited against regulations. Their behavior emerges unpredictably from training rather than intentional design. However, the traditional model of delegating oversight to an expert agency, which has succeeded in high-risk sectors like aviation and nuclear power, should not be wholly discarded. Instead, policymakers must contain risks from today’s opaque models while supporting research into provably safe AI architectures. Drawing lessons from AI safety literature and past regulatory successes, effective AI governance will likely require consolidated authority, licensing regimes, mandated training data and modeling disclosures, formal verification of system behavior, and the capacity for rapid intervention.","PeriodicalId":47383,"journal":{"name":"Policy and Society","volume":"22 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":9.3,"publicationDate":"2024-05-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141177193","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The concept of robustness has received increasing scholarly attention regarding public policy and governance, where it has enhanced our understanding of how policies and governance are adapted and innovated in response to disruptive events, challenges, and demands associated with heightened societal turbulence. Yet, we know little about the robustness of the ideas undergirding the efforts to foster robust policymaking and public governance. Based on a review of recent strands of governance theory and the ideational turn in public policy research, we define a new ideational robustness concept, which can help us to explain why some governance and policy ideas persist, while others disappear. As the contributions to this special issue demonstrate, studying ideational robustness opens new avenues for reflecting on how the robustness of ideas may affect the robustness of public policy and governance.
{"title":"Ideational robustness in turbulent times","authors":"Martin B Carstensen, Eva Sørensen, Jacob Torfing","doi":"10.1093/polsoc/puae016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/polsoc/puae016","url":null,"abstract":"The concept of robustness has received increasing scholarly attention regarding public policy and governance, where it has enhanced our understanding of how policies and governance are adapted and innovated in response to disruptive events, challenges, and demands associated with heightened societal turbulence. Yet, we know little about the robustness of the ideas undergirding the efforts to foster robust policymaking and public governance. Based on a review of recent strands of governance theory and the ideational turn in public policy research, we define a new ideational robustness concept, which can help us to explain why some governance and policy ideas persist, while others disappear. As the contributions to this special issue demonstrate, studying ideational robustness opens new avenues for reflecting on how the robustness of ideas may affect the robustness of public policy and governance.","PeriodicalId":47383,"journal":{"name":"Policy and Society","volume":"19 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":9.3,"publicationDate":"2024-05-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141085561","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article draws on rich qualitative data from two national parliaments—the UK House of Commons and the German Bundestag—to examine knowledge practices in political institutions. This is an important topic, not only because parliaments play a significant role in democratic decision-making, but because it sheds light on debates about how such decision-making is based on and interacts with knowledge and evidence. By adopting an interpretive analytical approach, I analyze the ways in which those practices are shaped by the beliefs and values of parliamentary actors. Indeed, in better understanding everyday practices, beliefs, and ideational traditions, it also contributes to better explaining how components of political and parliamentary cultures contribute to knowledge use more broadly. In the House of Commons, MPs draw on a highly trusted and independent parliamentary administration; meanwhile, committees have become fruitful avenues for MPs to develop policy expertise and engage with knowledge and evidence in a non-partisan way. In the German Bundestag, MPs also develop policy expertise—in fact, they interpret their role as specialists in a “working” parliament—but their knowledge practices are more openly partisan through the structuring role of parliamentary party groups and the skepticism of “neutral” advice from research services. Consequently, committees tend to be sites of political bargaining and conflict, rather than evidence-gathering. In both cases, parliaments’ knowledge practices are shaped by wider webs of beliefs about the role of MPs within the institutions. This suggests that knowledge use in political and policy settings is shaped by broader cultural factors.
{"title":"Comparing evidence use in parliaments: the interplay of beliefs, traditions, and practices in the UK and Germany","authors":"Marc Geddes","doi":"10.1093/polsoc/puae017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/polsoc/puae017","url":null,"abstract":"This article draws on rich qualitative data from two national parliaments—the UK House of Commons and the German Bundestag—to examine knowledge practices in political institutions. This is an important topic, not only because parliaments play a significant role in democratic decision-making, but because it sheds light on debates about how such decision-making is based on and interacts with knowledge and evidence. By adopting an interpretive analytical approach, I analyze the ways in which those practices are shaped by the beliefs and values of parliamentary actors. Indeed, in better understanding everyday practices, beliefs, and ideational traditions, it also contributes to better explaining how components of political and parliamentary cultures contribute to knowledge use more broadly. In the House of Commons, MPs draw on a highly trusted and independent parliamentary administration; meanwhile, committees have become fruitful avenues for MPs to develop policy expertise and engage with knowledge and evidence in a non-partisan way. In the German Bundestag, MPs also develop policy expertise—in fact, they interpret their role as specialists in a “working” parliament—but their knowledge practices are more openly partisan through the structuring role of parliamentary party groups and the skepticism of “neutral” advice from research services. Consequently, committees tend to be sites of political bargaining and conflict, rather than evidence-gathering. In both cases, parliaments’ knowledge practices are shaped by wider webs of beliefs about the role of MPs within the institutions. This suggests that knowledge use in political and policy settings is shaped by broader cultural factors.","PeriodicalId":47383,"journal":{"name":"Policy and Society","volume":"34 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":9.3,"publicationDate":"2024-05-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141085536","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Lutfun Nahar Lata, Tim Reddel, Brian W Head, Luke Craven
More collaborative and human-centered approaches to tackle social problems of entrenched disadvantage have been introduced in many countries, including Australia, but with mixed results. Traditional programs that reinforce existing political and bureaucratic processes have been seen as blockers to collaborative modes of policymaking, governance, and delivery. Drawing on collaborative governance perspectives, this paper reports new research undertaken in conjunction with a not-for-profit organization (Collaboration for Impact) involved in supporting place-based collaborative community change efforts. Research findings, based on stakeholder perspectives, highlight not only the potential benefits of a more collaborative model (i.e., placed-based and community driven) but also the significant unresolved challenges for “backbone” coordination bodies, which have recently been established to achieve more “joined-up” policy, funding, and service delivery arrangements. The paper concludes by proposing a practice-driven focus on policy and funding systems, together with implications for policy learning and program design.
{"title":"Advancing collaborative social outcomes through place-based solutions—aligning policy and funding systems","authors":"Lutfun Nahar Lata, Tim Reddel, Brian W Head, Luke Craven","doi":"10.1093/polsoc/puae018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/polsoc/puae018","url":null,"abstract":"More collaborative and human-centered approaches to tackle social problems of entrenched disadvantage have been introduced in many countries, including Australia, but with mixed results. Traditional programs that reinforce existing political and bureaucratic processes have been seen as blockers to collaborative modes of policymaking, governance, and delivery. Drawing on collaborative governance perspectives, this paper reports new research undertaken in conjunction with a not-for-profit organization (Collaboration for Impact) involved in supporting place-based collaborative community change efforts. Research findings, based on stakeholder perspectives, highlight not only the potential benefits of a more collaborative model (i.e., placed-based and community driven) but also the significant unresolved challenges for “backbone” coordination bodies, which have recently been established to achieve more “joined-up” policy, funding, and service delivery arrangements. The paper concludes by proposing a practice-driven focus on policy and funding systems, together with implications for policy learning and program design.","PeriodicalId":47383,"journal":{"name":"Policy and Society","volume":"50 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":9.3,"publicationDate":"2024-05-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141073916","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In this contribution, we identify how the framing strategies employed by policy and political actors make policy ideas robust. We examine the policy ideas of solidarity and sustainability to show how framing strategies that took advantages of the valence and polysemy of both ideas shaped them into robust policy ideas. Both ideas began as wide-ranging concepts designed to build coalitions in debates over a particular large-scale policy problem. Robustness is a quality that emerged over time as these ideas grew to become highly attractive framing devices to justify policy proposals. Moreover, they have proven to be resilient despite changing circumstances or even efforts of their opponents to reframe them in a negative way.
{"title":"How framing strategies foster robust policy ideas","authors":"Daniel Béland, Robert Henry Cox","doi":"10.1093/polsoc/puae014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/polsoc/puae014","url":null,"abstract":"In this contribution, we identify how the framing strategies employed by policy and political actors make policy ideas robust. We examine the policy ideas of solidarity and sustainability to show how framing strategies that took advantages of the valence and polysemy of both ideas shaped them into robust policy ideas. Both ideas began as wide-ranging concepts designed to build coalitions in debates over a particular large-scale policy problem. Robustness is a quality that emerged over time as these ideas grew to become highly attractive framing devices to justify policy proposals. Moreover, they have proven to be resilient despite changing circumstances or even efforts of their opponents to reframe them in a negative way.","PeriodicalId":47383,"journal":{"name":"Policy and Society","volume":"10 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":9.3,"publicationDate":"2024-05-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140895798","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
As artificial intelligence (AI) policy has begun to take shape in recent years, policy actors have worked to influence policymakers by strategically promoting issue frames that define the problems and solutions policymakers should attend to. Three such issue frames are especially prominent, surrounding AI’s economic, geopolitical, and ethical dimensions. Relatedly, while technology policy is traditionally expert-dominated, new governance paradigms are encouraging increased public participation along with heightened attention to social and ethical dimensions of technology. This study aims to provide insight into whether members of the public and the issue frames they employ shape—or fail to shape—policymaker agendas, particularly for highly contested and technical policy domains. To assess this question, the study draws on a dataset of approximately five million Twitter messages from members of the public related to AI, as well as corresponding AI messages from the 115th and 116th US Congresses. After using text analysis techniques to identify the prevalence of issue frames, the study applies autoregressive integrated moving average and vector autoregression modeling to determine whether issue frames used by the public appear to influence the subsequent messaging used by federal US policymakers. Results indicate that the public does lead policymaker attention to AI generally. However, the public does not have a special role in shaping attention to ethical implications of AI, as public influence occurs only when the public discusses AI’s economic dimensions. Overall, the results suggest that calls for public engagement in AI policy may be underrealized and potentially circumscribed by strategic considerations.
{"title":"Framing contestation and public influence on policymakers: evidence from US artificial intelligence policy discourse","authors":"Daniel S Schiff","doi":"10.1093/polsoc/puae007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/polsoc/puae007","url":null,"abstract":"As artificial intelligence (AI) policy has begun to take shape in recent years, policy actors have worked to influence policymakers by strategically promoting issue frames that define the problems and solutions policymakers should attend to. Three such issue frames are especially prominent, surrounding AI’s economic, geopolitical, and ethical dimensions. Relatedly, while technology policy is traditionally expert-dominated, new governance paradigms are encouraging increased public participation along with heightened attention to social and ethical dimensions of technology. This study aims to provide insight into whether members of the public and the issue frames they employ shape—or fail to shape—policymaker agendas, particularly for highly contested and technical policy domains. To assess this question, the study draws on a dataset of approximately five million Twitter messages from members of the public related to AI, as well as corresponding AI messages from the 115th and 116th US Congresses. After using text analysis techniques to identify the prevalence of issue frames, the study applies autoregressive integrated moving average and vector autoregression modeling to determine whether issue frames used by the public appear to influence the subsequent messaging used by federal US policymakers. Results indicate that the public does lead policymaker attention to AI generally. However, the public does not have a special role in shaping attention to ethical implications of AI, as public influence occurs only when the public discusses AI’s economic dimensions. Overall, the results suggest that calls for public engagement in AI policy may be underrealized and potentially circumscribed by strategic considerations.","PeriodicalId":47383,"journal":{"name":"Policy and Society","volume":"75 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":9.3,"publicationDate":"2024-04-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140552006","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The growing digitalization of our society has led to a meteoric rise of large technology companies (Big Tech), which have amassed tremendous wealth and influence through their ownership of digital infrastructure and platforms. The recent launch of ChatGPT and the rapid popularization of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) act as a focusing event to further accelerate the concentration of power in the hands of the Big Tech. By using Kingdon’s multiple streams framework, this article investigates how Big Tech utilize their technological monopoly and political influence to reshape the policy landscape and establish themselves as key actors in the policy process. It explores the implications of the rise of Big Tech for policy theory in two ways. First, it develops the Big Tech-centric technology stream, highlighting the differing motivations and activities from the traditional innovation-centric technology stream. Second, it underscores the universality of Big Tech exerting ubiquitous influence within and across streams, to primarily serve their self-interests rather than promote innovation. Our findings emphasize the need for a more critical exploration of policy role of Big Tech to ensure balanced and effective policy outcomes in the age of AI.
{"title":"Why and how is the power of Big Tech increasing in the policy process? The case of generative AI","authors":"Shaleen Khanal, Hongzhou Zhang, Araz Taeihagh","doi":"10.1093/polsoc/puae012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/polsoc/puae012","url":null,"abstract":"The growing digitalization of our society has led to a meteoric rise of large technology companies (Big Tech), which have amassed tremendous wealth and influence through their ownership of digital infrastructure and platforms. The recent launch of ChatGPT and the rapid popularization of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) act as a focusing event to further accelerate the concentration of power in the hands of the Big Tech. By using Kingdon’s multiple streams framework, this article investigates how Big Tech utilize their technological monopoly and political influence to reshape the policy landscape and establish themselves as key actors in the policy process. It explores the implications of the rise of Big Tech for policy theory in two ways. First, it develops the Big Tech-centric technology stream, highlighting the differing motivations and activities from the traditional innovation-centric technology stream. Second, it underscores the universality of Big Tech exerting ubiquitous influence within and across streams, to primarily serve their self-interests rather than promote innovation. Our findings emphasize the need for a more critical exploration of policy role of Big Tech to ensure balanced and effective policy outcomes in the age of AI.","PeriodicalId":47383,"journal":{"name":"Policy and Society","volume":"2 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":9.3,"publicationDate":"2024-03-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140317150","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Policies aimed at upskilling, motivating and/or disciplining the unemployed have remained a cornerstone of most OECD countries’ employment policies since the 1990s. Central to these policies is the idea of activation – i.e. the premise that benefit entitlement is conditional on one’s participation in some kind of activity. This article seek to understand how this idea of activation has proven so enduring by analyzing the international development of Activation Policies since 1990 through the lens offered by the concept of ideational robustness. It is analyzed how the robustness of the idea of activation has been continuously challenged through critiques raised against the effects, the legitimacy and the relevance of activation policies. Yet, in each of these moments of contest, proponents of the idea of activation succeeded in keeping the idea relevant as a point of reference for policymaking. They did so by rebalancing disciplinary and enabling approaches to activation, adding a new scope of application for activation policies, and rearticulating the underlying assumption about client agency. The analysis further reveals how these robustness mechanisms succeeded in appropriating the critiques due to their inscription within the technical and seemingly de-political language concerning effect evaluations, implementation deficits, and new forms of governance. Policymakers were thereby able to downplay normative questions of the legitimacy, fairness, and justice of activation policies. The idea of activation has thus taken on a status as an objective to be implemented as effective and efficiently as possible rather than as an idea to be discussed or challenged. However, while the idea of activation remains robust, the same cannot be said of the governance and implementation structures of activation policies. Our study suggest that the near-constant reforms of these governance arrangements and implementation structures during the last 30 years are partly a consequence of critique being skewed from the idea of activation to these structures and arrangements. The robustness of the idea of activation has thus, rather paradoxically, come about by reducing the robustness of specific activation policies and governance arrangements.
{"title":"Activation policy: bruised and battered but still standing","authors":"Niklas A Andersen, Flemming Larsen","doi":"10.1093/polsoc/puae013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/polsoc/puae013","url":null,"abstract":"Policies aimed at upskilling, motivating and/or disciplining the unemployed have remained a cornerstone of most OECD countries’ employment policies since the 1990s. Central to these policies is the idea of activation – i.e. the premise that benefit entitlement is conditional on one’s participation in some kind of activity. This article seek to understand how this idea of activation has proven so enduring by analyzing the international development of Activation Policies since 1990 through the lens offered by the concept of ideational robustness. It is analyzed how the robustness of the idea of activation has been continuously challenged through critiques raised against the effects, the legitimacy and the relevance of activation policies. Yet, in each of these moments of contest, proponents of the idea of activation succeeded in keeping the idea relevant as a point of reference for policymaking. They did so by rebalancing disciplinary and enabling approaches to activation, adding a new scope of application for activation policies, and rearticulating the underlying assumption about client agency. The analysis further reveals how these robustness mechanisms succeeded in appropriating the critiques due to their inscription within the technical and seemingly de-political language concerning effect evaluations, implementation deficits, and new forms of governance. Policymakers were thereby able to downplay normative questions of the legitimacy, fairness, and justice of activation policies. The idea of activation has thus taken on a status as an objective to be implemented as effective and efficiently as possible rather than as an idea to be discussed or challenged. However, while the idea of activation remains robust, the same cannot be said of the governance and implementation structures of activation policies. Our study suggest that the near-constant reforms of these governance arrangements and implementation structures during the last 30 years are partly a consequence of critique being skewed from the idea of activation to these structures and arrangements. The robustness of the idea of activation has thus, rather paradoxically, come about by reducing the robustness of specific activation policies and governance arrangements.","PeriodicalId":47383,"journal":{"name":"Policy and Society","volume":"34 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":9.3,"publicationDate":"2024-03-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140317146","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Is it possible to develop a robust crisis management response in a system where governance is characterized by coercive power and adversarial bargaining rather than the diversity, inclusion, and openness highlighted by extant scholarship as conducive factors for robustness? Using two instances of crisis in the European Union—the Eurozone crisis (2010‒2015) and COVID-19 pandemic (2020‒2022)—the paper argues that how actors reinterpret existing rules and institutions offers an important source of robustness in crisis management. Based on the employment of a disaggregation of robustness into degrees of robustness, as well as the concepts of ideational and institutional power, we show how actors can counter the coercive power of dominant coalitions and open up for rule adaptation through reinterpretations of existing rules that, at least in the short term, can solidify the functioning of existing institutions faced by turbulence. In the context of the Eurozone crisis, ideational and institutional power thus enabled a moderately robust response without treaty reform. In the case of the pandemic, it was possible to convince (particularly German) policymakers of the need to employ new ideas about common debt. This meant less need to employ ideational and institutional power by other actors, leading to significantly more effective crisis management than in the Eurozone crisis, what the paper terms maximal robustness.
{"title":"Ideational robustness of economic ideas in action: the case of European Union economic governance through a decade of crisis","authors":"Martin B Carstensen, Vivien A Schmidt","doi":"10.1093/polsoc/puae011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/polsoc/puae011","url":null,"abstract":"Is it possible to develop a robust crisis management response in a system where governance is characterized by coercive power and adversarial bargaining rather than the diversity, inclusion, and openness highlighted by extant scholarship as conducive factors for robustness? Using two instances of crisis in the European Union—the Eurozone crisis (2010‒2015) and COVID-19 pandemic (2020‒2022)—the paper argues that how actors reinterpret existing rules and institutions offers an important source of robustness in crisis management. Based on the employment of a disaggregation of robustness into degrees of robustness, as well as the concepts of ideational and institutional power, we show how actors can counter the coercive power of dominant coalitions and open up for rule adaptation through reinterpretations of existing rules that, at least in the short term, can solidify the functioning of existing institutions faced by turbulence. In the context of the Eurozone crisis, ideational and institutional power thus enabled a moderately robust response without treaty reform. In the case of the pandemic, it was possible to convince (particularly German) policymakers of the need to employ new ideas about common debt. This meant less need to employ ideational and institutional power by other actors, leading to significantly more effective crisis management than in the Eurozone crisis, what the paper terms maximal robustness.","PeriodicalId":47383,"journal":{"name":"Policy and Society","volume":"73 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":9.3,"publicationDate":"2024-03-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140317158","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The Covid-19 pandemic sparked unprecedented political responses dramatically affecting societies, markets, and the lives of individuals. Under great uncertainty and turbulent conditions, governments adopted far-reaching political interventions to curb the pandemic. These interventions might therefore be expected to challenge key ideas underpinning liberal democracy. We analyze and compare how the political interventions seeking to curb the spread of the coronavirus in Denmark and Sweden challenged and possibly adapted three key ideas underpinning liberal democracy, namely, constitutionality, parliamentarism, and public responsiveness. When ideas are adapted in ways that advance their ability to stay relevant when faced with turbulence, we understand them as robust. Our study found both similarities and differences between the two countries. The idea of constitutionality was challenged in Denmark but remained robust in Sweden. The idea of parliamentarism appeared robust in both countries, whereas the idea of public responsiveness was adapted in neither country but challenged further in Sweden than in Denmark. Paradoxically, Denmark saw fewer adaptations to the liberal democratic ideas than Sweden yet appeared better prepared to protect lives during turbulent times. Our study suggests that liberal democracies must very carefully balance trade-offs between individual liberties and the protection of public health to preserve the core public ideas of constitutionality, parliamentarism, and public responsiveness.
{"title":"The ideational robustness of liberal democracy in the wake of the pandemic: comparing the Danish and Swedish cases","authors":"Åsa Knaggård, Peter Triantafillou","doi":"10.1093/polsoc/puae009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/polsoc/puae009","url":null,"abstract":"The Covid-19 pandemic sparked unprecedented political responses dramatically affecting societies, markets, and the lives of individuals. Under great uncertainty and turbulent conditions, governments adopted far-reaching political interventions to curb the pandemic. These interventions might therefore be expected to challenge key ideas underpinning liberal democracy. We analyze and compare how the political interventions seeking to curb the spread of the coronavirus in Denmark and Sweden challenged and possibly adapted three key ideas underpinning liberal democracy, namely, constitutionality, parliamentarism, and public responsiveness. When ideas are adapted in ways that advance their ability to stay relevant when faced with turbulence, we understand them as robust. Our study found both similarities and differences between the two countries. The idea of constitutionality was challenged in Denmark but remained robust in Sweden. The idea of parliamentarism appeared robust in both countries, whereas the idea of public responsiveness was adapted in neither country but challenged further in Sweden than in Denmark. Paradoxically, Denmark saw fewer adaptations to the liberal democratic ideas than Sweden yet appeared better prepared to protect lives during turbulent times. Our study suggests that liberal democracies must very carefully balance trade-offs between individual liberties and the protection of public health to preserve the core public ideas of constitutionality, parliamentarism, and public responsiveness.","PeriodicalId":47383,"journal":{"name":"Policy and Society","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":9.3,"publicationDate":"2024-03-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140317246","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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