As the coronavirus pandemic swept the nation in 2020, many emphasized that carceral spaces were hotspots for the virus, leaving Black and Brown people especially vulnerable to infection. In combination with other critiques of racism in the carceral state, these observations created pressure to decarcerate, especially on the political left. How did political elites discuss the carceral state in this changed atmosphere? To answer this question, we analyze rhetoric in public statements across four liberal metropolitan areas during the spring and summer of 2020. In these statements, we find a long-standing discourse of racially paternalist penal welfarism, retrofitted to pandemic times and accompanied by a distinction between “deserving” and “undeserving” criminals. Accommodating portrayals of incarcerated people as vulnerable to COVID-19 and in desperate need of care, this pattern of rhetoric positioned the carceral state as a protector in order to justify continued incarceration.

Does the threat of automation of workers’ employment provoke distinct policy preferences from that of globalization? We present hypotheses about how these different threats affect support for policies to prevent such shocks as well as policies to compensate via redistribution. Using vignettes and conjoint experiments embedded in survey evidence from Spain, we find that the threat of automation does not provoke any greater demand for redistribution than does openness. Nor does job loss due to automation provoke beliefs of greater deservingness of compensatory transfers, compared to job loss from openness. While the threat of offshoring and hiring foreign workers increases support for policies to prevent this process from occurring, scenarios of robot substitution do not provoke a similar reaction. These results suggest policies to prioritize automation over openness may gain less political traction.

Previous scholarship has shown that experience with public policies can affect citizens’ willingness to participate in politics. However, few studies have examined whether the effect of experience with policy is moderated by existing policy environments. We focus on the impact of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and examine how it affects foreign-born Latinos’ political orientation and behavior. We find a relationship between enrollment in DACA and political orientation and that the effect on participation is moderated by the intensity of enforcement in an immigrant’s county of residence.

The outbreak of COVID-19 unleashed a severe crisis in society. The suddenness and speed with which the disease spread into a global pandemic makes it an outstanding case for showing how bureaucracy acts in response to a crisis marked by uncertainty and urgency. This article focuses on the role played by the central government bureaucracy in preparing and enacting the Danish government’s response to the COVID-19 crisis. It is based on full access to internal government files related to crisis management during the winter and spring of 2020. These files include memos, e-mails, decision notes, and draft decisions from key civil servants. The article demonstrates the strength of the theory of bounded rationality when it comes to analyzing the interaction between top civil servants and political executives. Moreover, it shows how administrative and political executives can mold a governmental organization to overcome the inertia inherent in bureaucratic organization and procedures.

Many Western countries first introduced family allowances around the Second World War. We argue that this clustering is not coincidental and put pronatalist policies related to war preparation and the socioeconomic and demographic ramifications of the Second World War at the center of our explanation. To test this, we first conduct brief case studies of France, Germany, Italy, and Japan to detail how war preparation influenced the introduction of such family allowances. Second, a panel regression of 18 Western countries investigates the different factors contributing to the timing of introduction of such policies and shows that war and its aftershocks have been an important causal factor in the introduction of family allowances. It was not so much the destructiveness of and the involvement in the war that played a role, but rather a general wartime crisis that affected belligerent and non-belligerent countries in similar ways.

Researchers and practitioners are increasingly embracing systems approaches to deal with the complexity of public service delivery and policy evaluation. However, there is little agreement on what exactly constitutes a systems approach, conceptually or methodologically. We review and critically synthesize systems literature from the fields of health, education, and infrastructure. We argue that the common theoretical core of systems approaches is the idea that multi-dimensional complementarities between a policy and other aspects of the policy context are the first-order problem of policy design and evaluation. We distinguish between macro-systems approaches, which focus on the collective coherence of a set of policies or institutions, and micro-systems approaches, which focus on how a single policy interacts with the context in which it operates. We develop a typology of micro-systems approaches and discuss their relationship to standard impact evaluation methods as well as to work in external validity, implementation science, and complexity theory.

How do cultural biases, trust in government, and perceptions of risk and protective actions influence compliance with regulation of COVID-19? Analyzing Chinese (n = 646) and American public opinion samples (n = 1,325) from spring 2020, we use Grid–Group Cultural Theory and the Protective Action Decision Model to specify, respectively, cultural influences on public risk perceptions and decision-making regarding protective actions. We find that cultural biases mostly affect protective actions indirectly through public perceptions. Regardless of country, hierarchical cultural biases increase protective behaviors via positive perceptions of protective actions. However, other indirect effects of cultural bias via public perceptions vary across both protective actions and countries. Moreover, trust in government only mediates the effect of cultural bias in China and risk perception only mediates the effect of cultural bias in the United States. Our findings suggest that regulators in both countries should craft regulations that are congenial to culturally diverse populations.

Schedule C and noncareer Senior Executive Service positions hold significant influence over policy outcomes, yet they have received limited scrutiny compared to advise and consent (PAS) appointments. Such appointments offer understudied avenues for presidential control over the bureaucracy. Through a comprehensive analysis of more detailed data than has been employed to date, we reveal that these appointments are responsive to broader political dynamics, particularly those relevant to PAS appointments, including inter- and intrabranch conflicts, agency ideology, Senate workload, and the political calendar. However, statutory constraints and agency characteristics – such as the managerial expertise of appointed agency leadership – also shape their utilization. While unilateral appointments provide an advantage to Presidents, executives are constrained when using them to overcome legislative opposition or reshape resistant agencies. These lower-level appointments reflect the wider political landscape, granting the President significant – but not unrestrained – opportunities to exert influence on both the bureaucracy and policy outcomes.

The power of economists in policymaking is widely recognized by both scholars and political actors. While the literature on expert influence has primarily focused on the intellectual features of expert arguments, we argue that economists’ strategic use of framing and normative reasoning wields more influence in policymaking than is acknowledged by current scholarship. Through a comprehensive investigation into the institutionalization of the Norwegian Oil Fund and its associated fiscal regime, drawing on 26 elite interviews with key political and technocratic actors, we unveil the considerable influence of state economists in shaping the policy for managing petroleum wealth. These economists not only played a crucial role in legitimizing and lending credibility to the new policy but also employed strategic framing as a reinforcing mechanism to sustain the policy regime, illustrating the essential role of economists as storytellers. Hence, we suggest including strategic framing as a conceptual element within the theoretical framework of expert influence.

Policy diffusion is an important element of the policy formation process. However, understanding of the micro-level interactions governing policy spread remains limited. Much of the literature focuses on macro-level proxies for intergovernmental connectivity. These proxies outline broad diffusion patterns without specifying the micro-level mechanisms that govern how individuals facilitate that diffusion. The role of stakeholders in diffusion in the policy subsystem is also poorly understood. We construct a panel dataset covering the spread of the US ecotourism programs from 1993 to 2016 to investigate how micro-level movement within stakeholder networks explains state-level policy diffusion over time. Using fixed-effects regression, we find that stakeholder movement significantly drives diffusion, acting as a mechanism of knowledge transfer. Our findings provide a more precise theoretical understanding of how policy knowledge diffuses at the micro level, empirically explain the role of policy stakeholders in diffusion, and highlight the value of citizen-science data for policy research.

Why do citizens support or reject climate change mitigation policies? This is not an easy choice: citizens need to support the government in making these decisions, accept potentially radical behavior change, and have altruism across borders and for future generations. A substantial literature argues that political trust facilitates citizen support for these complex policy decisions by mitigating the cost and uncertainty that policies impose on individuals and buttressing support for government intervention. We test whether this is the case with a pre-registered conjoint experiment fielded in Germany in which we vary fundamental aspects of policy design that are related to the cost, uncertainty, and implementation of climate change policies. Contrary to strong theoretical expectations and previous work, we find no difference between those with low and high trust on their support for different policy attributes, assuaging the concern that low and declining trust inhibits climate policymaking.

As the COVID-19 pandemic became an unprecedented global threat, it was accompanied by an increase in trust in governments as well as fear among the public. Previous research suggests that both institutional trust and fear contribute to the willingness of citizens to comply with anti-pandemic measures. Moreover, fear during the contagion also increases trust in government. This article presents a test of the mediation of the effects of fear on compliance through trust. In addition, it differentiates between three different facets of COVID-19-related fear: fear of the disease, fear of economic consequences, and fear of political consequences. The results suggest that while fear of the disease increases compliance, fear of political consequences decreases compliance. Moreover, the effects of fear are mediated through trust in government. The negative impact of fear of political consequences on compliance increased between April and December 2020.

Unilateral presidential action is thought to be limited by the ability of successors to easily reverse past decisions. Yet, most executive actions are never formally revoked. We argue that because of presidents’ unique position as chief executive, some actions create outcomes that make policy reversal more difficult or even infeasible. We develop a novel measure of policies with more immutable consequences and analyze the revocation of executive orders issued between 1937 and 2021. We find the degree of outcome immutability reduces the influence of political conditions on policy revocation. We further examine these dynamics in three cases in which presidents have substantial discretion – diplomacy, non-combatant detention, and police militarization. Scholarship has long highlighted the president’s first-mover status relative to other institutional actors as a key source of their power. Collectively, our argument and evidence demonstrate this applies to their relationship with successors.

International efforts to protect biodiversity date back to the 1970s. The effectiveness of Multilateral Environmental Agreements and regional legal instruments has been influenced by national implementation. In this process, subnational governance plays a crucial role. Although policy implementation has been extensively investigated, its subnational dimension has been somewhat neglected, particularly in peripheral areas such as the Outermost Regions of Europe. These remote territories are critical areas in the global fight against biodiversity loss since their ecosystems’ richness makes them biodiversity hotspots. The article applies the knowledge cumulated in policy research to the implementation of biodiversity policy in two of these territories – Reunion Island (France) and the Canary Islands (Spain) – and analyzes policy implementation in the context of multi-level governance. The article questions whether and to what extent decentralization benefits biodiversity policies and highlights salient trade-offs: local empowerment versus fragmentation of competences; responsiveness versus subnational discretion; and accountability versus policy capture.

Why do executive agencies form coalitions? Legislative coalitions are widely theorized and studied, but less attention has been paid to executive coalitions. Executive agencies’ dependence on the political branches calls for a distinctive theory of coalition building. This article presents such a theory, arguing that agencies form coalitions to optimize their autonomy given their subordinate position in a separation of powers system by signaling to overseers that their policies are efficient and should be maintained. Bureaucrats form coalitions actively to advance their policy goals in the face of political opposition. Using data on dozens of agencies over seventeen years, I find that agencies are most likely to form coalitions when their preferences are misaligned with the president but aligned with each other. I also find evidence that coalitions send credible signals that bureaucratic policies are efficient since Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs is less likely to request regulatory revisions of policies produced by coalitions.

This study analyzes the link between egalitarian ideals and the rise in party polarization in Congress. To demonstrate how philosophical differences over conceptions of fairness, equality, and justice help explain the recent growth in partisanship over the past few decades, I argue one overlooked explanatory factor which assists in capturing this ideological rift is noncontributory welfare spending. Recovering annual ideal point estimates between 1947 and 2018 that are comparable with annual federal spending, I use multivariate time series models and find convincing evidence which suggests welfare outlays have a strong short- and long-run effect on polarization. Moreover, analysis of the roll call record also shows when ideal point estimates are recovered by specific policy area, lawmakers exhibit higher levels of ideological separation on welfare compared to, among others, policies such as defense and transportation. Robustness checks confirm these findings also hold even when controlling for income inequality.

The three-child policy constitutes a hotly debated socio-political issue in China. Upon its announcement, many Chinese citizens have ridiculed the move on social media. Adopting the cognitive mediation model and the influence of presumed influence theory, this study examines how social media exposure to three-child policy-related news and discussions could affect the Chinese public’s attitudes toward the policy. The online survey results show that social media exposure negatively predicts supportive opinion via cognitive elaboration and three types of perceived negative effects of the policy (i.e., perceived negative effects on self, on the public, and on females) in serial. It also finds that institutional trust moderates the relationship between cognitive elaboration and policy support. Only among people with high institutional trust, there is a positive effect of social media exposure on supportive opinion through cognitive elaboration.

Does American identity predict preferences for anti-democratic policies that aim to marginalize Muslim Americans? Absent significant priming of inclusive elements of American identity, we argue that individuals with stronger attachments to American identity will be less likely than their counterparts to reject a range of anti-Muslim policies that are antithetical to principles of religious liberty and equality. Across three surveys and multiple measures, American identity powerfully predicts preferences for curbing the civil liberties of Muslim citizens. Particularly striking is the finding that the effect of American identity spans the partisan divide; it consistently explains the endorsement of exclusionary policies among self-identified Democrats, who typically hold more progressive policy positions toward minority groups than Republicans. Overall, our study highlights the contradictory and exclusionary nature of American identity, which has important implications for minority groups constructed as outside the boundaries of Americanness.

Policy piloting has become a popular form of organization in implementing public policies. However, the current literature surprisingly discusses little about its management. This study investigates how two policy-pilot attributes – ambiguity and compatibility – shape policy-pilot management. To accomplish this, we developed an analytic framework consisting of four management strategies: experimentation, refinement, upscaling, and institutionalization. We chose a representative policy pilot in Chinese health governance, the New Rural Cooperative Medical Scheme, to examine the adoption of these four strategies. Our finding that, at various junctures, the Chinese state adopted these four strategies to manage policy piloting demonstrates the applicability of the analytic framework constructed in this study. This study contributes to the existing public policy literature by providing new insights into policy implementation in temporary organizing settings.

Through the pooling and exchange of resources such as expertise and knowledge between network participants, European Administrative Networks (EANs) are expected to play a significant role in enhancing policy learning. Yet, scarce empirical evidence has been presented concerning the learning process taking place within EANs. This paper addresses this gap through the analysis of the Network of the Heads of European Environmental Protection Agencies (EPA Network). Based on a unique survey dataset, social network analysis and exponential random graph models are used to trace the interaction patterns within the network and test which factors shape them. The analysis highlights the relevance of national political factors – i.e. the preferences of national governments and ministries – in shaping the learning processes taking place in the EPA Network. While the network is an important venue for disseminating knowledge between directly and indirectly connected actors, learning processes are mainly limited to like-minded peers.