One hammer for all nails? Testing the autonomy of policy instrument attitudes

Policy design is influenced by stakeholders' attitudes and contextual constraints. While the latter factor is highly variable, attitudes toward policy instruments are deemed more stable across both policy domains and time. This article uses evidence from a cross-sectional survey of Czech university students to examine the autonomy of policy instrument attitudes (APIA) in five policy domains. Only 16% of students endorse a small set of universal instruments for a wide range of applications (so-called instrumentalists) which indicates rather low cross-domain consistency of attitudes (strong APIA hypothesis). Attitudes toward information instruments are correlated within policy domains, thus providing some support for the weak version of APIA. However, this association does not apply to other instruments. The results suggest that the majority of students can be seen as contingentists whose evaluation of the merits of instruments is based on instruments' suitability for a particular problem.