Dealing With Conflicting Values in Policy Experiments: A New Pragmatist Approach

Despite the “turn to values” in Public Administration, there is still a lack of empirical research in situ that investigates how various stakeholders in interaction develop strategies to deal with conflicting values over time. By using a new pragmatist approach, this article fills in this gap by investigating policy experiments in Dutch healthcare. The results show how professionals, citizens, and policymakers differently valued the worth of policy experiments, which manifested itself in multiple value conflicts. To deal with these conflicts, stakeholders adopted different strategies: colonization, compromising, prioritization, short-cutting, organizational enmeshing, and pilotification. The results show a shift from exclusive top-down strategies to inclusive multi-value strategies over time.

Can Policy Change Culture? Government Pension Plans and Traditional Kinship Practices

Policies may change the incentives that allow cultural practices to persist. To test this, I study matrilocality and patrilocality, kinship traditions that determine daughters’ and sons’ post-marriage residences, and thus, which gender lives with and supports parents in their old age. Two separate policy experiments in Ghana and Indonesia show that pension policies reduce the practice of these traditions. I also show that these traditions incentivize parents to invest in the education of children who traditionally coreside with them. Consequently, when pension plans change cultural practices, they also reduce educational investment. This finding further demonstrates that policy can change culture. (JEL G51, I20, J15, J16, J32, Z13)

Policy Feedback and Interdependence in American Federalism: Evidence from Rooftop Solar Politics

Scholars have long understood the American states as “laboratories of democracy,” exploring how mechanisms of learning and competition lead to the diffusion of successful state policy experiments across the federal system. Drawing from policy feedback literature, I develop a new framework for studying policy interdependence in American federalism. I argue that state policies can, in addition to promoting learning and competition, also feed into the interest group politics in other states. Broadly speaking, the organized interests that benefit from, and are strengthened by, particular policy reforms might apply newfound strength to propagate them. Empirically, I study rooftop solar policy, an area in which state-level decisions have been fundamental to industry growth and the emergence of installers as political actors. Bringing together a variety of administrative, lobbying, and policy data, I demonstrate that solar installers used resources accumulated in early adopter of favorable rooftop solar policies to influence policy decisions elsewhere. For reformers, I suggest that subnational policy can be a crucial ingredient in building coalitions for (geographically) broader policy reform.

China’s Monetary and Macroprudential Policies: Are They Complementary or Substitutive?

This paper develops a calibrated dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model incorporating a banking sector and some unique features of China’s macroeconomic policies to simulate China’s monetary and macroprudential policies. The quantitative results show, first, that the interest rate is a better instrument for China’s monetary policy than the required reserve ratio (RRR) when the central bank is solely concerned about price stability; second, that the loan-to-value ratio is a very useful macroprudential tool for China’s financial stability, and the RRR could be used as an instrument for both objectives; third, monetary and macroprudential policies could be either complements or substitutes in China, depending on the choices of instruments for the two policies. Our policy experiments recommend three combination choices of instruments for China’s monetary and macroprudential policies. (JEL codes: E52, E61and G18)

Some Lessons From 50 Years of Multiarm Public Policy Experiments

In this article, we explore the reasons why multiarm trials have been conducted and the design and analysis issues they involve. We point to three fundamental reasons for such designs: (1) Multiarm designs allow the estimation of “response surfaces”—that is, the variation in response to an intervention across a range of one or more continuous policy parameters. (2) Multiarm designs are an efficient way to test multiple policy approaches to the same social problem simultaneously, either to compare the effects of the different approaches or to estimate the effect of each separately. (3) Multiarm designs may allow for the estimation of the separate and combined effects of discrete program components. We illustrate each of these objectives with examples from the history of public policy experimentation over the past 50 years and discuss some design and analysis issues raised by each, including sample allocation, statistical power, multiple comparisons, and alignment of analysis with goals of the evaluation.

Räume des Experimentierens: Die Einführung von Sprühdrohnen in der digitalen Landwirtschaft

This article investigates how new digital technologies are established in agriculture. It does so by drawing upon empirical data from a qualitative case study with a Swiss based but internationally operating start-up that has recently obtained the first authorisation to spray crop protection products on vineyards and fruit plantations with their home-made drone. Conceptually the article takes inspiration in Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) and challenges common understandings of overly urban centred approaches of how new technologies find entry in public policies. The authors argue that instead of seeing a straightforward process of implementing the new drone technology, there has been a joint-effort between the private company and federal institutions to experiment, improve and regulate the functioning of the sprayer drone. A process that is, so is argued, heavily marked by knowledge transfers and formalisations of new private-public alliances, that have been channelled through three particular spatial categories, relating to policy experiments, socio-technical experiments and strategic experiments.