Policy Sciences最新文献

In the Policy Sciences of Harold Lasswell, Douglas Torgerson asks an important question–whether the logic of policy sciences can inspire democratic hope for social betterment. His response is refreshing and psychoanalytically-informed optimism, whereas a jurisprudential detour of the NHS’s legacy as the most important application of policy sciences in another discipline calls for agnosticism. Revisiting the application of policy sciences in international law suggests that the very logic of policy sciences, under the influence of a defective form of naturalism, disables its potential for inclusive democracy.

Coalitions that engage in political advocacy are constituted by organisations, which are made up of individuals and organisational subunits. Comparing the coalitions formed by organisations to the those formed by their constituent parts provides a means of examining the extent to which their coalition memberships are aligned. This paper applies inferential network clustering methods to survey data collected from organisations engaging in Irish climate change politics and to X (formerly twitter) data extracted from both the primary accounts of these organisations and the accounts of the individuals and subunits affiliated with them. Analysis of the survey-based organisation-level policy network finds evidence of an outsider coalition, formed by non-governmental organisations, labour unions and left-leaning political parties, and an insider coalition formed by the two main political parties in government, energy sector organisations, business and agricultural interests, scientific organisations, and government bodies. An analysis of the X-based account-level endorsement network finds evidence for a nested coalition structure wherein there are multiple distinct communities, which largely align with the organisation-level coalitions. Most interestingly, the largest and most active community is formed by accounts affiliated with the organisations with agricultural interests—the sector most opposed to ambitious climate action in Ireland. The results show how the somewhat disjoint behaviours of formal organisations and their affiliates give rise to nested coalitions, which can only be identified by disaggregating organisations by their constituent parts.

The continuity of Harold D. Lasswell’s legacy as a champion of democratic policysciences is demonstrated.

In “The Policy Science of Harold Lasswell: Contextual Orientation and the Critical Dimension,” Torgerson argues against the simplistic classification of scholars, suggesting that stereotyping positions should be resisted or exposed as rhetorical devices rather than serious engagements. Torgerson illustrates that Lasswell was, in part, a critical policy scholar who promoted reflexivity and radical democracy. This book serves as a reminder that engaging with the deeper meanings and the potential overlaps between and contradictions within our stereotypes may foster the shared ideals of emancipation, security, deliberation, and creativity. Although today’s interpretation of Lasswell and the policy sciences may have been stripped of its original meaning, we can still follow Lasswell’s guidance by directing our scholarship toward empowering the disadvantaged and achieving greater political equality for all.

Over the past decade, a range of efforts have been made to incorporate practices drawn from industrial and participatory design into elements of the public policymaking process. Our interest lies in the field of co-design in policymaking. This emerging field has seen considerable emphasis placed on informing policy development with knowledge and insights from those living with specific problems and existing policy settings. Following the extant literature, we define co-design in policymaking as a participatory and design-oriented process which creatively and actively engages a diverse pool of participants to define and address a public problem. Evidence to date suggests co-design in policymaking can be especially useful in broadening participation in policy development, encouraging creative speculation about how policy choices might shape future outcomes, and prototyping policy approaches to assess their feasibility and desirability. But evidence continues to emerge regarding the barriers in many public sector settings that preclude co-design practice from greater engagement with – and influence upon – long-established, tightly-held processes of policy development. Through critical assessment of existing literature, we summarise the current state of co-design in policymaking. We then suggest promising ways policy practitioners and researchers could contribute to making co-design an embedded practice in policymaking, well-used and well-recognised for the unique contributions it can make to policy development.

Whether endemic or overt, conflict is an intrinsic part of policymaking. Public participation promises to give a place to those conflicts in a more inclusive and productive way. Previous research has primarily focused on the substance and discourse of conflict, studying what conflicts are about and how actors give meaning to conflicts. Less attention has been given to how conflicts are enacted and performed when citizens and the state meet. Using a dramaturgical approach, this paper explores how the performances, staging practices, and scenography of public participation influence policy conflicts. The research concentrates on two contentious urban projects in the Belgian city of Genk, employing ethnographic observation of participatory moments to expose the performative elements of participation. The analysis uncovers the artifacts and communicative methods that narrow the conflict scope, determine the micro-politics of the participatory meetings, and influence whose voices are heard. Using a dramaturgical analysis framework sheds light on some underexplored, micro-level dynamics of participatory efforts that may limit the scope of policy conflict. Understanding these micro-mechanisms is essential for a more inclusive and equitable urban transformation policy.

Although causal evidence synthesis is critical for the policy sciences—whether it be analysis for policy or analysis of policy—its repeatable, systematic, and transparent execution remains challenging due to the growing volume, variety, and velocity of policy-relevant evidence generation as well as the complex web of relationships within which policies are usually situated. To address these shortcomings, we develop a novel, semi-automated approach to synthesizing causal evidence from policy-relevant documents. Specifically, we propose the use of natural language processing (NLP) for the extraction of causal evidence and subsequent homogenization of the text; causal mapping for the collation, visualization, and summarization of complex interdependencies within the policy system; and graph analytics for further investigation of the structure and dynamics of the causal map. We illustrate this approach by applying it to a collection of 28 articles on the emissions trading scheme (ETS), a policy instrument of increasing importance for climate change mitigation. In all, we find 300 variables and 284 cause-effect pairs in our input dataset (consisting of 4524 sentences), which are reduced to 70 unique variables and 119 cause-effect pairs after homogenization. We create a causal map depicting these relationships and analyze it to demonstrate the perspectives and policy-relevant insights that can be obtained. We compare these with select manually conducted, previous meta-reviews of the policy instrument, and find them to be not only broadly consistent but also complementary. We conclude that, despite remaining limitations, this approach can help synthesize causal evidence for policy analysis, policy making, and policy research.

Risk perception influences the perceived salience of various policy issues. In this study, we examine the pathways through which environmental identity influences the perceived salience of two kinds of policy issues—climate change (climate mitigation and climate adaptation) and development (economic growth and infrastructure). Based on a dataset of 503 respondents from coastal communities along the east coast of the United States, our findings indicate that environmental identity is associated with a greater perceived salience of climate mitigation, and that this relationship is mediated by hydrometeorological disaster risk perception. While we found no significant total effect of environmental identity on the perceived salience of climate adaptation, perceived salience of infrastructure development, and perceived salience of economic growth, hydrometeorological disaster risk perception was found to fully mediate all three relationships. Also, the mediated relationships were found to be significantly moderated by gender identity, but not by age (except for the perceived salience of infrastructure development). The study highlights the pivotal role of hydrometeorological risk perception in modifying the perceived importance of different policy issues among environmentalists and has implications for policy and planning in coastal regions.

The concept of nudge has been prevalent in studies that explore behavioral changes for better individual decision-making. While nudging has been applied to study public policy, a puzzling under-explored issue in this context is coproduction. In this study, I build on the rich literature on nudging theory and conduct an empirical assessment that compares different strategies intended to increase public willingness to engage in coproduction. In public administration, the concept of coproduction refers to citizens’ willingness to contribute to policies that improve their lives. Therefore, a nudging approach offers multiple benefits in employing strategies that do not compel but can motivate greater citizen participation. My approach focuses on comparing common nudging strategies in two unique coproduction areas: natural hazards resilience and public health, and identifying the most efficient ways to increase citizens’ willingness to contribute to proposed policies. The results suggest that nudging strategies are a useful tool for increasing hazard resilience coproduction, while they backfire for organ donations and reduce the willingness to participate. Also, norm-nudge and loss aversion are more powerful strategies in increasing intention to join compared to a default strategy. Lastly, I provide evidence showing relative consistency between respondents’ stated intention and actual coproduction behavior in both policy areas. These findings provide valuable insights to policymakers in designing effective tools to encourage greater public engagement with policy. It also offers theoretical contributions to research on coproduction and how to more directly integrate behavioral theories into public administration studies and investigate individuals’ attitudes towards participation in policy solutions.

Although abortion policy is often discussed as a black-and-white conflict characterized by polarization and a lack of compromise, this study explores the validity of such a presupposition by asking how advocates articulate their belief systems about abortion policy and in what ways—if at all—are those beliefs shared within and across coalitions and create fissures within and between coalitions? Applying the Advocacy Coalition Framework, we interviewed advocates, representing both pro-abortion-access and anti-abortion-access perspectives, about their beliefs, coalition allies, and opponents in Colorado. The result reveals nuanced belief systems that address competing conceptions of morality, gender, and life with a tendency toward deep core beliefs. This paper contributes to the ACF literature by highlighting a policy issue not often raised by ACF scholars, bridging morality policy and abortion policy literature with more mainstream policy process research, and surpassing simple “pro-life vs. pro-choice” dichotomies to reveal complex belief systems about abortion.