Policy Sciences最新文献

Firms often oppose costly public policy reforms—but under what conditions may they come to support such reforms? Previous scholarship has taken a predominantly static approach to the analysis of business positions. Here, we advance a dynamic theory of change in business policy positions that explains how business may shift from opposing to supporting new regulation over the course of multiple rounds of policymaking. We identify three sets of drivers and causal mechanisms behind business repositioning related to political, policy, and market change. We argue that political mechanisms can shift opposition to “strategic support” for reform, whereas policy and market mechanisms may shift opposition or strategic support toward “sincere support.” We examine the reconfiguration of business interests and policy positions in the context of three decades of US climate politics, focusing on the oil and gas, electricity, and auto sectors. Our dynamic theory of business positions moves beyond the dualism that views business as either opposing or supporting public interest regulation. We thus advance our understanding of why initial business opposition can incrementally turn into strategic or sincere support for policy reform.

Scholars have spent decades arguing that policy entrepreneurs, change agents who work individually and in groups to influence the policy process, can be crucial in introducing policy innovation and spurring policy change. How to identify policy entrepreneurs empirically has received less attention. This oversight is consequential because scholars trying to understand when policy entrepreneurs emerge, and why, and what makes them more or less successful, need to be able to identify these change agents reliably and accurately. This paper explores the ways policy entrepreneurs are currently identified and highlights issues with current approaches. We introduce a new technique for eliciting and distinguishing policy entrepreneurs, coupling automated and manual analysis of local news media and a survey of policy entrepreneur candidates. We apply this technique to the empirical case of unconventional oil and gas drilling in Pennsylvania and derive some tentative results concerning factors which increase entrepreneurial efficacy.

The “policy subsystem” has long been a key concept in our understanding of how policies on a given topic are produced. However, we know much less about policymaking in nascent policy subsystems. This article draws on the theories of agenda-setting and venue shopping to argue that the similarity and convergence of policy subsystems’ agendas across different institutional venues and over time are features that distinguish more nascent policy subsystems from their more established, mature counterparts. In simple terms, policy venues’ agendas converge when policy actors begin to discuss the same issues and instruments instead of talking past one another. The article illustrates this argument using textual data on Germany’s emerging Artificial Intelligence (AI) policy: print media debates, parliamentary debates, and a government consultation from the period between November 2017 and November 2019. The insights from our analysis show that actors emphasize somewhat different policy issues and instruments related to AI in different venues. Nevertheless, the longitudinal analysis suggests that the debate does seem to converge across different venues, which indicates the formation of a subsystem-specific policy agenda regarding AI.

While prior studies have examined various factors that affect immigration policymaking across Europe, little attention has been paid to the impact of the gender structure within parliament. It has been found that female parliamentarians are more concerned with the interests of women, children, and other marginalized groups than their male colleagues. Consequently, they are more likely to prioritize the rights of immigrants who represent an important social minority in European settings. Leveraging a panel data set spanning 26 European states from 2007 to 2019, the paper shows that an increase in the share of women parliamentarians is indeed associated with the liberalization of immigration policy. The results remain significant when employing historical female enrollment as an instrumental variable. Notably, the growth of the right-wing parties (including mainstream and radical right parties) in parliament would undercut the positive impact of female parliamentarians. The paper sheds some light on European immigration policymaking and female political representation.