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28 results in Cambridge Elements

Page 1 of 2

Bad Public Policy

Bad Public Policy
  • Malignity, Volatility and the Inherent Vices of Policymaking
  • Michael Howlett, Ching Leong, Tim Legrand
  • Published online:
    07 April 2025
    Print publication:
    08 May 2025
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  • Policy studies assume the existence of baseline parameters – such as honest governments doing their best to create public value, publics responding in good faith, and both parties relying on a policy-making process which aligns with the public interest. In such circumstances, policy goals are expected to be produced through mechanisms in which the public can articulate its preferences and policy-makers are expected to listen to what has been said in determining their governments' courses of action. While these conditions are found in some governments, there is evidence from around the world that much policy-making occurs without these pre-conditions and processes. Unlike situations which produce what can be thought of as 'good' public policy, 'bad' public policy is a more common outcome. How this happens and what makes for bad public policy are the subjects of this Element. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Public Contracting for Social Outcomes

Public Contracting for Social Outcomes
  • Clare J. FitzGerald, J. Ruairi Macdonald
  • Published online:
    12 December 2024
    Print publication:
    12 December 2024
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  • Governments all over the world have transitioned away from directly providing public services to contracting and collaborating with cross-sectoral networks to deliver services on their behalf. Governments have thus pursued an array of policy instruments to improve interorganizational progress towards policy goals. In recent years, outcomes-based contracting has emerged as a compelling solution to service quality shortcomings and collective action challenges. Informed by public policy, public administration, and public procurement scholarship, this Element details the evolution of social outcomes in public contracting, exploring the relationship between how outcomes are specified and managed and how well such instruments deliver against policy goals. It comments on the possible drawbacks of contracting for social outcomes, highlighting how governments may use outcomes as an excuse to avoid actively managing contracts or to sidestep their accountability as outlined in public law. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Policy Entrepreneurs, Crises, and Policy Change

Policy Entrepreneurs, Crises, and Policy Change
  • Evangelia Petridou, Jörgen Sparf, Nikolaos Zahariadis, Thomas Birkland
  • Published online:
    10 December 2024
    Print publication:
    16 January 2025
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  • Increasingly, policymaking takes place while extraordinary events threaten fundamental societal values. During turbulent times, policy entrepreneurs emerge as pivotal figures. They are energetic actors who pursue dynamic change in public policy and, whereas we know much about how they promote innovation and change in normal policymaking, we know less about how they behave in crises, and even less about how different crises influence policy entrepreneurial action. This Element focuses on interaction between policy entrepreneurs and crises. It analyzes policy entrepreneurial action in six case studies – three fast-burning and three creeping crises – to ascertain policy entrepreneurs' strategies and effectiveness during extraordinary events. It proposes crisis policy entrepreneurial strategies, a framework to understand outcomes based on policy entrepreneurial action and type of crisis and suggests avenues for further research on policy entrepreneurs and crises, including implications for crisis managers. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Symbolic Policy

Symbolic Policy
  • Laurie Boussaguet, Florence Faucher
  • Published online:
    30 November 2024
    Print publication:
    02 January 2025
  • Symbols are everywhere in politics. Yet, they tended to be overlooked in the study of public policy. This book shows how they play an important role in the policy process, in shaping citizens' representations thanks to their ability to combine meanings and to stimulate emotional reactions. We use crisis management as a lens through which we analyse this symbolic dimension, and we focus on two case studies (governmental responses to the Covid-19 crisis in Europe in 2020 and to terrorist attacks in France in 2015). We show how the symbolic enables leaders to claim legitimacy for themselves and their decisions, and foster feelings of reassurance, solidarity and belonging. All politicians use the symbolic, whether consciously or otherwise, but what they choose to do varies and is affected by timing, the existence of national repertoires of symbolic actions and the personas of leaders.
Robust Governance in Turbulent Times

Robust Governance in Turbulent Times
  • Christopher Ansell, Eva Sørensen, Jacob Torfing, Jarle Trondal
  • Published online:
    26 April 2024
    Print publication:
    16 May 2024
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  • This Element aims to build, promote, and consolidate a new social science research agenda by defining and exploring the concepts of turbulence and robustness, and subsequently demonstrating the need for robust governance in turbulent times. Turbulence refers to the unpredictable dynamics that public governance is currently facing in the wake of the financial crisis, the refugee crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, the inflation crisis etc. The heightened societal turbulence calls for robust governance aiming to maintain core functions, goals and values by means of flexibly adapting and proactively innovating the modus operandi of the public sector. This Element identifies a broad repertoire of robustness strategies that public governors may use and combine to respond robustly to turbulence. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Designing Behavioural Insights for Policy

Designing Behavioural Insights for Policy
  • Processes, Capacities & Institutions
  • Ishani Mukherjee, Assel Mussagulova
  • Published online:
    24 April 2024
    Print publication:
    16 May 2024
  • The diversity of knowledge surrounding behavioural insights (BI) means in the policy sciences, although visible, remains under-theorized with scant comparative and generalizable explorations of the procedural prerequisites for their effective design, both as stand-alone tools and as part of dedicated policy 'toolkits'. While comparative analyses of the content of BI tools has proliferated, the knowledge gap about the procedural needs of BI policy design is growing recognizably, as the range of BI responses grows in practice necessitating specific capabilities, processes and institutional frameworks to be in place for their design. This Element draws on the literature on policy design and innovation adoption to explore the administrative, institutional and capacity endowments of governments for the successful and appropriate integration of BI in existing policy frameworks. Further, we present three illustrative cases with respect to their experience of essential procedural endowments facilitating for the effective integration of BI in policy design.
Multiple Streams and Policy Ambiguity

Multiple Streams and Policy Ambiguity
  • Rob A. DeLeo, Reimut Zohlnhöfer, Nikolaos Zahariadis
  • Published online:
    28 February 2024
    Print publication:
    21 March 2024
  • The last decade has seen a proliferation of research bolstering the theoretical and methodological rigor of the Multiple Streams Framework (MSF), one of the most prolific theories of agenda-setting and policy change. This Element sets out to address some of the most prominent criticisms of the theory, including the lack of empirical research and the inconsistent operationalization of key concepts, by developing the first comprehensive guide for conducting MSF research. It begins by introducing the MSF, including key theoretical constructs and hypotheses. It then presents the most important theoretical extensions of the framework and articulates a series of best practices for operationalizing, measuring, and analyzing MSF concepts. It closes by exploring existing gaps in MSF research and articulating fruitful areas of future research.
Public Inquiries and Policy Design

Public Inquiries and Policy Design
  • Alastair Stark, Sophie Yates
  • Published online:
    06 February 2024
    Print publication:
    23 May 2024
  • Public inquiries regularly produce outcomes of importance to policy design. However, the policy design literature has largely ignored the many important ways that public inquiries can act as policy design tools, meaning the functions that inquiries can offer the policy designer are not properly understood. This Element addresses this gap in two ways. First, it presents a theoretical discussion, underpinned by international empirical illustrations, to explain how inquiries perform policy design roles and can be classified as procedural policy tools. It focuses on four inquiry functions – catalytic, learning, processual, and legitimation. Second, it addresses the challenge of designing inquiries that have the policy-facing capacities required to make them effective. It introduces plurality as a key variable influencing effectiveness, demonstrating its relevance to internal inquiry operations, the external inquiry environment, and policy tool selection. Thus, it combines conceptual and practical insights to speak to academic and practice orientated audiences.
Understanding Accountability in Democratic Governance

Understanding Accountability in Democratic Governance
  • Yannis Papadopoulos
  • Published online:
    28 February 2023
    Print publication:
    09 March 2023
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  • This Element comprehensively scrutinizes the key issue of the accountability of policy-makers in democratic governance. The electoral punishment of the incumbents, parliamentary control of the government, and sanctions in the case of administrative misconduct or negligence are the most visible manifestations of accountability in politics. However, the phenomenon is much more complex, and fully understanding such a multifaceted object requires bridging bodies of work that usually remain disjointed. This Element assesses the effectiveness of vertical accountability through elections and how interinstitutional accountability operates in checks-and-balances systems, along with the growing role of the courts. It evaluates how the accountability of the bureaucracy has been affected by managerial reforms and different governance transformations. It also scrutinizes to what extent mediatization and policy failure boost accountability, before zooming in on the feelings and reactions of those who are held accountable. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Relationality

Relationality
  • The Inner Life of Public Policy
  • Raul P. Lejano, Wing Shan Kan
  • Published online:
    23 November 2022
    Print publication:
    22 December 2022
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  • This Element argues that relational policy analysis can provide deeper insights into the career of any policy and the dynamics of any policy situation. This task is all the more difficult as the relational often operates unseen in the backstages of a policy arena. Another issue is the potentially unbounded scope of a relational analysis. But these challenges should not dissuade policy scholars from beginning to address the theme of relationality in public policy. This Element sketches a conceptual framework for the study of relationality and illustrates some of the promise of relational analysis using an extended case study. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Government Transparency

Government Transparency
  • State of the Art and New Perspectives
  • Gregory Porumbescu, Albert Meijer, Stephan Grimmelikhuijsen
  • Published online:
    15 June 2022
    Print publication:
    07 July 2022
  • This Element argues that to understand why transparency “works” in one context, but fails in another, we have to take into account how institutional (macro), organizational (meso) contexts interact with individual behavior (micro). A review of research from each of these perspectives shows that the big promises thought to accompany greater transparency during the first two decades of the 20th century have not been delivered. For example, transparency does not necessarily lead to better government performance and more trust in government. At the same time, transparency is still a hallmark of democratic governance and as this book highlights, for instance, transparency has been relatively successful in combating government corruption. Finally, by explicitly taking a multilayered perspective into account, this Element develops new paths for future research.
Policy Feedback

Policy Feedback
  • How Policies Shape Politics
  • Daniel Béland, Andrea Louise Campbell, R. Kent Weaver
  • Published online:
    06 June 2022
    Print publication:
    23 June 2022
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  • Although the idea that existing policies can have major effects on politics and policy development is hardly new, the last three decades witnessed a major expansion of policy feedback scholarship, which focuses on the mechanisms through which existing policies shape politics and policy development. Starting with a discussion of the origins of the concept of policy feedback, this element explores early and more recent contributions of the policy feedback literature to clarify the meaning of this concept and its contribution to both political science and policy studies. After exploring the rapidly expanding scholarship on policy feedback and mass politics, this element also puts forward new research agendas that stress several ways forward, including the need to explain both institutional and policy continuity and change. Finally, the element discusses the practical implications of policy feedback research through a discussion of its potential impact on policy design.This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Digital Technology, Politics, and Policy-Making

Digital Technology, Politics, and Policy-Making
  • Fabrizio Gilardi
  • Published online:
    25 May 2022
    Print publication:
    23 June 2022
  • This element shows, based on a review of the literature, how digital technology has affected liberal democracies with a focus on three key aspects of democratic politics: political communication, political participation, and policy-making. The impact of digital technology permeates the entire political process, affecting the flow of information among citizen and political actors, the connection between the mass public and political elites, and the development of policy responses to societal problems. This element discusses how digital technology has shaped these different domains, identifies areas of research consensus as well as unresolved questions, and argues that a key perspective involves issue definition, that is, how the nature of the problems raised by digital technology is subject to political contestation.
Public Policy and Universities

Public Policy and Universities
  • The Interplay of Knowledge and Power
  • Andrew Gunn, Michael Mintrom
  • Published online:
    17 May 2022
    Print publication:
    09 June 2022
  • Higher education is undergoing unprecedented transformation. In the global knowledge economy universities are of paramount importance to governments worldwide. This creates a strong rationale for an element exploring how the interactions between universities and the state are being reconfigured, while highlighting the role policy analysis can play in explaining these dynamics. Specifically, this element draws on four theoretical approaches – New-Institutionalism, the Advocacy Coalition Framework, the Narrative Policy Framework, and Policy Diffusion and Transfer – to inform the analysis. Examples are drawn from a range of countries and areas of potential research informed by policy theory are identified. This element features a section dedicated to each of the three main missions of the university followed by an analysis of the institution as a whole. This reveals how universities, while typically seeking greater autonomy, remain subject to a multifaceted form of nation state oversight as they continue to globalise in an uncertain world.
Herding Scientists

Herding Scientists
  • A Story of Failed Reform at the CDC
  • Andrew B. Whitford
  • Published online:
    11 April 2022
    Print publication:
    12 May 2022
  • When politicians reshape public health agencies, scientists resist changes and, if possible, leave. Those shifts make it harder for agencies to fight future public health threats. This Element focuses on the tension between scientists and managerial control in the policy process, both conceptually and empirically. It centers on a failed attempt to reorganize the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Because many of the gains in longevity and health quality result from the work of public health agencies, public health scientists and practitioners are the frontline producers of public health.
Disrupted Governance

Disrupted Governance
  • Towards a New Policy Science
  • Kris Hartley, Glen David Kuecker
  • Published online:
    16 February 2022
    Print publication:
    17 March 2022
  • This Element explores the uncertain future of public policy practice and scholarship in an age of radical disruption. Building on foundational ideas in policy sciences, we argue that an anachronistic instrumental rationalism underlies contemporary policy logic and limits efforts to understand new policy challenges. We consider whether the policy sciences framework can be reframed to facilitate deeper understandings of this anachronistic epistemic, in anticipation of a research agenda about epistemic destabilization and contestation. The Element applies this theoretical provocation to environmental policy and sustainability, issues about which policymaking proceeds amid unpredictable contexts and rising sociopolitical turbulence that portend a liminal state in the transition from one way of thinking to another. The Element concludes by contemplating the fate of policy's epistemic instability, anticipating what policy understandings will emerge in a new system, and questioning the degree to which either presages a seismic shift in the relationship between policy and society.
Truth and Post-Truth in Public Policy

Truth and Post-Truth in Public Policy
  • Frank Fischer
  • Published online:
    18 November 2021
    Print publication:
    09 December 2021
  • The phenomenon of post-truth poses a problem for the public policy-oriented sciences, including policy analysis. Along with “fake news,” the post-truth denial of facts constitutes a major concern for numerous policy fields. Whereas a standard response is to call for more and better factual information, this Element shows that the effort to understand this phenomenon has to go beyond the emphasis on facts to include an understanding of the social meanings that get attached to facts in the political world of public policy. The challenge is thus seen to be as much about a politics of meaning as it is about epistemology. The analysis here supplements the examination of facts with an interpretive policy-analytic approach to gain a fuller understanding of post-truth. The importance of the interpretive perspective is illustrated by examining the policy arguments that have shaped policy controversies related to climate change and coronavirus denial.
Integrating Logics in the Governance of Emerging Technologies

Integrating Logics in the Governance of Emerging Technologies
  • The Case of Nanotechnology
  • Derrick Mason Anderson, Andrew Whitford
  • Published online:
    18 March 2021
    Print publication:
    24 June 2021
  • The governance of emerging technologies does not follow a single governance paradigm because of complex interactions between government, industry, and civil actors. In this Element, we will argue that for emerging technologies, governance is a 'convergent paradigm'. We introduce governance issues associated with emerging technologies generally before turning to the specifics of nanotechnology. We then approach governance theory and practice by considering different perspectives on governance by their different orientations with respect to object and process. Finally, we construct a matrix of object and process oriented governance activities observed in the case of nanotechnology in the United States.
Defining Policy Analysis: A Journey that Never Ends

Defining Policy Analysis: A Journey that Never Ends
  • Beryl A. Radin
  • Published online:
    19 December 2020
    Print publication:
    28 January 2021
  • For much of its life, the field of policy analysis has lived with a wide range of definitions of its goals, work and significance in the society. This Element seeks to sort out these differences by describing the issues, players and developments that have played a role over the life of this field. As a result of the relationships that have developed an environment has emerged where both academics and practitioners who self identify as 'policy analysts' are not always recognized as such by others who use that same label.This Element explores the reasons why this conflictual situation has developed and whether the current status is a major departure from the past. While these developments may not be new or found only in policy analysis, they do have an impact on the status of the academics as well as the practitioners in the field.
Zombie Ideas

Zombie Ideas
  • Why Failed Policy Ideas Persist
  • Brainard Guy Peters, Maximilian Lennart Nagel
  • Published online:
    27 November 2020
    Print publication:
    24 December 2020
  • Ideas are important in shaping the policy choices of governments. But many ideas that have not been successful in the past continue to be used by policymakers, and some good ideas tend not to be adopted. This Element will focus on why governments make these poor policy choices. We will discuss a number of examples of 'zombie ideas' that refuse to die, and then discuss the factors that are associated with their survival. Those factors occur at the elite, the organizational and the societal level. We will also examine some 'ghost' ideas that may well be successful but have a difficult time being adopted, and the factors that are associated with the exclusion of these ideas from the policy process.

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