Studying Policy Design Quality in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

This article is a first attempt to systematically examine policy design and its influence on policy effectiveness in a comparative perspective. We begin by providing a novel concept and measure of policy design. Our Average Instrument Diversity (AID) index captures whether governments tend to reuse the same policy instruments and instrument combinations or produce policy solutions that are carefully tailored to the policy problem at hand. Second, we demonstrate that our AID index is a valid and reliable measure of policy design quality with a strong explanatory power for the outcome variables tested. Analyzing the composition of environmental policy portfolios in 21 OECD countries, we show that higher levels of AID are positively associated with a country’s policy effectiveness in environmental matters. Based on this finding, we analyze, in a third step, the factors that lead countries to adopt more or less diverse policy portfolios. We find that the policy design quality is significantly improved when policy makers are not bound by high institutional constraints and, more importantly, are backed by well-equipped bureaucracies.

New pathways to paradigm change in public policy: combining insights from policy design, mix and feedback

“…First, as has been prominently argued before (Cashore and Howlett, 2007;Howlett and Cashore, 2009), the operationalisation and measurement of the dependent variable in studies of policy change is crucial for understanding what exactly is changing (or not) over time. Broadly speaking, there is much more awareness today of the importance of this issue than previously (for example, Capano and Howlett, 2020;Tosun and Schnepf, 2020;Fernández-i-Marín et al, 2021). However, the measurement of (changes in) policy output remains a crucial stumbling block.…”

Condemned to complexity? Growing state activity and complex policy systems

“…Second, we measure policy complexity by the diversity of the policy instruments used. We assess the level of complexity by making random draws from the policy portfolio and by calculating the average probability that two instruments picked across two targets are of different kind (Fernández‐I‐Marín et al, 2021). This measurement approach corresponds to the above‐mentioned conceptions of policy complexity in three ways 1 .…”

“…While institutional constraints can increase the potential that more policies actually result in more complex policy portfolios, this does not mean that the opposite is necessarily the case in the absence of such limitations. A greater complexity might also result from the fact that government have more “elbow room” to design policies and, this way, come up with novel policy solutions (Fernández‐I‐Marín et al, 2021). We can hence derive no straightforward expectation on the extent to which a growing state activity in constellations of few institutional constraints comes with more or less policy complexity.…”

“…This should in turn lead to more complex policies. In social policy, however, patterns are likely to look different as more leftist parties often tend to support broad, universalists welfare state policies (Esping-Andersen, 1990). The universalist Scandinavian welfare states, which have been crucially shaped by social-democratic parties in power (Esping-Andersen, 1985;Manow, 2009), serve as a prime example as they provide high levels of social-security with hardly any needs-testing.…”

A new framework to understand the drivers of policy mixes in multilevel contexts: The case of urban air pollution

“…In addition, governments that seek to address environmental problems may adopt a broader range of different initiatives: this means more policies overall (what Knill et al [2009] describe as policy ‘density’), and greater diversity of initiatives and target groups (Fernández‐i‐Marín et al, 2021). Therefore, alongside the type of instrument that governments adopt, we suggest that the breadth of initiatives operates as another dimension of policy ambition.…”