From Personal Responsibility to Political Mobilization: Using Attribution Frames to Overcome Policy Feedback Effects

Public policies that promote personal responsibility while minimizing government responsibility are a key feature of modern American political economy. They can decrease Americans’ political participation on a given issue, with detrimental consequences for the wellbeing of economically insecure families. Can this pattern be overcome? I argue that attribution frames highlighting government’s role in and responsibility for policies may increase people’s propensity for political action on an issue, but only if the frame can increase the salience of their preexisting beliefs about government intervention. Drawing on the case of consumer financial protection, I administer an experiment to determine the effect of attribution framing on people’s willingness to act in support of a popular banking reform. I find that helping people draw parallels between an issue they feel responsibility for and one they accept government responsibility for can boost political engagement on behalf of the original policy.

The Participatory Implications of Racialized Policy Feedback

How do involuntary interactions with authoritarian institutions shape political engagement? The policy feedback literature suggests that interactions with authoritarian policies undercut political participation. However, research in racial and ethnic politics offers reason to believe that these experiences may increase citizens’ engagement. Drawing on group attachment and discrimination research, we argue that mobilization is contingent on individuals’ political psychological state. Relative to their counterparts, individuals with a politicized group identity will display higher odds of political engagement when exposed to authoritarian institutions. To evaluate our theory, we draw on the 2016 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Study to examine the experiences of Blacks, Latinos, and Asian Americans. For all subgroups and different types of institutions, we find that, for those with a politicized group identity, institutional contact is associated with higher odds of participation. Our research modifies the classic policy feedback framework, which neglects group-based narratives in the calculus of collective action.

Impact of COVID-19 on Saudi Arabia's economy: evidence from macro-micro modelling

PurposeEven with the Saudi Arabian Government's discretionary measures to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), the economic sectors were not spared from the damage. Thus, the paper aims to use a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model to evaluate the impact of COVID-19 on the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia's (KSA) economy, with a special focus on small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and production. These influence the level of poverty.Design/methodology/approachThe paper adopted the social accounting matrix (SAM) for Saudi Arabia built in 2021 by Imtithal Althumairi from Saudi Arabia's 2017 SAM. The model represents a snapshot of the economy and different flows that exist within the tasks and institutions. Two simulations (mild and severe) were conducted because of the focus on the distributional outcomes.FindingsDecrease in job creation and economic growth were significant evidence from the study's findings. Findings show that more families hit below the poverty line because the negative impacts of the pandemic have shifted the income allocation curve. Findings show that the weakest of the poor are mitigated by government social grants during the pandemic.Research limitations/implicationsThe paper is restricted to the relevant literature relating to the impact of COVID-19 on Saudi Arabia's economy and evaluated using the SAM model. Moreover, the COVID-19 is still an ongoing scenario; thus, the model should be updated as data utilised for the operationalisation are made available.Practical implicationsThe information from the suggested model can be suitable to measure the degree of the harm, and thus, the likely extent of the desirable policy feedback. Also, the model can be updated, as data are made available and formulated policies based on the updated data implemented by the policymakers.Originality/valueApart from the recovery planning of SMEs during the pandemic, the paper intends to stir up Saudi Arabia's policymakers through the macro-micro model to recovery planning and resilience of the economy with emphasis on mitigating unemployment.

Implementation Capacity and Evaluation Capacity

The study of policy implementation and evaluation is the subject of a conflict between the viewpoint that the quality of public administration is defined by its capacity to implement policy faithfully and accurately, as it has been designed and promulgated, and the viewpoint that policy as it is practiced and delivered on the ground to citizens will only ever bear a passing similarity to policy as the purposeful design of central policymakers. As elsewhere in public administration, this conflict is far from a creative engagement and lacks a definitive resolution between the main schools of policy implementation that stress, in turn, top-down or bottom-up approaches. Progress has been made in the recognition that policy implementation and policy evaluation have become increasingly, in theory and practice, less distinct from one another and are best understood as different values of the same thing—policy feedback—rather than analytically different things. In this line of inquiry, the contextual analysis of implementation and evaluation is critical, and recent work has begun to uncover important success factors not conventionally labeled as implementation and evaluation. Connections between the study of implementation capacity and evaluation are now able to be made with prominent public administration debates on scale, complexity, and participation. These connections hold promise for future research.

Policy Feedback and the Polarization of Interest Groups

We use the case of education interest groups to examine how and when policy changes lead interest groups to polarize in their support for political parties. Using over 145,000 campaign contributions from all 50 states from 2000 to 2017, we test whether the passage of private school choice, charter laws, and labor retrenchment policies led to the polarization of education interest groups over time. In 2000, teachers unions were the dominant group and mostly aligned with Democrats. Meanwhile, Republicans lacked support from any education groups. This pattern was consistent across states. Over time, coalitions in some states became polarized, meaning unions grew even more aligned with Democrats and reform groups with Republicans, while other states did not experience such polarization. We show that private school choice programs, but not labor retrenchment or charter laws, contributed to this changing partisan alignment. Our findings demonstrate that policy feedback can shape both the electoral mobilization and party alignments of interest groups.

Reap what you sow: implementing agencies as strategic actors in policy feedback dynamics

Government agencies responsible for policy implementation have expertise on policy practicability, efficiency and effectiveness, and knowledge which is provided to policymakers as feedback. However, we know very little about the feedback dynamics in which implementing agencies provide different types of feedback with the intention that it is used by policymakers, and the strategic decisions underlying these dynamics. This article connects the literature on policy feedback and knowledge use to develop a typology of implementation feedback which can account for these strategic actions. While existing distinctions between positive and negative feedback lead to confusion when applied to implementation feedback, our typology moves beyond this confusion, by classifying implementation feedback on the basis of two dimensions: preferences of implementing agencies and whether feedback is in response an agenda for change, or existing policy instruments. To illustrate the typology, we look at implementation feedback surrounding the post-2013 reform of the Common Agricultural Policy. We find that implementing agencies engage predominantly in problem-solving and mitigating types of implementation feedback, which are the types of feedback most likely to be used instrumentally by policymakers. Moreover, role perception of implementing agencies limits feedback focused on agenda removal, which is more politically sensitive and contested. These insights are important for our understanding of policy feedback on the level of policy instruments and settings. Moreover, future research can use this typology to structure feedback by other actors.

Power struggles in policy feedback processes: incremental steps towards a circular economy within Dutch wastewater policy

Environmental problems are usually not tackled with path-departing policies but rather with incrementally adjusted or unchanged policies. One way to address incremental change is the policy feedback approach, which initially focussed on self-reinforcing feedback and path-dependency. Today, self-undermining feedback is also increasingly being studied, centring on agency and change. However, it is unclear precisely how actors use power in policy feedback processes. Therefore, this study applied a power perspective and the policy arrangement approach to a case study of the reorientation towards a circular economy in Dutch wastewater policy between 2008 and 2018, which resulted in incremental instead of fundamental policy change. Here it was observed that self-undermining feedback was generated from 2008 onwards but the balance quickly shifted back to self-reinforcing feedback, indicating that the analysed power struggles led to incremental change. These dynamics resemble a shift from the so-called paths and forks (i.e. fork in the road) towards the boomerang pattern (i.e. returning to its original position) of policy change. The patterns are explained by focussing on powerful actors that resist change through the use of incremental reforms, the ongoing struggles of these actors in facilitating self-reinforcing feedback and the role of interpretation in using feedback as a resource. Overall, this study provides a nuanced understanding of incremental change by directing attention to the power struggles of actors in policy feedback processes. For practitioners, the study emphasises the importance of power struggles in enabling a circular economy.

Citizens support ambitious but costly food waste governance

About one-third of all food produced for human consumption worldwide is wasted, particularly in high-income countries. Reducing this waste is key to decreasing negative environmental impacts from the food sector and increasing food security in developing countries. Yet, achieving food waste reduction is challenging. It is widely presumed that efforts at stronger food waste governance may increase food prices, and hence consumer and citizen opposition that renders effective governance politically unfeasible. Here, we assess this critical presumption and argue that policy framing and design can ensure public support for ambitious but costly food waste governance, while policy feedbacks from voluntary firm actions are unlikely to diminish public support. Our empirical analysis uses survey experiments with a population-representative sample (N=3’329) from a typical high-income country with a unique direct democratic tradition, Switzerland. First, in a combined framing and conjoint experiment, we show that messages emphasizing national or international social norms in favor of reducing food waste (policy framing) can increase public support for more ambitious reduction targets. We also show that a majority of citizens support food waste governance that leads to substantial increases in food prices, but only if such policies set stringent reduction targets and are transparently monitored (policy design). Finally, in a vignette experiment, we show that voluntary industry initiatives do not crowd out individuals’ intentions to reduce their food waste nor support for stronger governmental regulation, but even crowd public support in if industry initiatives are unambitious (policy feedback). Our research offers an analytical template for studying public support for food waste governance and shows that there is more political room for adopting ambitious policies than hitherto presumed.