How Policies Change

Multilevel governance divides powers, includes many veto players and requires extensive policy coordination among different jurisdictions. Under these conditions, innovative policies or institutional reforms seem difficult to achieve. However, while multilevel systems establish obstructive barriers to change, they also provide spaces for creative and experimental policies, incentives for learning, and ways to circumvent resistance against change. As the book explains, appropriate patterns of multilevel governance linking diverse policy arenas to a loosely coupled structure are conducive to policy innovation.

Policy Change, Courts, and the Canadian Constitution aims to further our understanding of judicial policy impact and the role of the courts in shaping policy change. Bringing together a group of political scientists and legal scholars, this volume delves into a diverse set of policy areas, including health care issues, the regulation of elections, criminal justice policy, minority language education, citizenship, refugee policy, human rights legislation, and Indigenous policy. While much of the public law and judicial politics literatures focus on the impact of the constitution and the judicial role, scholarship on courts that makes policy change its central lens of analysis is surprisingly rare. Multidisciplinary in its approach to examining policy issues, this book focuses on specific cases or policy issues through a wide-ranging set of approaches, including the use of interview data, policy analysis, historical and interpretive analysis, and jurisprudential analysis.

Japan is aging rapidly, and its government has been groping with the implications of this profound social change. In a pioneering study of postwar Japanese social policy, John Creighton Campbell traces the growth from small beginnings to an elaborate and expensive set of pension, health care, employment, and social service programs for older people. He argues that an understanding of policy change requires a careful disentangling of social problems and how they come to be perceived, the invention (or borrowing) of policy solutions, and conflicts and coalitions among bureaucrats, politicians, interest groups, and the general public. The key to policy change has often been the strategies adopted by policy entrepreneurs to generate or channel political energy. To make sense of all these complex processes, the author employs a new theory of four "modes" of decision-making--cognitive, political, artifactual, and inertial. Campbell refutes the claim that there is a unique "Japanese-style welfare state." Despite the big differences in cultural values, social arrangements, economic priorities, and political control, government responsibility for the "aging-society problem" is broadly similar to that in advanced Western nations. However, Campbell's account of how Japan has taken on that responsibility raises new issues for our understanding of both Japanese politics and theories of the welfare state. Originally published in 1992. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This vivid book of 'continuity and change' in policy and management by Pollitt and Bouckaert follows in the footsteps of Pollitt's previous book on the issue of time, a vital but often neglected issue.

In Constructing Policy Change, Linda A. White examines the expansion of early childhood education and care (ECEC) policies and programs in liberal welfare states, including Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK, and the USA. In the first part of the book, the author investigates the sources of policy ideas that triggered ECEC changes in various national contexts. This is followed by a close analysis of cross-national variation in the implementation of ECEC policy in Canada and the USA. White argues that the primary mechanisms for policy change are grounded in policy investment logics as well as cultural logics: that is, shifts in public sentiments and government beliefs about the value of ECEC policies and programs are rooted in both evidence-based arguments and in principled beliefs about the policy. A rich, nuanced examination of the reasons motivating ECEC policy expansion and adoption in different countries, Constructing Policy Change is a corrective to the comparative welfare state literature that focuses on political interest alone.

Public policy issues directly and indirectly affect many everyday aspects of the lives of all Americans. Yet, most of us don’t fully understand how policy evolves. Why do public policies exist? What different types of policies are there and how controversial have they become over time? How can we better understand the continuity and change in public policies? Expanding upon the first and second editions, the author uses theoretical and historical approaches to answer these questions and highlight changes that have occurred with public policies over the past decade. He explains the complex relationship of political and social theories that explain the modifications and restructuring of public policies that exist today. Through his engaging writing style, Wilson examines a variety of controversial issues and legal cases to deconstruct each aspect of public policy. His explanations provide detailed information in clear, comfortable language that encourages the reader to better understand and appreciate policies and theories. A list of referenced websites after each chapter allows for exploration outside of the text for up-to-date information on the ever-changing world of public policy.

During the 2008 election season, politicians from both sides of the aisle promised to rid government of lobbyists’ undue influence. For the authors of Lobbying and Policy Change, the most extensive study ever done on the topic, these promises ring hollow—not because politicians fail to keep them but because lobbies are far less influential than political rhetoric suggests. Based on a comprehensive examination of ninety-eight issues, this volume demonstrates that sixty percent of recent lobbying campaigns failed to change policy despite millions of dollars spent trying. Why? The authors find that resources explain less than five percent of the difference between successful and unsuccessful efforts. Moreover, they show, these attempts must overcome an entrenched Washington system with a tremendous bias in favor of the status quo. Though elected officials and existing policies carry more weight, lobbies have an impact too, and when advocates for a given issue finally succeed, policy tends to change significantly. The authors argue, however, that the lobbying community so strongly reflects elite interests that it will not fundamentally alter the balance of power unless its makeup shifts dramatically in favor of average Americans’ concerns.

This book provides the reader with the full panoply of political economy tools and concepts necessary to understand, analyze, and integrate how political and social factors may influence the success or failure of their policy goals.