Policy-change theory

There is increasing pressure in international development to demonstrate that aid spending has an impact. This includes spending on policy research. While there is much debate about appropriate methods and evidence for demonstrating impact, ‘a more recent development is the movement to include practice-based evidence alongside more traditional scientific evidence in the accumulation of knowledge about what works, when, and why?’ (Forss, Marra and Schwartz 2011: 5).

The concept of practice-based evidence accepts that the world is a complicated, messy place that cannot be easily controlled. Those promoting its use suggest that it can provide additional insight about impact. Impact evaluation is an assessment of both the intended and unintended outcomes of a given intervention, where ‘the proper analysis of impact requires a counterfactual of what those outcomes would have been in the absence of the intervention’ (OECD 2001).

This paper explores the challenge of using practice-based evidence gathered with civil society organisations – and agencies that support them – to learn more about the impact of policy-related work. Specifically, it uses the work undertaken in the Sexuality, Poverty and Law programme at the Institute of Development Studies, and focuses on one case study that looked at sex workers’ experiences of economic empowerment programmes in Ethiopia. The purpose is not to assess the case study or particular interventions, but to better understand what policy impact might look like.

El presente documento tiene por finalidad presentar un esbozo sobre el desarrollo teórico en políticas públicas (policy theory) y en las teorías sobre el cambio político (policy-change theory), identificando las tendencias actuales, así como los retos de cara al futuro.

Jarvis, Darryl S.L. and Caner Bakir (2018), ‘Institutional and Policy Change: Meta-theory and Method,’ in Jarvis, Darryl S.L. and Caner Bakir (eds.), Institutional Entrepreneurship and Policy Change: Theoretical and Empirical Explorations. Houndmills, Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1-38. DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-70350-3.

Employing a policy network approach within a multiple theories framework, this paper explicates a unifying analytical framework for examining state-level policy change in educational subsystems. In the politically fluid context of current educational domains, policy networks have strong potential for conceptualizing the contemporary nature of policy-making, in which a loose coordination of private and public actors work together across issues. Likewise, the complex and dynamic nature of state policy-making may not conform to a single theory of the policy process, requiring concepts to be synthesized across theories. This theoretical model addresses these issues by linking subsystem attributes to network characteristics, which I show may then be empirically linked to a number of policy outcomes in educational contexts.

In policy change study, there are at least two main methods used, namely the domestic and international approaches. The classification of approaches is not only based on who the actors are involved in the policy change process or where the source of influence comes from, but more fundamentally each approach emphasizes a different political arena. The domestic approach that is dominant in the study of political science and public policy administration explains policy change as an arena of domestic actors in the fight for their own self-interests. Meanwhile the international approach developed in the study of international relations oversees policy change as an arena for the achievement of the international or transnational actors' interests who want a policy change either by pressuring for changes or providing preferences that can be selected voluntarily by the governments in the decision-making process. This paper aimed at reviewing the methodology of the two approaches that had existed previously and trying to introduce an alternative approach called intermestic (international domestic). The intermestic approach is useful to analyse the policy change in the globalization era that occurs as if the world is "borderless". This approach starts with the explanation that the domestic and international categories are no longer relevant. In other words, the intermestic approach emphasizes the one fatal mistake that we did was precisely in the selection of the domestic and international arena in the policy change process because the world was headed for a "one space or global political arena". However, in the intermestic approach the idea of state sovereignty is an important aspect and the government still has the main role in the policy change process in addition to those influences of other actors. Nevertheless, the role of states becomes ambiguous because the globalization process has redefined the sovereignty rights and political power of the nation state.

Después de lustros de implementar iniciativas diversas de igualdad y de incorporar el principio de transversalidad de género o gender mainstreaming en la normativa de los países europeos, persisten grandes interrogantes acerca de su grado real de impacto en los contenidos y los procesos de elaboración y gestión de las políticas públicas. El objetivo de este trabajo es proporcionar herramientas teóricas y analíticas para analizar cómo el poder moldea las instituciones públicas, y con ello identificar aspectos críticos y palancas útiles para impulsar un cambio hacia una mayor igualdad de género. Para ello, se recurre a una revisión y sistematización de la literatura reciente en los campos de género y política pública y de género y organizaciones. Se argumentará que para abordar la eficacia de la estrategia de la transversalidad de género es necesario poner el foco en la dimensión de género de las instituciones, explorando sus culturas y patrones organizativos formales e informales en toda su complejidad sectorial, de nivel de gobierno y territorial; entendiéndolas como ámbitos de conflicto, contestación y cambio, y como sedimentaciones de tensiones históricas. Como conclusión se destaca que es necesario profundizar en los condicionantes y dinámicas locales que se dan en distintos contextos para definir propuestas de cambio más efectivas. Esto implica desarrollar más análisis empíricos y comparados de las diferencias entre instituciones, de cómo se dan los procesos de cambio y de las características de las resistencias a la igualdad.

""Resumen: En las últimas tres décadas, las políticas de drogas en el Uruguay han cambiado considerablemente, pasando de un modelo prohibicionista a uno de reducción de daños. Actualmente, el Gobierno uruguayo se plantea la regulación legal de la producción, distribución, tenencia y el consumo recreacional del cannabis. La presente investigación utiliza el enfoque de coaliciones promotoras (advocacy coalition framework, ACF) para identificar los factores que explican estos cambios y las dinámicas que se generan, a la vez que se contrasta la validez de sus postulados en el contexto político uruguayo. El análisis apoya las hipótesis del ACF sobre los cambios en las políticas públicas. El aprendizaje orientado a las políticas de drogas en la década de 1990, así como un evento no cognitivo, el ascenso de un Gobierno favorable en el año 2000, fueron cruciales para la dominación del subsistema de drogas por parte de la coalición promotora del modelo de reducción de daños, en perjuicio de la coalición prohibicionista. Desde entonces, otros eventos no cognitivos y externos al subsistema fomentaron el fortalecimiento de la coalición promotora de la liberalización del cannabis, la cual, a pesar estar dividida internamente y no contar con información técnica consistente, compite con las otras dos coaliciones por el dominio del subsistema;

Abstract: Over the last three decades, Uruguayan drug policy has changed considerably, moving away from a prohibitionist to a harm reduction model. The Uruguayan Government is currently considering a reform to regulate the production, sale and consumption of marihuana for recreational purposes. This article uses the advocacy coalition framework to identify the factors that explain these changes and their dynamics, as well as to test the validity of the framework in the Uruguayan context. The analysis supports the frameworks hypothesis regarding policy change. Policy-oriented learning during the 1990, as well as a non-cognitive event, when a favorable Government took office in 2000, were crucial factors that helped the harm reduction coalition to overthrow the hegemonic prohibition coalition. Since then, other non-cognitive events, external to the drug policy subsystem, encouraged the strengthening of the cannabis legalization coalition. Although it is internally divided and it’s technical information is inconsistent, it currently competes against the other two coalitions for the control of the subsystem.""

The term 'Narrative Change’ seems to have become a catch-phrase in the philanthropic world. A number of foundations have engaged in narrative change work and a number of donors have funded narrative change projects. However, when a term becomes a trend, there is the danger that it starts to lose meaning.
Some two years ago, the Open Society Public Health Program (PHP) decided to emphasize narrative change work within its strategy, and we therefore needed to be able to define the concept more precisely, to understand what it is and what it is not, why it is important, and how we ‘do’ narrative change. We needed to better articulate how narrative change relates to attitude change, and how it impacts on policy. This paper represents an attempt to answer some of these questions.
In this paper I make an attempt to define both ‘narrative’ and ‘narrative change’ and outline reasons it is important. I examine narrative change and its link to attitudes and values. I then turn to the role of narrative in policy change processes, narrative change at the level of culture, and the ways in which policy and culture interact. I go on to outline some of the narrative change methods that we are using within the PHP, and discuss several questions related to risks and ethics.

This paper presents an interdisciplinary nested multilevel analytic  framework to study public policy changes and institutional reform.  Interdisciplinary, because the methodological choices are based upon existing compatible theories and models from an array of disciplines within the social sciences such as political science, public administration, sociology, psychology and economics. Multilevel, because the focus of the analysis for any given case study may use elements that range from the macro-most level of systems and structural contexts, to the micro-most level of individual narrative of key people that hold sway over the change, and three additional levels in between. Nested, because it aims to integrate several independently conceived methodological tools under a coherent framework where these reinforce and supplement each other’s explanatory powers.

Pressures have increasingly been put upon social scientists to prove their economic, cultural and social value through 'impact agendas' in higher education. There has been little conceptual and empirical discussion of the challenges involved in achieving impact and the dangers of evaluating it, however. This article argues that a critical realist approach to social science can help to identify some of these key challenges and the institutional incompatibilities between impact regimes and university research in free societies. These incompatibilities are brought out through an autobiographical 'insider-account' of trying to achieve impact in the field of electoral integrity in Britain. The article argues that there is a more complex relationship between research and the real world which means that the nature of knowledge might change as it becomes known by reflexive agents. Secondly, the researchers are joined into social relations with a variety of actors, including those who might be the object of study in their research. Researchers are often weakly positioned in these relations. Some forms of impact, such as achieving policy change, are therefore exceptionally difficult as they are dependent on other actors. Strategies for trying to achieve impact are drawn out such as collaborating with civil society groups and parliamentarians to lobby for policy change. This is a pre-print of an article due for publication in the journal British Politics. Please cite and quote from the final version of the article.

En las últimas décadas, los estudiosos de la política pública demostraron especial interés en la búsqueda de una explicación para los cambios y continuidades en las instituciones y en las políticas públicas. Los principales desarrollos teóricos, por tratar las institucionales como características relativamente perdurables de la vida política y social (normas, reglas, procedimientos, valores) que estructuran los comportamientos, acabaron dando más énfasis a las explicaciones centradas en la continuidad en lugar del cambio. Consideraron solamente una vía para el cambio, la que lo concibe como un choque abrupto causado por factores externos, lo que interrumpe el equilibrio establecido y provoca un giro en la política. Las características variables y dinámicas, presentes en el ámbito de las políticas, son apartadas del análisis y con ellas las fuentes endógenas del cambio. En esta tesis doctoral nos propusimos ir más allá de las explicaciones convencionales del neoinstitucionalismo. Al ampliar y cambiar el foco de análisis hacia el desempeño de los actores en los procesos endógenos de cambio institucional gradual, mostramos varios medios por los que las políticas pueden modificarse, incluso sin atacar directamente a las instituciones establecidas. El estudio no niega que el diseño de las instituciones puede influir en el comportamiento de los actores, sino que busca profundizar en el vínculo explicativo de esa relación y va más allá. Analizamos diferentes factores que pueden influenciar los cambios que se producen en las instituciones y en las políticas generadas y gestionadas por éstas. Partimos del punto de vista del poder distributivo de las instituciones, utilizando como marco conceptual las teorías de cambio institucional gradual. Elegimos como caso exploratorio la reforma del sistema sanitario brasileño, en la que el cambio fue el resultado de demandas, articulaciones y estrategias de la propia sociedad civil. Nos preguntamos más: ¿cómo podemos explicar los cambios de dirección en la política pública cuando las características que hasta entonces habían sostenido su trayectoria no facilitaban esfuerzos en esa dirección? O aún, ¿por qué incluso formulando políticas que formalmente rompen con el status quo, en la práctica, al implementar la decisión no se sigue la misma dirección? El análisis tuvo en cuenta tres dimensiones: el contexto (político, institucional y del sector sanitario), la direccionalidad (rol y estrategia de los actores) y los diferentes tipos de cambio. Los resultados mostraron que la interacción de las tres variables de contexto puede influir en el tipo de cambio producido. Sin embargo, el vínculo de causalidad entre éstas y el cambio está en el rol y las estrategias de los actores. Los actores favorables u opositores al cambio desarrollarán diferentes estrategias, conforme a sus percepciones de las variables relevantes del contexto, lo que conducirá a un tipo u otro de cambio. Así, tanto el cambio como la estabilidad institucional dependerán de una movilización política activa y constante de los actores. Lo que demuestra que las instituciones no son algo automático, que se perpetúe o se refuerce a sí mismo, como defiende la literatura de path dependence. Por detrás del aparente inmovilismo institucional los actores interactúan dando forma a la agenda del debate y restringiéndola o evitando decisiones colectivas por completo. Esta tesis doctoral refuerza, por tanto, los argumentos explicativos de las teorías del cambio institucional gradual y presenta evidencias que contribuyen a profundizar en el debate.

The cultural policy domain can be considered a relevant object of study for analyzing policy change processes in which policy discourse and the ambiguity of language have a central role. However, there are few studies that analyze cultural policy and policy change. This article therefore develops an approach for analyzing policy change based on evidence from a case study of the development of cultural policy in Catalonia. In this narrative-interactionist approach, policy change is taken to mean the result of the symbolic interaction among political actors, within a relatively restricted institutional framework. Policy change is conditioned by the variations in the process of symbolic legitimation of government intervention, in this case in the cultural arena. By adapting the concept of frame alignment to policy change analysis, this article shows that the alignment between policy frames and a master frame underpins this symbolic legitimation. The process of alignment is dynamic and leads to a modification of the actors’ policy frames.

Policy change, especially the significant one, is something rare in Greece. Ruling political parties, as the legitimate decision makers, are not inclined to impose any significant change due to its unforeseen consequences. And yet, since Greece approved the rescue packages in 2010 and 2012 from international institutions, namely European Commission (EC), European Central Bank (ECB) and International Monetary Fund (IMF) –herewith “troika”, significant policy change started to appear. Generally speaking, each package consists of bailout funds and austerity measures. The latter is aimed at promoting sustainable fiscal balance for Greece mainly through fiscal policy tools to enhance revenue and reduce expenditure. Drawing from these instances, this research will attain two-folded goals which are to assess the extent to which policy change in Greece is deemed to be significant rather than incremental and how this policy change happens.  Based on the Punctuated Equilibrium (PE) model employed as the main analytical tool in this research, the extent to which policy change in Greece is considered significant can be seen from the drop in government expenditure, changes in some policy domains and the nature of policy feedback. Furthermore, this significant change can be understood by looking at the promotion of policy image done by policy entrepreneur and the change in institutional policy venue. The interaction between policy image and policy venue provides the chance for significant change to happen. It is supported by disturbance or policy punctuation on Greece’s political system in the forms of economic crisis and leadership change.

Keywords: austerity measures, debt crisis, fiscal consolidation, Greece, policy change

The objective of the paper is to explain a case of social innovation in mental health services, moving from a psychiatric hospital, classically a total institution, to a healthier, diversified, and personalized care service. The research was conducted by a participant observation method, on the long run, from 1996 to 2006 in Milan (Italy): more than 25 meeting and 40 semi structured interviews were conducted. It looks at a case of 'social entrepreneurship' in Milan which contributes to the transformation of a large, closed psychiatric hospital into a more open and therapeutic environment for mental health services users, as well as for ordinary citizens of the whole metropolitan area. Most of the literature correctly emphasize governance and administrative capability as crucial variable for satisfaction of needs, recognition of capability and sustainability of projects. The paper shows the relevance of exogenous resources, nonlocal mobilisations, and loosely connected social movement networks to enact communicative spaces and challenge closed and inertial policy communities.

Employing the critical juncture theory (CJT), a discursive institutionalist approach, this paper examines the nature of the changes to Irish social partnership policy at the end of the decade of the 2000s.  Did these policy changes constitute a transformation in social partnership policy, or were they simply a continuation of a previously established policy pathway?  The CJT consists of three elements – economic crisis, ideational change, and the nature of the policy change – that must be identified for us to be able to declare with some certainty if the changes to social partnership policy constituted a critical juncture.  Our findings will help explain why Irish social partnership policy underwent a radical transformation at this time.

Employing the critical juncture theory (CJT), a discursive institutionalist approach, this paper examines the nature of the changes to Irish social partnership policy at the end of the decade of the 2000s. Did these policy changes constitute a transformation in social partnership policy, or were they simply a continuation of a previously established policy pathway? The CJT consists of three elements – economic crisis, ideational change, and the nature of the policy change – that must be identified for us to be able to declare with some certainty if the changes to social partnership policy constituted a critical juncture. Our findings will help explain why Irish social partnership policy underwent a radical transformation at this time.

Resumen: En las últimas tres décadas, las políticas de drogas en el Uruguay han cambiado consi- derablemente, pasando de un modelo prohibicionista a uno de reducción de daños. Actualmente, el Gobierno uruguayo se plantea la regulación legal de la producción, distribución, tenencia y el consumo recreacional del cannabis. La presente investigación utiliza el enfoque de coaliciones promotoras (advocacy coalition framework, ACF) para identifi car los factores que explican estos cambios y las dinámicas que se generan, a la vez que se contrasta la validez de sus postulados en el el contexto político uruguayo. Abstract: Over the last three decades, Uruguayan drug policy has changed considerably, moving away from a prohibitionist to a harm reduction model. The Uruguayan Government is currently considering a reform to regulate the production, sale and consumption of marihuana for recre- ational purposes. This article uses the advocacy coalition framework to identify the factors that explain ...

En el contexto de la denominada cuarta revolución industrial se han dado transformaciones profundas en la sociedad en relación con las políticas de Acceso a recursos genéticos y la Distribución de Beneficios (adb), que impactan a quienes aplican herramientas moleculares en sus investigaciones académicas, por lo que resulta pertinente indagar sobre quién es el indicado para tomar decisiones en este contexto. En los decretos 1375 y 1376 de 2013 hubo un proceso de coproducción de políticas, con demandas concretas por parte de actores no-estatales, así como el involucramiento de actores públicos que aportaron insumos y recursos y alcanzaron soluciones nuevas e innovadoras.

Institutions are norms that undergird organisations and are reflected in laws and practices. Overtime institutions take root and persist, as they are path dependent. This makes them change-resistant. So, it is puzzling when institutions change. One such puzzle, in the Indian context, has been the enactment of the Right to Information Act (RTI Act) in 2005, which brought about institutional change by transforming the ‘information regime’ in India. But why did the government upend the norm of secrecy, which had historically been persisting and entrenched within the Indian state? This book uses archival material, internal government documents, and interviews to understand the why and the how of institutional change. The book demonstrates that the institutional change was a result of an incremental and gradual process of emerging ‘ideas’ resulting in a ‘tipping point’.

Toda política es un cambio de política (All policy is policy change) pregonaron Hogwood & Peters en 1983. Posterior a esa época el debate se ha ampliado buscando comprender los cambios en la política (changes within policy) y los cambios de política (change of policy)” (del Castillo, 2017: 54); su clasificación como cambios incrementales o paradigmáticos (Hall, 1993), la velocidad del cambio (Howlett & Cashore, 2009); sus motores (Harguindeguy, 2015) y de manera más reciente, comprobar si hay conexión entre el cambio de políticas y la resolución de los problemas públicos.

Por lo tanto, es importante analizar el enfoque del cambio como una perspectiva que permita ir más allá de los límites del enfoque cíclico de las políticas y entender ¿Qué es el cambio? ¿Por qué cambian las políticas? ¿Cómo medirlo? ¿Qué tipos de cambio hay? ¿Cuáles son los motores del cambio?

En este sentido, el objetivo de este ensayo es analizar los postulados del enfoque del cambio de políticas, cuestionando ¿Qué podemos saber gracias al estudio del enfoque del cambio de políticas? Para ello, se busca aplicar los principios de este campo a un caso concreto: la política urbana en México, un sector caracterizado por contar con cambios paradigmáticos graduales (Howlett & Cashore, 2009) debido a una reforma administrativa previa, un cambio en la imagen de la política y una modificación de la comunidad de políticas involucrada en ese sector.

Para ello, este trabajo se estructura de la siguiente manera. En el primer apartado se explica que es el cambio de políticas públicas, sus principales subenfoques y tipos de cambio; en el segundo se trata de aplicar dichos postulados teóricos al caso de la política urbana; en el tercero se argumenta de la importancia de la reforma administrativa como un cambio de política pública y por último se concluye que la reforma administrativa puede ser un primer paso de innovación para lograr cambios paradigmáticos en las políticas públicas.

Much of the disaster risk reduction (DRR) scholarship has focused on failures while neglecting positive developments, particularly in developing countries. In part, this bias reflects the adaptation deficit argument, which suggests we should expect the most vulnerable (i.e., developing) countries to struggle with adaptation due to their socio-political characteristics and heavy exposure to natural hazards. Investigating Fiji and Nepal, this study serves as a plausibility probe, examining how unexpected change in national DRR policy regimes was enabled under such adverse circumstances and exploring the appropriateness of theoretical assumptions suggesting aspects that warrant more testing in future. Following an exploratory approach, this qualitative study uses documentary evidence and secondary literature to illuminate how factors such as leadership, diffusion, and 'focusing events' enabled change. The study finds that in both cases, large-scale disasters accelerated change; however, Fiji was able to build upon continuity in its political leadership, whereas change in Nepal was contingent on international pressure. The findings bolster the case for the theory of 'focusing events', i.e., hazards serving as external shocks opening windows of opportunity, in developing countries. Furthermore, they confirm the importance of continuous commitment and diffusion processes in helping to overcome barriers to adaptation. Thereby, this study refines theoretical assumptions and illustrates the value of studying and learning from success and progress, particularly in the context of developing countries. Finally, the findings of this study underline the need, when analysing the processes of change, to take a closer look at the socio-political contextsincluding regime types.

Introduction/Abstract. [1]This chapter's goal is to provide an overview of some key issues in the relationship between business, science, and technology, with a focus on science, technology and innovation (STI) governance or policymaking. First, the topic of technology change as an organizational field will be explored. It will be shown how issues of causality in the historically changing relations between technological revolutions, and modes of conducting business (capitalism) and science have been replaced by questions about co-evolution, boundary-crossing and assemblage. Then the discussion will move to types of scientific theories dealing with socio-technological change. This issues in a brief sketch of the Multi-Level Perspective theory of innovation systems, as the most recent synthesis of thinking about technology in evolutionary economics and network sociology. [2]Second, technology change is recast as a strategic action field, in which several types of agents engage in competitive promising games. It will be shown how de facto governance, and policy thinking about STI-issues has moved from market and government failures to guarantee fair competition between firms, to innovation system failures in assuring national competitiveness in a global market, and, more recently, to transformation failures in enabling techno-social change for an ecologically sustainable future. Discussing policy instruments for these different goals and contexts, STI-policy has become a bewildering palimpsest of older and new policy instruments. Through policy instrument layering, conversion and drifting STI-governance is highly tentative - more an aspiration than an achievement. [3]The third and concluding section reflects on unintended consequences of de facto governance of technology, by firms as limited liability companies, and science as ‘the endless frontier’. Apart from ecological disasters, the loss of the public’s trust in science due to its pervasive commercialization is discussed. Against this background the future of STI-governance is conjectured as a rethinking and political struggle about the moral labour implicit in the de facto governance of technology.

This paper utilised and builds upon the critical junctures framework developed by Hogan and Doyle (2007; 2008).  That framework consists of three separate elements that must be identified in sequence in order for the researcher to be able to declare, with some degree of certainty, if an event constitutes a critical juncture.  These three elements are crisis, ideational change, and radical policy change.  The framework set out here constitutes an even more rigorous approach to clearly identifying crisis, and ideational and radical policy changes.  As Thelen (2003: 234) argues that few tools exist in political science to enable us make sense of institutional/policy change, a framework such as this should be of significant value.  The framework is employed here in examining the economic debacles in Brazil in 1999 and in Argentina in 2001, to determine if there were critical junctures in their privatisation policies at the start of the 21st century.  Privatisation policy is examined as it constitutes a core tenet of conservative economic restructuring.  A significant change in privatisation policy may be indicative of wider changes in macro-economic policy.  Prior to the existence of this framework we would have had to wait for decades pass before we would be able to determine if a critical juncture had taken place.

Ever since the publication of George Tsebelis's " Veto Players " , political scientists have constructed measures of policy stability on the basis of his theory's implications. In this research note, we indicate two popular misunderstandings associated with this use. To some extent these problems are known, but they scholars persist in ignoring them nevertheless, warranting drawing our attention to them. The first is the failure to distinguish between weak and strong implications of veto player theory. The second misunderstanding lies in the fact that scholars ignore information about the preferences of veto players in different settings. Focusing on the sheer number of veto players is particularly dangerous when constructing measures that are applied to draw inferences from cross-sectional comparisons. After explaining the nature of these misunderstanding using a stylized example, we provide evidence from two popular datasets proposing measures of policy stability that have been used in political science journal publications. We also develop a set of best practices for using the number of veto players as a measure of policy stability.

Fondé sur une étude de cas sur le développement des politiques culturelles du gouvernement de la Catalogne, cet article vise à mieux comprendre comment, quand et pourquoi les politiques publiques changent-elles. La continuité et le  changement des politiques culturelles sont affectés par un conflit insoluble : la construction (et la déconstruction) de la légitimité institutionnelle de l'intervention gouvernementale dans la culture. La continuité des politiques (transition culturelle) s’explique par la limitation de la portée de ce conflit. Une crise de légitimité institutionnelle des politiques culturelles se développe lorsque le gouvernement (comme un tout) entre  en conflit frontal avec d'autres systèmes de pouvoir. Finalement, l’introduction de changements significatifs (désétatisation) correspond à un processus de socialisation du conflit et de relégitimation institutionnelle. Cependant, plus que favoriser la démocratisation du processus des politiques, les changements peuvent reproduire la distance entre le  secteur culturel et le reste de la société.

Based on a case study of the development of the cultural policies of the autonomous government of Catalonia, this paper analyses how, when and why policy change processes are developed. Cultural policy continuity and change are conditioned by a permanent conflict: the institutional legitimacy of the government intervention in the cultural arena. Thus, a period of policy continuity (named cultural transition in this paper) can be explained by a process of conflict containment. In turn, cultural policies can face a crisis in institutional legitimacy when conflict affects the policy domain as a whole. Lastly, a period of significant changes in cultural policies (named desetatisation in this paper) corresponds to a process of conflict expansion and institutional re-legitimation of the government intervention. However, instead of promoting the democratization of the policy process, cultural policy changes can increase the gulf between the cultural sector and the rest of society.

Ever since the publication of George Tsebelis’s “Veto Players”, political scientists have constructed measures of policy stability on the basis of his theory’s implications. In this research note, we indicate two popular misunderstandings associated with this use. To some extent these problems are known, but they scholars persist in ignoring them nevertheless, warranting drawing our attention to them. The first is the failure to distinguish between weak and strong implications of veto player theory. The second misunderstanding lies in the fact that scholars ignore information about the preferences of veto players in different settings. Focusing on the sheer number of veto players is particularly dangerous when constructing measures that are applied to draw inferences from cross-sectional comparisons. After explaining the nature of these misunderstanding using a stylized example, we provide evidence from two popular datasets proposing measures of policy stability that have been used ...

Our project proposes to study a sample of 4 countries of the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean (SEMC): Turkey, Israel, Morocco and Tunisia, which are among the most committed to EU integration, on the one hand the relations between money and financial markets/exchange rates in the context of a Euro zone in the Mediterranean, and on the other hand the role of financial markets in smoothing national consumption in the countries concerned. On the basis of a single model based on the work of Edwards and Elbadawi, we tested the evolution of the exchange rates of the 4 countries concerned against their fundamental equilibrium exchange rates. We were thus able to better assess the exchange rate policies that were followed according to their under- or over-alignment with regard to a fundamental equilibrium parity that takes into account the sustainability of the internal and external balances of these countries. We were able to draw conclusions about their future exchange rate policy against the Euro based on the results obtained for each country.

This chapter's goal is to provide an overview of some key issues in the relationship between business, science, and technology, with a focus on science, technology and innovation (STI) governance or policymaking. First, the topic of technology change as an organizational field will be explored. It will be shown how issues of causality in the historically changing relations between technological revolutions, and modes of conducting business (capitalism) and science have been replaced by questions about co-evolution, boundary-crossing and assemblage. Then the discussion will move to types of scientific theories dealing with socio-technological change. This issues in a brief sketch of the Multi-Level Perspective theory of innovation systems, as the most recent synthesis of thinking about technology in evolutionary economics and network sociology.

Second, technology change is recast as a strategic action field, in which several types of agents engage in competitive promising games. It will be shown how de facto governance, and policy thinking about STI-issues has moved from market and government failures to guarantee fair competition between firms, to innovation system failures in assuring national competitiveness in a global market, and, more recently, to transformation failures in enabling techno-social change for an ecologically sustainable future.  Discussing policy instruments for these different goals and contexts, STI-policy has become a bewildering palimpsest of older and new policy instruments. Through policy instrument layering, conversion and drifting STI-governance is highly tentative - more an aspiration than an achievement.

The third and concluding section reflects on unintended consequences of de facto governance of technology, by firms as limited liability companies, and science as ‘the endless frontier’. Apart from ecological disasters, the loss of the public’s trust in science due to its pervasive commercialization is discussed. Against this background the future of STI-governance is conjectured as a rethinking and political struggle about the moral labour implicit in the de facto governance of technology.

Esta investigación tiene como objetivo conectar las teorías cognitivas e institucionales para explicar cómo evolucionan las políticas públicas. Partiendo de los límites identificados en el modelo propuesto por los enfoques cognitivos, el artículo muestra que este marco puede complementarse con el modelo de cambio institucional propuesto por las teorías del institucionalismo histórico. Este estudio se centra de esta manera en la dinámica del cambio y propone ir más allá de las teorías fundamentadas en coyunturas críticas o choques exógenos que se basan más en las continuidades que en los cambios. Se abordan aquí dos estudios de caso sobre el cambio de políticas públicas-la política fiscal en Brasil y las políticas medioambientales en Chile. Sugerimos un modelo que puede explicar los cambios cognitivos graduales al proponer dos formas diferentes de cambio de política—anclaje ideacional y estratificación cognitiva.

Employing the critical juncture theory (CJT), a discursive institutionalist approach, this paper examines the nature of the changes to Irish industrial policy, and Mexican macroeconomic policy, during early the 1980s, a time when both countries went through economic crises. Did these policy changes constitute transformations to failing policies, or were they simply continuations of previously established policy pathways despite their problems? The CJT consists of three elements – economic crisis, ideational change, and the nature of the policy change – that must be identified for us to be able to declare with some certainty if the policy changes constituted critical junctures. Our findings will help explain why Irish industrial policy did not undergo a radical transformation during the 1980s, while Mexican macroeconomic policy underwent major change in that decade.

This paper departs from the suggestion of combining the Advocacy Coalition Framework with an interest-oriented approach to understand policy change. The subject of study is the policy process of Swedish self-regulation of advertising during the time period 1950–1971. The beginning of the period is chosen for two reasons. Firstly, the state initiated a number of competitive and consumer-oriented policies during this time which directly or indirectly affected advertising. Secondly, the sustained economic growth of the era completely transformed lifestyles of Swedes, giving them an unprecedented opportunity of hedonistic consumption. This new found affluence also propelled advertising to the fore of social, political and economic life. Consequently, it became a hotly debated social issue, often within the context of consumer policies. Advertising was criticized for manipulating consumers, generating higher prices, wasting resources, producing informational overload and causing ecological strains. At the same time the business community considered advertising an integral part of the free market and vigorously defended it, usually through its business associations or by business supported research. Reflecting these major events, advertising regulations went through several changes at this time period and, in particular, self-regulation was reformed and transformed.

Adaptando la propuesta de D. Beetham (Beetham 1991) para el estudio de la legitimidad en ciencias sociales, y tomando en cuenta los avances teóricos existentes en el estudio de la dinámica de las políticas, este trabajo propone un enfoque sintético alternativo para el estudio de la estabilidad y el cambio de políticas públicas, llamado enfoque de legitimación y dinámica política LDP. Propone que los procesos de cambio sustantivo pueden darse de dos formas: bajo una lógica reactiva o como un proceso de desarrollo. Postula que con el reforzamiento y consolidación del patrón de legitimidad (categoría de análisis asociada a la política pública) se favorecen periodos más o menos prolongados de estabilidad que favorecen la perpetuación de la política, la lógica de adaptación y de cambios incrementales, o incluso procesos planificados, prolongados en el tiempo y complejos (negociados o no) de cambios sustantivos y graduales. Por otro lado sucesos de calado -shocks externos, la interiorización de procesos globales de innovación y difusión, o dinámicas endógenas propias son fuerzas tales que impactan en el patrón de legitimidad asociado a la política y detonan el cambio sustantivo de las políticas. Al transformarse el patrón de legitimidad se consolida el cambio sustantivo.

ABSTRACT: Adapting David Beetham's Legitimation of Power (Beetham 1991) model for social sciences, and taking into account synthetic theories of the policy process and recent developments in policy change theories, this paper defines an approach for the study of policy stability and change, (legitimation and policy dynamics - LPD approach). LPD assumes that substantive policy change process can take two forms: as a reactive way or as a developmental logic. The legitimacy pattern favors periods of policy stability, based on perpetuation, the logic of adaptation and incremental changes or planned and long-time based processes of substantive changes. On the other hand, focusing events, external shocks, the internalization of global processes of innovation and diffusion, or endogenous dynamics are all forces that influence the system and may lead to distortions in the legitimacy pattern. Change in the legitimacy pattern induces major policy change.