Critical Reading Response: Policy Feedbacks

Canadian Political Science Review, 2007

2018

How do politicians use policies strategically for their own political benefit and to achieve long-term political goals, and how does such strategic behavior in- fluence the design of policies? Answering these questions is crucial for under- standing key dynamics, challenges, limitations and opportunities of public policy making, for explaining strategic choices policy makers make when they design new policies and political struggles they engage in with their oppo- nents.

Social Policy & Administration, 2015

How and when does welfare policy contribute to shape public opinion? This article departs from the policy feedback research tradition and seeks to contribute to the understanding of how policy influences public opinion (public responsiveness). The argument here suggests that personal experiences in terms of empowerment condition the dynamics between policy and opinion. The empirical case concerns the implementation of a consumer's choice model in Swedish primary health care, which resulted an intended increase in private health care centres. In this case, empowerment is assumed to be enhanced by increased exit options and freedom of choice. The specific question in the analysis is whether citizens who have empowering experiences, as a consequence of the reform, are more likely to be positive towards further privatization of welfare services. The results show few effects in general, but there seems to be a correlation between the experience of exiting and more positive attitudes towards privatization.

International Review of Administrative Sciences, 2014

This article analyses and explains the responsiveness of social policies by comparing the impact of institutional logics, public preferences and external conditions on the evolution of three social policy domains in the Netherlands. It focuses on the institutional development of the policy domains of social assistance, labour market regulation and sheltered work over the last 15 years. The article integrates exogenous and endogenous explanations for institutional change. It shows that the analysis and explanation of processes of institutional evolution require in-depth analysis of the interaction between public preferences, the institutional logic and external conditions of the policy domains.

Policy Sciences, 2021

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 i...

European Journal of Political Research, 1986

This study is an attempt to explain redistributive policy changes in democratic political systems. The two major competing paradigms of such determinants are the 'political environments matter' hypothesis and the economic resources model. This study attempts to show that there is an interdependent or exchange relationship between the choices of the policy makers and the policy takers, and that the periodic elections and the parties are important institutional mechanisms which make the exchange relationship possible. Several propositions about the conditions of policy change emerge from the assumptions about the behaviour of the policy makers and the policy takers. These propositions along with those emerging from the socioeconomic and the political factors are tested using data from 21 contemporary democratic regimes beteen 1952-1980. The two dependent variables in the model are expenditures on the direct transfers to the households, and revenue from the direct taxes. Multiple regression analyses are utilized in the statistical tests. These analyses confirm the contention that political exchange plays an important part as a determinant of policy outcomes. It explains as much, if not more, variation in the model as the socio-economic or political environment variables.

2004

An income tax is generally levied on both labor and captal. The working young bear mostly the tax on labor income, whereas the old, who already accumulated savings, bear the brunt of the capital tax. Therefore, there arise two types of con ‡icts in the determination of the income tax: the standard intra-generational con ‡ict between the poor and rich, and an integrational con ‡ict between the young and the old. The paper studies how aging a¤ects the resolutuion of these con ‡icts, and the politico-economic forces that are of play: the changes in the voting pivots and the …scal leakages from taxpayers to transfer recipients.

Journal of Public Administration, Finance and Law, 2018

The topic of policy change is a widely researched area in public policy. Ultimately, every government at whatever level is judged by its policy choices and their outcomes. Moreover, generally speaking, public policies establish where communication routes are built, the number of medical staff in hospitals, the taxes citizens pay, the amount of taxes, the cost of health care, the amount of pensions, etc. So, in order to understand public policies, it is necessary to know how they are developed according with the environmental changes. In this sense, on the one hand the paper describes and analysis the concept and process of policy-making develop, and on the other hand assets the importance change for policy process. Undoubtedly, the scarcity of resources and the abundance of problems reveals the necessity for adaptive policies. From a methodological standpoint, and taking into consideration the theoretical framework, the study adopts a review conceptual approach to advance its argume...

2007