The enforcement of EU state aid rules is often portrayed as mainly driven by technocratic standards, but there are indications that political factors also play a role. However, their exact impact and relationship with technocratic factors remain unknown. This article studies under which technocratic and political conditions the Commission approves or does not approve state aid to national airlines. Based on a crisp-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis of all 14 cases of alleged state aid to national airlines between 2004 and 2019, the article shows that both the approval and non-approval of aid are predominantly dependent upon the Commission’s technocratic assessment: a low degree of market distortion turns out to be a sufficient condition for the approval of aid, whereas a high degree of market distortion is a necessary condition for the non-approval of aid. However, in some cases, political factors are decisive in determining enforcement outcomes.

Policy networks fulfil an important role within policymaking. Networks of public and private actors provide information to policymakers and may halt or accommodate policy change. Generally, these networks exhibit stability, but at times, they are transformed due to disruptive shocks. This article compares lobbying networks surrounding three EU financial regulatory agencies before and after the global financial crisis. Utilising network-analytical methods, the analysis assesses network change after the financial crisis and the subsequent institutional and regulatory reforms. The findings show that as lobbying networks expand, they become more fragmented. They also demonstrate that shocks stimulate the entrance of new interest groups and make repeat players more selective in their lobbying efforts. This implies that the financial regulation policy network becomes less club-like after the crisis, allowing new groups to inform regulators about their policy preferences.

This article explores the politics of policy change by focusing on agenda setting through the lens of the Multiple Streams Approach (MSA), which has been travelling to ever-larger geographies. We aim to produce signposts for future case studies of policy change by bringing together insights from MSA and New Institutionalism. We ask: Which institutions should we focus on when studying agenda-setting politics in different geographies? How do these institutions shape MSA’s structural elements – problem stream, policy stream, political stream, policy windows, and policy entrepreneur? In answering these questions, we hope to weave not only formal but also informal institutions into MSA’s backbone more tightly. We bring together diverse case studies that are sufficiently abstract and whose findings travel easily across other institutional contexts. We revisit the structural elements of MSA and illustrate how key formal and informal rules structure the politics in these structural elements.

Using an original demographically representative survey, we estimate the determinants of public support for a set of supportive and punitive policies to combat the opioid epidemic among a sample of 2,131 Americans. Our findings indicate that individuals who attribute blame for the epidemic to the personal choices of individuals, conservatives and those high in racial resentment are consistently more likely to support punitive policies to combat the opioid epidemic and less likely to favour policies to support individuals with substance use disorders. Individuals who have a personal connection to someone struggling with opioid use disorder favour policies to support such individuals but have nuanced attitudes towards punitive policies. Importantly, we find overwhelming support for all supportive policies except supervised injection sites, while roughly 50% of our sample supported the set of punitive policy choices. Our research represents a significant step forward toward understanding public opinion about the opioid epidemic and policies to combat it.

Research on environmental policy support utilises different categorisations of policies, for example, differentiating between policies assumed to be perceived as rewarding or punishing. Do citizens’ perception of environmental policies also lend itself to this categorisation? Based on an exhaustive sample of active policies in Sweden, this study presents a taxonomy of environmental policy support in Sweden. A fairly representative Swedish sample (N = 2911) rated the acceptability of 44 environmental policies. Exploratory factor analysis indicated that participants’ acceptability of policies forms three categories: push policies consisting of regulatory and market-based disincentives, pull policies consisting mainly of market-based incentives, and informational policies, such as ecolabeling. Sociodemographics had small but consistent effects on attitudes towards the three categories, while political ideology had a larger effect across the categories. This study indicates that current academic categorisations may not adequately capture laypeople’s perceptions, and discusses the importance of research on driving mechanisms behind the current taxonomy.

Anti-crime policy is often unresponsive to reductions in crime. To address why, we provide a model and empirical test of how citizens’ anti-crime policy preferences respond to information. Our model shows that preferences for anti-crime policy hinge on expectations about the crime rate: punitive policies are preferred in high crime contexts, whereas social policies are preferred in low crime contexts. We evaluate these expectations through an information experiment embedded in the 2017 Latin American Public Opinion Project survey conducted in Panama. As expected by our theory, a high crime message induced stronger preferences in favour of punitive policies. Unanticipated by our theory, but in line with cursory evidence and survey results, we find that a low crime message did not induce stronger preferences in favour of social policies. These findings are consistent with policy ratcheting: punitive policies increase during periods of high crime and remain in place during periods of low crime.

The literature on carbon pricing offers competing explanations for the introduction of carbon taxation. This article contributes to the field by highlighting the interaction of dynamic political factors and external pressures in explaining the timing of the adoption of carbon taxes. Focusing on the second wave of European countries, the study combines the multiple streams framework with qualitative comparative analysis to identify conditions favourable to the introduction of carbon taxes. Additional case studies on Ireland and Portugal serve to illuminate the reform process, especially the role of policy entrepreneurs. This approach yields three insights. First, fiscal crises provide political actors with an opportunity to raise environmental taxes. Second, the introduction of carbon taxation is most likely when push and pull factors come together, i.e. when high problem pressure coincides with governments receptive to environmental issues. Finally, the prospects of “green” policy entrepreneurs are strongly determined by their standing within the government.

A patchwork of policies exists across the United States. While citizens’ policy preferences in domains such as the criminal legal system, gun regulations/rights, immigration, and welfare are informed by their political predispositions, they are also shaped by the extent to which policy targets are viewed as deserving. This article centres the idea that collective evaluations matter in policymaking, and it ascertains whether subnational levels of deservingness evaluations of several target groups differ across space to illuminate the link between these judgements and state policy design. We leverage original survey data and multilevel regression and poststratification to create state-level estimates of deservingness evaluations. The analyses elucidate the heterogeneity in state-level deservingness evaluations of several politically relevant groups, and they pinpoint a link between these social reputations and policy design. The article also delivers a useful methodological tool and measures for scholars of state policy design to employ in future research.

The analysis of public policy agendas in comparative politics has been somewhat limited in terms of geography, time frame and political system, with studies on full-blown autocracies and hybrid regimes few and far between. This article addresses this gap by comparing policy dynamics in three Hungarian regimes over 73 years. Besides our theoretical contribution related to policy-making in Socialist autocracy and illiberal democracy, we also test hypotheses related to non-democratic regimes. We find that – similarly to developed democracies – policy agendas in autocracies are mostly stable with occasional but large-scale “punctuations”. Our data also confirms that these punctuations are more pronounced in non-democratic polities. However, based on our results, illiberal political systems, such as the hybrid regime of Viktor Orbán, are difficult to pin down on such a clear-cut continuum between democracy and autocracy as the level of punctuation differs by policy agendas from parliamentary debates to budgets.

Political economy theories tell us that policy preferences are driven by economic self-interest and that party cues can be a rational decision-making strategy. But does citizens’ ability to assess their self-interest influence the sources of information they rely on and their policy choices? I hypothesise that financial and economic literacy influences the type of information individuals are responsive to, and ultimately, their economic policy preferences. Using a survey experiment on price controls in Italy, I manipulate whether citizens receive party cues or policy information. I show that financially and economically literate individuals are more likely to understand information concerning the costs and benefits of the policy under analysis, and to be responsive to it. This is not the case for financially and economically illiterate individuals, who are more receptive to party cues, even when such cues are misleading and lead them to support welfare-reducing policies.

When does legislation trigger regulation? The US Congress regularly passes laws that authorise government agencies to write legally binding regulations. Yet, when this occurs, agencies may take years to act – or, at times – may never act at all. We theorise that the breadth of the congressional statutory delegation drives the timing of agency policy production. In particular, when Congress expressly tells an agency to promulgate a rule, we expect agencies to do so quickly. Yet, when Congress provides greater policymaking discretion to agencies, we expect other factors – and especially, internal agency considerations – to drive regulatory timing. We use data from almost 350 statutes spanning four decades, which are then matched up with thousands of regulations, to assess the argument. Using innovative methods, we find support for our hypotheses. Overall, we produce a deeper understanding of the link between delegation and discretion: suggesting when it occurs, as well as, importantly, why.

Policy processes are affected by how policymakers assess public support for a policy. But is public support for a given policy itself affected by characteristics of the policy process, such as cooperation or confrontation amongst policy actors? Specifically, if different branches of government hold conflicting positions on a given policy, do clashes affect public support for the policy? To address this question, we exploit an unexpected clash amongst the executive and judiciary in New Delhi, between survey waves, over exemptions for women in the context of the odd–even rule, a policy intervention to reduce air pollution from transportation. We find that public support for the contested policy was not undermined by the executive–judiciary clash. However, the clash polarised public opinion by gender, based upon the policy exemptions. Our findings shed new light on the broader question of how conflicts amongst different parts of government influence mass public policy preferences.

Electoral accountability is widely considered to be an essential component for maintaining the quality of a polity’s institutions. Nevertheless, a growing body of research has found weak or limited support for the notion that voters punish political corruption, a central but partial aspect of institutional quality. In order to capture the full range of institutional dysfunction an electorate should be incentivised to punish, I further the concept of institutional performance voting, that is, voting on institutional quality as a whole. Using a novel data set on performance audit reports in Swedish municipalities between 2003 and 2014, I find that audit critique is associated with a statistically significant but substantively moderate electoral loss of about a percentage point for mayoral parties, while simultaneously associated with a 14 percentage point decrease in their probability of reelection.

Normative theories of democracy agree that public demand should be the main guide in policymaking. But positive theories and related empirical research disagree about the extent to which this holds true in reality. We address this debate with an empirical focus on climate change policy. Specifically, we are interested in whether observable variation in public demand for climate change mitigation can help explain variation in adopted national climate policies. Using our own data to approximate public demand, we estimate the responsiveness of policymakers to changes in public demand in six OECD countries from 1995 to 2010. We find that policymakers are responsive and react in predicted ways to variation in our opinion component of measured public demand, rather than to the mere salience of the climate issue. The effect of issue salience is strongest in combination with our opinion measure as this creates a scope for action. The results underscore the importance and usefulness of our concept and empirical measures for public demand, as well as of our disaggregated analysis of climate policy outputs in this area.

We focus on one of the most salient policy issues of our time, immigration, and evaluate whether the salience of immigration in governing parties’ manifestos translates into actual legislative activity on immigration. We contend that democratic policymakers have genuine incentives to do so. Furthermore, we argue that the country context matters for pledge fulfillment, and we find that the migration salience of governing parties’ manifestos more strongly translates into policy activity when the level of immigration restrictions is higher and when countries’ economies perform well. This research has important implications for our understanding of the relationships between economic performance, democratic representation and immigration policy making.

Collaboration has become a key element of governments’ efforts to address complex policy problems as well as of attempts to revitalise democracy. Depending on what public agencies want to achieve by engaging in collaboration – whether collaboration is intended to gain support for public policymaking, induce voluntary actions by stakeholders, or something else – collaborative governance will have to mean very different things. Collaborative governance needs to be made fit for purpose. Drawing on the literature and a case study of road safety governance in Sweden, the article theorises on the interplay between strategic purpose and institutional design in collaborative governance and shows how two types of strategic purposes – policy support and voluntary actions – determine appropriate choices of institutional designs. This generates important insights that contribute to understanding institutional diversity and factors important to the success or failure of collaborative governance, and can aid practitioners who are designing collaborative forums within various policy fields.

Federalism and the associated multi-level polity-structure have been frequently blamed for delaying the implementation of European Union (EU) directives. However, this verdict is incomplete as only a few studies open the “black box” of federalism to analyse the involvement of subnational parliaments and executives or second chambers in policy implementation. This article fills this gap and explains the transposition delay on the level of each individual implementation measure. Our novel data set covers about 850 directives and the corresponding 1,950 implementation measures between 1990 and 2018 in Germany. Using logistic regression models, we find that involving the subnational authorities substantially delays transposition. Subnational measures are three times more likely to be delayed than national ones. The effect of the veto power of a second chamber remains inconclusive. Our findings highlight the challenges federalism poses for the multi-level implementation of EU policies and have implications for the broader literature on compliance with public policies.

Left-right partisan conflict has been a key driver of welfare state expansion and retrenchment over time and across countries. Yet, we know very little about how left-right differences in party appeals vary across social policy domains. Why are some issues contentious while there is broad consensus on others? This paper starts from the simple premise that partisan conflict is a function of how popular a certain policy is. Based on this assumption, it argues that the left-right gap should be (1) larger for revenue-side issues than for expenditure-side issues, (2) larger for policies targeted at groups that are viewed as less deserving and (3) larger for more redistributive programs than less redistributive ones (e.g. means-tested versus earnings-related benefits). These expectations are tested on fine-grained policy data coded from 65 Austrian party manifestos issued between 1970 and 2017 (N = 18,219). The analysis strongly supports the revenue–expenditure hypothesis and the deservingness hypothesis, but not the redistribution hypothesis.

Fiscal decentralisation theory calls for enhanced local revenue and spending responsibilities to promote the efficiency of public service delivery. However, some have pointed to the danger of local capture cancelling out these effects. I examine the argument that organised crime violence (OCV) intensifies as mafias fight for access to local government resources, which they consider an attractive income source. I regress violence on local spending (LS) in Mexican municipalities over the period 1995–2015. I find a significant relationship between LS and the intensity of violence: higher levels of LS per capita are strongly related to higher homicide rates, conditional on them being positive. However, LS does not determine the probability of OCV taking place in the first place. The results suggest that caution should be exercised when initiating decentralisation reforms in the context of local capture and OCV.

This article draws on the Programmatic Action Framework (PAF) to tackle the question of how the dominance and decline of a specific policy programme in a policy sector can be explained. It starts from the observation that visionary policy programmes, defined as a set of policy goals and instruments that find their expression in subsequently adopted and interconnected policy reforms, may shape a sector’s policies over several decades. Linking policy programmes to programmatic groups that promote these programmes in search of boosting their careers and authority, the programme’s rising and declining dominance can be explained by the career trajectories of programmatic actors. By displaying empirical evidence for the argument from German health policy, the article shows that proponents of today’s change are opponents of tomorrow’s change since individual careers depend on the dominance of policy programmes.