Policy Styles and Policy-Making

doi:10.4324/9781315111247

Cited by 29 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…With the COVID-19 case, however, policy scholars are presented with the highly unusual opportunity to study virtually simultaneous but different government responses to the same problem and thus tease out the key factors which drove those decisions and their implications for both policy success and future practice. The case studies detail how the problem of the pandemic was constructed at the cognitive and ideological level by national and international governing elites and epistemic communities (Peters, 2005(Peters, , 2018Haas, 1992;Zito, 2018;Dunlop, 2009) and with how traditional mechanisms for dealing with problems -national policy styles (Howlett & Tosun, 2019) -were over-ridden or came to the fore in specific national circumstances.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Mobilizing Policy (In)Capacity to Fight COVID-19: Understanding Variations in State Responses

Capano

Howlett

Jarvis³

et al. 2020

Policy and Society

414

338

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The objective of this collection of essays is to gain insights into the different national-level state responses to COVID-19 around the world and the conditions that shaped them. The pandemic offers a natural experiment wherein the policy problem governments faced was the same but the responses they made were different, creating opportunities for comparison of both the kinds of policy tools being used and the factors that accounted for their choice. Accordingly, after surveying on-line databases of policy tools used in the pandemic and subjecting these to topic modelling to reveal the characteristics of a 'standard' national pandemic response, we discuss the similarities and differences found in specific responses. This is done with reference to the nature and level of policy capacity of respective governments, highlighting the critical roles played by (in)adequate preparation and lesson-drawing from past experiences with similar outbreaks or crises. Taken together the articles show how the national responses to the COVID-19 pandemic were shaped by the opportunity and capacity each government had to learn from previous pandemics and their capacity to operationalize and build political support for the standard portfolio of policy measures deployed to deal with the crisis. However, they also show how other factors such as the nature of national leadership, the organization of government and civil society, and blindspots towards the vulnerabilities of certain population segments also helped to shape policy responses to the pandemic.

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mentioning

confidence: 99%

Mobilizing Policy (In)Capacity to Fight COVID-19: Understanding Variations in State Responses

Capano

Howlett

Jarvis³

et al. 2020

Policy and Society

414

338

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…The challenge for the EU lies in harmonizing these divergent preferences to devise policies that not only provide immediate relief but also contribute to the Union's long-term resilience and prosperity (Howlett and Tosun 2018). Until the early 2000s, however, this debate was guided by academia rather than the world of practice, as the EU's economic guiding principle remained that of fiscal restraint.…”

Section: Spending Preferences In Times Of Crisismentioning

confidence: 99%

The relief–reform divide: An analysis of national responses to Covid-19 in seven EU member states' recovery plans

Caramani,

Cicchi

2024

Preprint

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This research paper explores the “recovery divide” in the distribution of funds from Next Generation EU’s the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF). The RRF, the central and largest component of the EU’s response to the Covid-19 economic crisis, represents a policy shift by providing aid to all member states with less strict conditionality than previous crises such as the 2008 Great Recession. The paper provides a descriptive overview of the RRF and investigates how the seven largest recipients (France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland, Romania, and Spain) prioritize spending the funds. It hypothesizes that ideological orientation and executive type influence whether the extent to which focus on technocratic long-term reforms or politically rewarding short-term relief. A qualitative text analysis of the first national recovery and resilience plans (NRRPs) submitted to the European Commission in 2021 is employed to explore this “relief–reform” dimension, combined with official data from the European Commission and other data sources (Bruegel). Results show that substantial country differences exist, especially in the sectors where the NRRPs pledge intervention. However, EU conditionality still exerts a strong influence, as all NRRPs are consistently reform-oriented and their (minimal) differences are not significantly accounted for by the ideological placement of the executive submitting it.

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