Sorting through the garbage can: under what conditions do governments adopt policy programs?

Abstract

The paper aims at explaining the adoption of policy programs. We use the garbage can model of organizational choice as our theoretical framework and complement it with the institutional setting of administrative decision-making in order to understand the complex causation of policy program adoption. Institutions distribute decision power by rules and routines and coin actor identities and their interpretations of situations. We therefore expect institutions to play a role when a policy window opens. We explore the configurative explanations for program adoption in a systematic comparison of the adoption of new alcohol policy programs in the Swiss cantons employing Qualitative Comparative Analysis. The most important conditions are the organizational elements of the administrative structure decisive for the coupling of the streams. The results imply that classic bureaucratic structures are better suited to put policies into practice than limited government.

Multiple streams in member state implementation: politics, problem construction and policy paths in Swiss asylum policy

“…Our results suggest an important role for a strong bureaucracy (Sager and Rielle, 2013). In fact, despite the high politicisation of the asylum issue and contrary to the "parties-do-matter" view (Castles, 2000), findings indicate a somewhat higher relevance of the absence of political parties than of their presence for the policy decisions under study.…”

Policy Design and Non-Design: Towards a Spectrum of Policy Formulation Types

“…Again, however, this does not preclude, but rather is built upon the recognition and acceptance of the fact that in some policy decisions and formulation processes "design" considerations may be more or less absent and the quality of the logical or empirical relations between policy components as solutions to problems may be incorrect or ignored (Cohen, March, & Olsen, 1979;Dryzek, 1983;Eijlander, 2005;Franchino & Hoyland, 2009;Kingdon, 1984;Sager & Rielle, 2013). This includes a variety of contexts in which formulators or decision-makers, for example, may engage in interestdriven trade-offs or log-rolling between different values or resource uses or, more extremely, might engage in venal or corrupt behaviour in which personal gain from a decision may trump other evaluative criteria.…”

Street-level Bureaucrats and New Modes of Governance: How conflicting roles affect the implementation of the Swiss Ordinance on Veterinary Medicinal Products

“…However, the state remains responsible and has typically focused on increasingly regulating private actors to safeguard the public interest (Pierre and Peters 2000;Sager 2009;Sager and Rielle 2013). Private actors might implement rules in a rather light-handed way if the threat of public enforcement is low (Baldwin et al 2011: 35, 58).…”