Reading Lessons and Federal Policy Making: An Overview and Introduction to the Special Issue

This special issue examines local government; one of the less explored and yet most relevant aspects of federal studies. The special issue looks at cases that demonstrate how the growing role of local government has a considerable impact on federal systems.

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Responsive versus responsible? Party democracy in times of crisis

Party Politics ◽

10.1177/1354068818761199 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 26 (3) ◽

pp. 271-279 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Johannes Karremans ◽

Zoe Lefkofridi

Keyword(s):

Policy Making ◽

Political Representation ◽

The Political ◽

Individual Contribution ◽

Eurozone Crisis ◽

Special Issue ◽

Present Evidence ◽

Party Government ◽

Electoral Incentives ◽

Responsible Party

This essay introduces a collection of papers dealing with the responsive–responsible dilemma of party government. The political developments surrounding the Eurozone crisis attest that the duties of government and the demands of political representation may at times be in sharp contrast with one another. In such contexts, it becomes hard for parties in government to combine responsiveness with responsible policy-making. Late Peter Mair theorized this phenomenon as the increasing bifurcation between the growing complexity of governing in a world of interdependence and the need to respond to often polarizing electoral demands. The key question is whether and how in such contexts parties find the balance between their representative and governing duties. The papers included in this special issue deal with this question in the context of the Eurozone crisis and present evidence about parties’ behavior, rhetoric, and policy outputs. In introducing the contributions here, we illustrate how this collective endeavor helps advance the debate on the major challenges to contemporary representative democracy. More specifically, we first discuss how the framework of the responsive–responsible dilemma helps understanding contemporary political developments. We then critically reflect on the distinction between responsiveness and responsibility. Finally, we present how each individual contribution approaches the question of how parties manage the tension between electoral incentives and governmental duties.

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Funding, financing and governing urban infrastructures

Urban Studies ◽

10.1177/0042098018824014 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 56 (7) ◽

pp. 1291-1303 ◽

Cited By ~ 11

Author(s):

Peter O’Brien ◽

Phil O’Neill ◽

Andy Pike

Keyword(s):

North America ◽

Urban Development ◽

Policy Making ◽

Urban Infrastructure ◽

Future Research ◽

Special Issue ◽

Infrastructure Provision ◽

Infrastructure Policy ◽

Critical Issues ◽

Empirical Material

This Special Issue aims to further understanding and explanation of the funding, financing and governing of urban infrastructure amidst its engagements with contemporary financialisation. Drawing upon empirical material from international cases from Europe, North America, Africa and Asia, it identifies critical issues to advance work in this area. These themes concern: the impacts of financialisation upon shifting the definitions and conceptualisations of urban infrastructure; the worth of adopting more actor-oriented and grounded approaches to financialisation; the importance of affording greater recognition to national and local states as the objects and agents of financialising relations, processes and practices; the substance and ramifications of the emergent informalisation of infrastructure policy-making and governance; and, the implications of financialisation for the evolving and uneven landscapes of urban infrastructure provision. The arguments are, first, that how infrastructure is funded, financed and governed is integral to explaining socially and spatially uneven infrastructural provision and its urban development ramifications; and second, the engagements of urban infrastructure with contemporary financialisation have become central in such accounts. Future research avenues are identified. These comprise: identifying exactly how revenues are generated from infrastructure assets; specifying the relations of financialisation with other processes such as ‘assetisation’, ‘marketisation’ and privatisation; extending the geographical and comparative reach of current studies; elaborating the spaces of regulation in negotiating and accommodating infrastructure financialisation; and, scrutinising the roles of decentralised powers and resources in financialising urban infrastructure and exploring its alternatives.

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“Sustainability State” in the Making? Institutionalization of Sustainability in German Federal Policy Making

Sustainability ◽

10.3390/su6052623 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 6 (5) ◽

pp. 2623-2641 ◽

Cited By ~ 18

Author(s):

Harald Heinrichs ◽

Norman Laws

Keyword(s):

Policy Making ◽

Federal Policy

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Process-Policy & Outcome-Policy: Rethinking How to Address Poverty & Inequality

Daedalus ◽

10.1162/daed_a_01756 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 148 (3) ◽

pp. 181-190

Author(s):

Vijayendra Rao

Keyword(s):

Social Structure ◽

Policy Making ◽

Randomized Trials ◽

Policy Outcome ◽

Special Issue ◽

Change Behavior ◽

Lasting Change ◽

Structural Inequalities

Process matters not just for diagnosing the causes of inequality, but also for how policy is shaped. The dominant paradigms for policy-making – neoliberalism, neo-Keynesianism, and neopaternalism – largely address inequality via “outcome-policies” that manipulate the levers of government and, more recently, draw on randomized trials and “nudges” to change behavior, in a manner that is not only easy to measure, but also easy to reverse. This commentary draws on the essays in this special issue of Dædalus to make the case for “reflectivism,” which shifts structural inequalities in agency, power, social structure, empathy, and aspiration in an incremental manner that is more uncertain and difficult to measure, but that can result in more lasting change.

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Policy Learning and Policy Failure

10.1332/policypress/9781447352006.001.0001 ◽

2020 ◽

Keyword(s):

Policy Making ◽

Policy Diffusion ◽

Policy Transfer ◽

Policy Learning ◽

Special Issue ◽

Meso Level ◽

Policy Failure ◽

Limited Success ◽

Opportunities For Learning ◽

Policy Failures

First published as a special issue of Policy & Politics, this updated volume explores policy failures and the valuable opportunities for learning that they offer. The book begins with an overview of policy learning and policy failure. The links between the two appear obvious, yet there are very few studies that address how one can learn from failure, learn to limit failure, and fail to learn. The book attempts to bring the two together. In doing so, it explores how dysfunctional forms of policy learning impact policy failure at the meso-level. The book expands on this by demonstrating how different learning processes generated by actors at the meso-level mediate the extent to which policy transfer is a success or failure. It re-assesses some of the literature on policy transfer and policy diffusion, in light of ideas as to what constitutes failure, partial failure, or limited success. This is followed by an examination of situations in which the incentives of partisanship can encourage a government to actively seek to exacerbate an existing policy failure rather than to repair it. The book studies the connections between repeated assessments of policy failure and subsequent opportunities for system-wide policy learning and reform. Finally, it introduces the idea of ‘policy myopia’ as a pressing source of failure in policy making and explores the possibility of developing policies that learn to help mitigate its impacts.

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